Today’s strategic environment implies an obligation to preserve innocent life when possible and to rebuild that which war destroys. Urban areas are the keys to nations; people make nations just as, as Thucydides wrote, men make cities. This study aimed to reveal tools that will better enable military and civilian alike to meet national policy objectives by more effectively conducting urban combat and restoration.

Three Overarching Synthesis Observations:

* The "Three-Block War" Is the Reality During Modern Urban Operations
* The Importance of Orchestrating Urban Military and Civil Activities in Support of Strategic Objectives Is Fundamental to National and Coalition Success
* Urban Operations Increasingly Characterize the General Character of U.S. and Coalition Undertakings

Beyond the three overarching observations, we provide 25 other observations and highlights organized using the joint urban doctrine operational construct of understand, shape, engage, consolidate, and transition.

'People Make the City': Joint Urban Operations Observations and Insights from Afghanistan and Iraq

The survival of pencils and hinges (and even typewriters), long after the development of alternatives, argues that, in forecasting technological conquests and describing the march of technological complexity, we have a tendency to underestimate what Raymond Williams calls the "social-material complex" of technologies are only a part.[7] Like an exasperated gardener, we snip triumphantly at the exposed plant, forgetting how extensive established roots can be. Pencil and hinge survive technological cuts on the strength of their deep social resourcefulness. And for similar reasons, we may find that the simple hinged book will prove as enduring. The closed cover, turned page, broken spine, serial form, immutable text, revealing heft, distinctive formats, handy size, and so on offer their own deep-rooted and resilient combination of technology and social process and continue to provide unrivalled signifying matter.

Material Matters

Some of you may remember the Gallery of Computation, which was popular here a few years ago.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

If you liked Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings, you might be interested in this software.

Processing 1.0 (BETA)

Dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban communication.

You may be familiar with the LED Throwies.

Graffiti Research Lab

Stamen ... is establishing a reputation for its expertise in creating compelling interactive design and data visualization projects.

Launched this week: BigSpy, a view onto Digg that graphically maps current interest in Digg stories as a continously flowing river of headlines.

Trace: Time-based mappings of wireless networks in urban environments

Global Business Network

Dominant political dialogue focuses on events that cross US borders; GBN asked us to focus on flows along the borders, and to use data visualization as a way of rendering visible (and intelligible) these otherwise elusive movements.

Digg Swarm

Digg Swarm is a lyrical view of Digg. Stories come in as circles with the title inside of them, and diggers "swarm" around these stories when they digg them. Every time a story gets dugg, it increases in size — so the bigger the story, the more active it is. As people digg more stories, they move from circle to circle, and increase in size. You might see enormous diggers moving quickly from story to story; those seem to be people digging without taking the time to read stories...

Stories that are closer together are being dugg by the same users, and you can roll over stories to see these connections. The thicker the line, the more diggers in common that story has—which starts to suggest connections between stories over time.

stamen design | big ideas worth pursuing

Once one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley, Sun Microsystems crashed with the dotcoms, but it kept pouring money into R&D. Now there are signs of a revival, thanks to a new CEO and a big black box.

It was a gamble. "But you can't find out if you're right until you take the risk," Papadopoulos says.

Dawn of the Dead

"If you want to be an innovator, you have to take the long-term approach," he said. "There is a view that innovation happens overnight and that's simply not the case. It took us eight to 10 years to get Windows popular, and many years to get databases popular."

Ballmer: Innovation Takes Time

A supporter once called out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And Adlai Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”

The central idea of this book is that voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational—and vote accordingly.

This book has three conjoined themes. The first: Doubts about the rationality of voters are empirically justified. The second: Voter irrationality is precisely what economic theory implies once we adopt introspectively plausible assumptions about human motivation. The third: Voter irrationality is the key to a realistic picture of democracy.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

Here's David Denby on "Paprika":

The brilliant “Paprika,” directed by Satoshi Kon — a masterly example of Japanese anime, intended for adults — is partly hand drawn, and features multiple areas of visual activity layered at different distances from the picture plane.

Set in a business world of long white corridors and glass walls and research labs, it’s a Freudian-Jungian-Felliniesque sci-fi thriller, and an outright challenge to American viewers, who may, in the face of its whirligig complexity, feel almost pea-brained.

Paprika, the heroine, is an eighteen-year-old sprite — a kind of sexy Japanese Tinker Bell — who enters people’s dreams as a form of therapy. She explains to one of her patients, a detective haunted by a murder he was unable to prevent, that the first dreams we have when we fall asleep are like arty short films and longer dreams are like blockbusters.

“Paprika” asks, “Who shall control our dreams?,” which, given this film’s take on the cinematic nature of the unconscious, is really asking, “Who shall control the movies?”

See also the NYT review.

Not Kids’ Stuff

The wave-of-advance model was introduced to describe the spread of advantageous genes in a population. It can be adapted to model the uptake of any advantageous technology through a population, such as the arrival of neolithic farmers in Europe, the domestication of the horse, and the development of the wheel, iron tools, political organization, or advanced weaponry.

Any trait that preexists alongside the advantageous one could be carried along with it, such as genetics or language, regardless of any intrinsic superiority. Decoupling of the advantageous trait from other "hitchhiking" traits depends on its adoption by the preexisting population.

Here, we adopt a similar wave-of-advance model based on food production on a heterogeneous landscape with multiple populations. Two key results arise from geographic inhomogeneity: the "subsistence boundary," land so poor that the wave of advance is halted, and the temporary "diffusion boundary" where the wave cannot move into poorer areas until its gradient becomes sufficiently large. At diffusion boundaries, farming technology may pass to indigenous people already in those poorer lands, allowing their population to grow and resist encroachment by farmers.

Ultimately, this adoption of technology leads to the halt in spread of the hitchhiking trait and establishment of a permanent "cultural boundary" between distinct cultures with equivalent technology.

If you don't have access to PNAS, you can download a preprint of the paper.

For a visual demonstration:

This page contains the test site applet for the Neolithic farming simulation in an environment with a Gaussian shaped hill in the middle.

The upper panels show the populations of Farmers, Hunter Gatherers and converts as the wave travels from left to right. Populations are suppressed in the central region.

Lower panels show the integrated fraction of the various populations (white). With the default settings, the wave of advance of the farmers outcompetes the hunter-gatherers, a few converts are formed, but rapidly overwhelmed. The wave is it is slowed by the hills, and Shortly after crossing the hills the converts become the dominant population, with a sharp cultural boundary between them and the original Farmers.

The timestep is hardcoded at 1 year, and the length unit is 1km. For fast moving waves these fixed scales lead to a numerical instability in the diffusion equation, which could be fixed by reducing the timestep (at the expense of slowing the applet)

Cultural hitchhiking on the wave of advance of beneficial technologies