All the data was out there to warn us of this impending attack:

"why didn't we see it?"

This was a frequently asked question in the weeks and months after 9/11. In the wake of the attacks, statisticians moved quickly to become part of the national response to the global war on terror.

This book is an overview of the emerging research program at the intersection of national security and statistical sciences. A wide range of talented researchers address issues:

How do we detect and recognize bioterrorist events?
How do we better understand and explain complex processes so that decision makers can take the best course of action?
How do we pick the terrorist out of the crowd of faces or better match the passport to the traveler?
How do we understand the rules that terrorists are playing by?

This book includes technical treatments of statistical issues that will be of use to quantitative researchers as well as more general examinations of quantitative approaches to counterterrorism that will be accessible to decision makers with stronger policy backgrounds.

Statistical Methods in Counterterrorism: Game Theory, Modeling, Syndromic Surveillance, and Biometric Authentication

Benjamin Franklin's invention of the lightning rod is the founding fable of American science, but Franklin was only one of many early Americans fascinated by electricity. As a dramatically new physical experience, electricity amazed those who dared to tame the lightning and set it coursing through their own bodies. Thanks to its technological and medical utility, but also its surprising ability to defy rational experimental mastery, electricity was a powerful experience of enlightenment, at once social, intellectual, and spiritual.

In this compelling book, James Delbourgo moves beyond Franklin to trace the path of electricity through early American culture, exploring how the relationship between human, natural, and divine powers was understood in the eighteenth century. By examining the lives and visions of natural philosophers, spectacular showmen, religious preachers, and medical therapists, he shows how electrical experiences of wonder, terror, and awe were connected to a broad array of cultural concerns that defined the American Enlightenment. The history of lightning rods, electrical demonstrations, electric eels, and medical electricity reveals how early American science, medicine, and technology were shaped by a culture of commercial performance, evangelical religion, and republican politics from mid-century to the early republic.

The first book to situate early American experimental science in the context of a transatlantic public sphere, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders offers a captivating view of the origins of American science and the cultural meaning of the American Enlightenment. In a story of shocks and sparks from New England to the Caribbean, Delbourgo brilliantly illuminates a revolutionary New World of wonder.

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders : Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America

From the American entry into World War II until September 1943, U.S. submarines experienced an abnormally high number of torpedo failures. These failures resulted from three defects present in the primary torpedo of the day, the Mark XIV. These defects were a tendency to run deeper than the set depth, the frequent premature detonation of the Mark 6 magnetic influence exploder, and the failure of the contact exploder when hitting a target at the textbook ninety-degree angle.

Ironically, despite using a completely independent design, the Germans experienced the same three defects. The Germans, however, fixed their defects in six months, while it took the Americans twenty-two months.

Much of the delay on the American side resulted from the denial of senior leaders in the operational forces and in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) that the torpedo itself was defective. Instead, they blamed crews for poor marksmanship or lack of training.

In the end, however, the submarine force itself overcame the bureaucratic inertia and correctly identified and fixed the three problems on their own, proving once again the industry of the average American [2,3] soldier or sailor.

The publisher continues:

Contrary to the interpretations of most submarine historians, this book concludes that BuOrd did not sit idly by while torpedoes failed on patrol after patrol. BuOrd acknowledged problems from early in the war, but their processes and their tunnel vision prevented them from realizing that the weapon sent to the fleet was grossly defective. One of World War II's forgotten heroes, Admiral Lockwood drove the process for finding and fixing the three major defects. This is first book that deals exclusively with the torpedo problem, building its case out of original research from the archives of the Bureau of Ordnance, the Chief of Naval Operations, Vice Admiral Lockwood's personal correspondence, and records from the British Admiralty at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. These sources are complemented by correspondence and interviews with men who actually participated in the events.

Iron Men and Tin Fish: The Race to Build a Better Torpedo during World War II

Some of the most celebrated images of nineteenth-century American photography emerged from government-sponsored geological surveys whose purpose was to study and document western territories.

Timothy H. O’Sullivan and William Bell, two survey photographers who joined expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s, opened the eyes of nineteenth-century Americans to the western frontier. Highlighting a recent Smart Museum of Art acquisition, One/Many brings together an exquisite group of photographs by Bell and O’Sullivan.

Particularly noteworthy are their photographic panoramas, assemblages of individual images joined together to form a continuous, horizontal landscape view. These panoramas have not been exhibited in well over a century and have never before been published.

One/Many: Western American Survey Photographs

Starred Review, From Publishers Weekly:

With his usual eloquence, patience and humor, Wilson, our modern-day Thoreau, adds his thoughts to the ongoing conversation between science and religion. Couched in the form of letters to a Southern Baptist pastor, the Pulitzer Prize–winning entomologist pleads for the salvation of biodiversity, arguing that both secular humanists like himself and believers in God acknowledge the glory of nature and can work together to save it. The "depth and complexity of living Nature still exceeds human imagination," he asserts (somewhere between 1.5 million and 1.8 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms have been discovered to date), and most of the world around us remains unknowable, as does God. Each species functions as a self-contained universe with its own evolutionary history, its own genetic structure and its own ecological role. Human life is tangled inextricably in this intricate and fragile web. Understanding these small universes, Wilson says, can foster human life.

Wilson convincingly demonstrates that such rich diversity offers a compelling moral argument from biology for preserving the "Creation." Wilson passionately leads us by the hand into an amazing and abundantly diverse natural order, singing its wonders and its beauty and captivating our hearts and imaginations with nature's mysterious ways.

From Booklist:

Famed entomologist, humanist thinker, and cogent writer Wilson issues a forthright call for unity between religion and science in order to save the "creation," or living nature, which is in "deep trouble." Addressing his commonsensical yet ardent discourse to "Dear Pastor," he asks why religious leaders haven't made protecting the creation part of their mission.

Forget about life's origins, Wilson suggests, and focus on the fact that while nature achieves "sustainability through complexity," human activities are driving myriad species into extinction, thus depleting the biosphere and jeopardizing civilization. Wilson celebrates individual species, each a "masterpiece of biology," and acutely analyzes the nexus between nature and the human psyche.

In the book's frankest passages, he neatly refutes fantasies about humanity's ability to re-create nature's intricate web, and deplores the use of religious belief (God will take care of it) as an impediment to conservation. Wilson's eloquent defense of nature, insights into our resistance to environmental preservation, and praise of scientific inquiry coalesce in a blueprint for a renaissance in biology reminiscent of the technological advances engendered by the space race.

The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson

How do people decide which country came out ahead in a war or a crisis? Why, for instance, was the Mayaguez Incident in May 1975 -- where 41 US soldiers were killed and dozens more wounded in a botched hostage rescue mission -- perceived as a triumph and the 1992-94 US humanitarian intervention in Somalia, which saved thousands of lives, viewed as a disaster?

In Failing to Win, Dominic Johnson and Dominic Tierney dissect the psychological factors that predispose leaders, media, and the public to perceive outcomes as victories or defeats -- often creating wide gaps between perceptions and reality.

To make their case, Johnson and Tierney employ two frameworks: "Scorekeeping," which focuses on actual material gains and losses; and "Match-fixing," where evaluations become skewed by mindsets, symbolic events, and media and elite spin. In case studies ranging from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the current War on Terror, the authors show that much of what we accept about international politics and world history is not what it seems -- and why, in a time when citizens offer or withdraw support based on an imagined view of the outcome rather than the result on the ground, perceptions of success or failure can shape the results of wars, the fate of leaders, and the "lessons" we draw from history.

Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics

If evolution involves a competition for survival, then how can we explain altruism?

Biologist Dugatkin splendidly narrates a fast-paced tale of scientific breakthrough, genius and intellectual history as he examines the lives of seven scientists -- from T.H. Huxley through Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson -- whose groundbreaking work attempts to answer this question.

Darwin's "bulldog," T.H. Huxley, believed altruism was rare, and that blood kinship provided the key to an evolutionary understanding of altruism. The Russian anarchist Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, on the other hand, believed altruism was widespread and unrelated to kinship. But the idea of the kinship link won out, and in the 1960s, William Hamilton developed a cost-benefit analysis to explain the genetic basis of altruism:

"If a gene for altruism is to evolve, then the cost of altruism must somehow be balanced by compensating benefits to the altruist."

This superb tale of scientific discovery is required reading for everyone interested in the nature of human morality.

The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness

“People were constantly asking for my advice: ‘Tell me what five albums I should buy now,’ or ‘Tell me what are the five best heavy metal albums of all time,’ ” Mr. Scaruffi said. “Eventually you get tired of answering the same question, and you prepare a list. Then the list becomes many lists.”

“Probably my biggest ambition would be to write a history of knowledge,” he said. “Something that packages all of my interests together: literature, science, philosophy, politics — whatever.”

The Greatest Web Site of All Time

About 6,000 people a day — most of them children — die from water-borne diseases.

A Danish textile company as come up with a new invention meant to render dangerous water drinkable.

The invention is called Lifestraw, a plastic tube [that] can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.

Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria.

A $3 Water Purifier That Could Save Lives

AFTER making a pair of successful documentaries about grunge rock (“Hype”) and hip-hop D.J.’s (“Scratch”), Doug Pray was approached to direct a movie about yet another subculture: graffiti artists. He wasn’t interested.

Then he met one.

Graffiti Cinema Turns Moody