In the country it's easy to find yourself leaning forward all through the year, always waiting on the next season, getting through your life as though you were walking into a stiff wind. This is one of those days when I catch myself in that posture — pitched forward into the gale of time. So I'll try to slow down and straighten up. I'll walk down to the barnyard later this morning and fix the gate on the horse corral, which has sagged since the warm weather last month. It should be good for another year once I am done.

A Momentary Pause

"If a subject is not tested, why teach it?"

"I don't like history or science anyway."

"most students are not complaining about being miserable."

"We're using [electives] as a motivation," Dr. O'Connor said. "We're hoping they'll concentrate on their math and reading so they can again participate in some course they love."

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math

In the summer of 2005, an international expert group was brought together for a workshop to define and produce a new vision and roadmap of the evolution, challenges and potential of computer science and computing in scientific research in the next fifteen years.
The resulting document, Towards 2020 Science, sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It seeks to identify the requirements necessary to accelerate scientific advances –particularly those driven by computational sciences and the 'new kinds' of science the synthesis of computing and the sciences is creating. Already this synthesis has led to new fields and advances spanning genomics and proteomics, earth sciences and climatology, nanomaterials, chemistry and physics.
We hope Towards 2020 Science will act as a 'pathfinder' to new research directions in science and computing. We also hope that it will contribute to, and inform, national and international scientific debate and science policy. It is also just a start, a catalyst for more discussion, so lastly, we hope that you will find it useful, inspiring and provocative.
The Towards 2020 Science workshop and the consequent report were run and produced under the aegis of Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Towards 2020 Science

Typo is a lean engine that makes blogging easy.

I would like to have inline editing of my MemeStream, via Ajax, rather than having to go to a separate "Edit" page for every entry. This code might prove useful.

typo - Trac

If you read the article "Saddam's Delusions" in the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, you'll be interested in this, which is the full report from which the article was drawn.

U.S. Joint Forces Command will release on Friday, March 24 an unclassified historical report in book form on the Iraqi view of coalition military operations conducted in Iraq. Conducted by U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Joint Center for Operational Analysis, the Iraqi Perspective Project (IPP) is a research effort focused on coalition military operations in Iraq from March to May 2003. This project focused on the perspectives of the Iraqi civilian and military leadership involved in major combat operations gathered through interviews conducted during the fall and winter of 2003/2004, and an extensive review of Iraqi historical documents done in the months since then.

The project is the first such effort by the U.S. government to understand the views of an enemy military force since World War II, when the U.S. government conducted a comprehensive review of recovered German and Japanese documents, along with interviews of key military and civilian leadership.

The overall objective of this project was to learn lessons from Operation Iraqi Freedom, and use those lessons for ongoing transformation activities.

US Joint Forces Command Releases Iraqi Perspective Project Report

Translation: Chocolate is good for you.

Epidemiological and medical anthropological investigations suggest that flavanol-rich foods exert cardiovascular health benefits. Endothelial dysfunction, a prognostically relevant key event in atherosclerosis, is characterized by a decreased bioactivity of nitric oxide (NO) and impaired flow-mediated vasodilation (FMD). We show in healthy male adults that the ingestion of flavanol-rich cocoa was associated with acute elevations in levels of circulating NO species, an enhanced FMD response of conduit arteries, and an augmented microcirculation. In addition, the concentrations and the chemical profiles of circulating flavanol metabolites were determined, and multivariate regression analyses identified (–)-epicatechin and its metabolite, epicatechin-7-O-glucuronide, as independent predictors of the vascular effects after flavanol-rich cocoa ingestion. A mixture of flavanols/metabolites, resembling the profile and concentration of circulating flavanol compounds in plasma after cocoa ingestion, induced a relaxation in preconstricted rabbit aortic rings ex vivo, thus mimicking acetylcholine-induced relaxations. Ex vivo flavanol-induced relaxation, as well as the in vivo increases in FMD, were abolished by inhibition of NO synthase. Oral administration of chemically pure (–)-epicatechin to humans closely emulated acute vascular effects of flavanol-rich cocoa. Finally, the concept that a chronic intake of high-flavanol diets is associated with prolonged, augmented NO synthesis is supported by data that indicate a correlation between the chronic consumption of a cocoa flavanol-rich diet and the augmented urinary excretion of NO metabolites. Collectively, our data demonstrate that the human ingestion of the flavanol (–)-epicatechin is, at least in part, causally linked to the reported vascular effects observed after the consumption of flavanol-rich cocoa.

Epicatechin mediates beneficial effects of flavanol-rich cocoa on vascular function in humans

This is from last year, and it's probably pretty dry reading, but I hadn't seen it before.

Electronic voting is controversial today. Many election officials look to electronic voting systems as a means for improving their ability to conduct and administer elections more efficiently. At the same time, many information technologists and activists have raised important concerns regarding the security of such systems. Social scientists have studied election issues for many years and have identified a host of issues that have significant impact on the conduct of elections. Policy makers are caught in the midst of a controversy with both political and technological overtones. Given this backdrop, the National Research Council (NRC) sought to examine this issue from the ground up—that is, from a broader perspective than simply addressing the most salient points in the public debate.

A first meaningful step in such an examination should be the articulation of important questions and issues that election officials, policy makers, and informed citizens should ask concerning the use of computers and information technology (IT) in the electoral process. In addition, the NRC’s Committee on a Framework for Understanding Electronic Voting reached a number of conclusions that help clarify the nature of the debate over electronic voting systems and provide a framework for putting these questions into perspective.

Asking the Right Questions About Electronic Voting

The mission of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is to provide timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence to support national security. NGA defines geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) as “the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth.” NGA faces a crisis of need in the post-9/11 world. Without effective GEOINT, the nation and its armed services are vulnerable to security risks and threats. NGA must improve the speed, rigor, accuracy, fidelity and relevance of its geospatial analyses while the sources of data increase in number and type, and data volume grows. Because GEOINT is rapidly moving to ever finer temporal, spatial, radiometric and spectral resolutions, increased volumes and more complex data must be absorbed: that is, captured, stored, analyzed and reported. The time horizons of problems that the intelligence community seeks to understand have gone from months and days to hours and minutes. Other challenges include adopting and spearheading new methods and technologies while maintaining fully operational existing systems; integrating data from a host of old and new sources through rapid georectification and spatial analysis; improving uncertainty management, including dealing with denial and deception; dealing with data volume issues, especially the need to automate human interpretation tasks; ubiquity of access, including web-based systems and the effective reuse of existing data; and the ability to work effectively within a broadening pool of partners and allies while maintaining appropriate security control. The challenges can be summarized as the conversion of what is today data into distilled information and knowledge. Yet analysis methods have not evolved to rapidly integrate multiple sources of data to create actionable intelligence. Nor do today's means of information dissemination, indexing and preservation suit this new agenda or future needs. NGA will play a major role for the entire intelligence community in creating the next-generation National System for Geospatial-Intelligence and has set forth a consistent vision of what this next generation GEOINT should be. The vision is intended to see NGA through the transition into a new era. NGA also plays a leading role in supporting fundamental research for the next generation of GEOINT, termed GEOINT2 in this document. It is within this context that the National Academies was asked by the NGA to identify research priorities and strategic directions in geospatial science for the NGA’s Basic and Applied Research Program. The goal of the study was to examine both “hard problems” in geospatial science that must be addressed to improve geospatial intelligence, as well as promising methods and tools to pursue in geospatial science and related disciplines. The results of this study are intended to help NG... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Priorities for GEOINT Research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

“I HAVE a religious belief in the power of ideas propelled by entrepreneurial energy,” declares Vinod Khosla.

His eyes have now turned towards a new target—the oil industry.

His plan is to use technology and entrepreneurship to tackle big social and environmental problems.

So will his grand plan really work?

A healthier addiction

"We've seen with music and video on demand that people are prepared to pay for virtual goods," said Paul Jackson, an Amsterdam-based analyst at Forrester Research. "Ultimately, digital distribution will win out over fairly archaic distribution methods like DVDs."

Hollywood takes new tack against film piracy