These color images of the World Trade Center under construction in 1969 bring a new perspective to our impressions of that structure. Native Wisconsinite Richard Quinney was on the faculty at NYU at the time; he spent the spring roaming the city, capturing the images that caught his eye. Quinney was especially fascinated with the construction of the World Trade Center, not just visually, but also in the context of the city's changing landscape and the political and social climate of the time. The 161 color slides he produced of the rising structure gained a dramatic new significance on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers fell victim to terrorist attack. For his comments on his experience documenting the construction and the significance these photographs possess today, see "110 Stories" in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Autumn 2002 (Vol. 86, No. 1).

Construction of the World Trade Center, 1969: The Photographs of Richard Quinney

The take is decidedly mixed.

... picturing a dystopic present ... convoluted and politically insistent plot ... Fanciful touches ...

If Gibson’s vision has got bleaker, his eye for the eerie in the everyday still lends events an otherworldly sheen.

For another view, see The Washington Post.

Spook Country: Briefly Noted: The New Yorker

Many people seem at first glance to be primarily interested in ideas, but if you look closely you will start to see little clues that they are more interested in social status than it seemed.

For example, they attend more than you would expect to boring well-funded topics, relative to fascinating orphan topics, to bad arguments by well-known people, relative to good arguments by obscure people, and to attention for their insights, relative to generating theirs or reading others'.

The more successful a group, the more of them that tend to be such "fine feathered friends."

To me, this is the main downside of associating with the successful.

Obscure people, bring us your good arguments!

Overcoming Bias: Looking for a Hard-Headed Blogger

Technology Review spoke with Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, to get a hint of what we can expect from search technology in the years to come.

This interview is pretty fluffy, but this comment was notable:

Norvig: I think another focus is to understand how people interact with Google and interact with each other on the Web, in general. How do people operate in these social networks? Understanding that question can help us serve them better.

The Future of Search

If, say, a computer were used to diagnose a patient's symptoms and recommend treatment, and the result was flawed, could the computer be held responsible? If so, then it is hard to see why computers should not be recognised for good work as well.

Stephen Emmott and Stephen Muggleton are developing an “artificial scientist” that would be capable of combining inductive logic with probabilistic reasoning. Such a computer would be able to design experiments, collect the results and then integrate those results with theory. Indeed, it should be possible, the pair think, for the artificial scientist to build hypotheses directly from the data, spotting relationships that the humble graduate student or even his supervisor might miss.

In the future, PhD's will have access to an automated thesis defense module.

Computing and biology | Arresting developments

Look someone up by their email address to view their reputation related information, profile stats, and social networks.
Leave feedback on others and they will be encouraged to rate you back. Use Rapleaf to build, promote, and manage your online reputation.

Rapleaf: Reputation Lookup and Email Search

If you want to stop hackers from invading your network, first you've got to invade their minds.

Is this for real? Apparently.

In (some parts of?) Asia it is reportedly one of the three most popular certifications.

I learned a new term today: "left hat" hacker. As far as I can tell, this is the invention of one Malaysian reporter; no one else is using it.

EC-Council | Certified Ethical Hacker

Social interactions and personal tastes shape our consumption behaviors of cultural products. In this study, we present a computational model of a cultural market and we aim to analyze the behavior of the consumer population as an emergent phenomena. Our results suggest that the final market shares of the cultural products dramatically depend on the consumer heterogeneity and social interaction pressure. Furthermore, the relation between the resulting market shares and the social interaction is robust with respect to a wide range of variation in the parameter values and the type of topology.

A Cultural Market Model

My Sunday samplers are immune to recommendation, but if you saw Part III this week ...

"Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice."

"They brought him in one day and brought his head in another."

... then you might be interested in this article. (I haven't read it yet.)

Over the past several months The Nation has interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq War from around the United States in an effort to investigate the effects of the four-year-old occupation on average Iraqi civilians. These combat veterans, some of whom bear deep emotional and physical scars, and many of whom have come to oppose the occupation, gave vivid, on-the-record accounts. They described a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts.

Their stories, recorded and typed into thousands of pages of transcripts, reveal disturbing patterns of behavior by American troops in Iraq. Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported--and almost always go unpunished.

This Nation investigation marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate these assertions.

The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness

This struck me as an amusing opener to an AP article:

Google is offering to run the search engines of small Web sites for as little as $100 per year, marking the company's latest attempt to make more money ...

Google offers to run search engines for small Web sites for $100