RAND:

All terrorist groups eventually end. But how do they end?

The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have ended because (1) they joined the political process (43 percent) or (2) local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members (40 percent). Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups, and few groups within this time frame have achieved victory. This has significant implications for dealing with al Qa'ida and suggests fundamentally rethinking post-9/11 US counterterrorism strategy: Policymakers need to understand where to prioritize their efforts with limited resources and attention.

Religious terrorist groups take longer to eliminate than other groups and rarely achieve their objectives. The largest groups achieve their goals more often and last longer than the smallest ones do. Finally, groups from upper-income countries are more likely to be left-wing or nationalist and less likely to have religion as their motivation.

Policing and intelligence, rather than military force, should form the backbone of US efforts against al Qa'ida. And US policymakers should end the use of the phrase “war on terrorism” since there is no battlefield solution to defeating al Qa'ida.

How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida

New work by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg:

This is an exciting moment for visualization. It’s a time when the mainstream media are embracing sophisticated techniques born in university research labs - a time when you can open the New York Times and see complex treemaps and network diagrams. But just as exciting is the fact that some new visualizations, ones that get people talking and thinking about data in a new way, are being invented outside the academy as well.

This is starting to happen often enough that it’s worth having a term for techniques that originate outside the research community. Borrowing terminology from the design world, we’ll call them “vernacular” visualizations-in a nod to Tibor Kalman’s admiration of “low” art. This article focuses on one ubiquitous type of streetwise visualization: tag clouds. Born outside the world of computers, they were raised to maturity by web 2.0 sites coping with an unwieldy world of collective activity. Tag clouds are an eclectic bunch spanning a variety of data inputs and usage patterns that defy much of the orthodox wisdom about how visualizations ought to work ...

(Unfortunately, ACM subscription required for full text)

From the archive:

My research focuses on the visualization of the traces people leave as they interact online. Some of my projects explore email archives, newsgroup conversations, and the editing history of wiki pages. I am particularly fascinated by the stories that these social archives tell us and the patterns they contain.

Martin is a mathematician whose research interests include information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, bioinformatics, and art.

Wattenberg’s investigation into the shape of song is part of his overall mission to make the invisible visible.

Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization

A DECADE AGO, those monotonous minutes were just a fact of life: time ticking away, as you gazed idly into space, stood in line, or sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Boredom's doldrums were unavoidable, yet also a primordial soup for some of life's most quintessentially human moments.

But are we too busy twirling through the songs on our iPods -- while checking e-mail, while changing lanes on the highway -- to consider whether we are giving up a good thing? We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

Paradoxically, as cures for boredom have proliferated, people do not seem to feel less bored; they simply flee it with more energy, flitting from one activity to the next. Ralley has noticed a kind of placid look among his students over the past few years, a "laptop culture" that he finds perplexing. They have more channels to be social; there are always things to do. And yet people seem oddly numb. They are not quite bored, but not really interested either.

From the archive:

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, ... I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

Despite our wondrous technologies and scientific advances, we are nurturing a culture of diffusion, fragmentation, and detachment. In this new world, something crucial is missing -- attention. Attention is the key to recapturing our ability to reconnect, reflect, and relax; the secret to coping with a mobile, multitasking, virtual world that isn't going to slow down or get simpler. Attention can keep us grounded and focused--not diffused and fragmented.

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

When we talk about multitasking, we are really talking about attention: the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and, more broadly, to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention.

Today, our collective will to pay attention seems fairly weak.

The joy of boredom

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive, a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA's images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.

NASA Images

I was a senior counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied 90 percent of the world’s heroin. I took to heart Hamid Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake.

Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade — by shielding it from American-designed policies. While it is true that Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics as other people’s business to be settled once the war-fighting is over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs — and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

From the archive:

"Trying to get rid of drugs in Afghanistan is like trying to clear sand from a beach with a bucket," said an American counter-narcotics agent.

Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?

There are now 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons and jails, a fourfold increase in the incarceration rate since 1980. During the fifty years preceding our current three-decade surge, the scale of imprisonment was largely unchanged. And the impact of this rise has hardly been felt equally in society; the American prison boom is as much a story about race and class as it is about crime control.

One-in-nine black men in their twenties is now in prison or jail. Among young black men who have never been to college, one in five are incarcerated, and one in three will go to prison at some time in their lives.

...

Nearly a century ago, Eugene Debs, at his sentencing under the Sedition Act in 1918, offered a moving account of the moral significance of the prison. “Your Honor,” he said, “years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Debs’s vision was radically egalitarian. Because we are joined by a common humanity, the imprisonment of one incarcerates us all.

From the archive:

The following paragraph basically sums up everything that is wrong with the American criminal justice system, no matter what the context is.

A handful of cases — in which a predator does an awful thing to an innocent — get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. This attention typically bears no relation to the frequency of the particular type of crime, and yet laws—such as three-strikes laws that give mandatory life sentences to nonviolent drug offenders — and political careers are made on the basis of the public’s reaction to the media coverage of such crimes.

Also:

We law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society — the society we have made — creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

Reentry: Reversing mass imprisonment

The reality is that PowerPoint is culture, and at any organization it is a specific culture of pre-determined templates, fonts and expectations. The only way to resolve the problem is for an entire organization to adopt a specific methodology -- a systematic process of producing consistent, reproducible, and quality results. The process has to work across the broadest range of topics and purposes, and yet allow variety within a set of constraints.

From the archive:

Romney is fond of PowerPoint and terms like "strategic audits" and "wow moments."

It's like a pointer that contains its own address. That's the essence of a Power pointer.

Every afternoon about 2:45 the city settles into a temporary coma. You can feel the biological lights dimming. As for those poor people trapped in PowerPoint presentations -- well, for them there is no help.

Better than any article, this briefing captures everything that is wrong, funny and horrifying about outrageous Pentagon weapons that sound too good to be true. I'm posting the briefing, called Directed Energy Sea Mammals, for those who weren't on the e-mail chain when it first came out.

Le Grand Content examines the omnipresent Powerpoint-culture in search for its philosophical potential. Intersections and diagrams are assembled to form a grand 'association-chain-massacre'. which challenges itself to answer all questions of the universe and some more. Of course, it totally fails this assignment, but in its failure it still manages to produce some magical nuance and shades between the great topics death, cable TV, emotions and hamsters.

Peter Norvig:

"My belief is that PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it."

Edward Tufte:

Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.

How Wide is Your PowerPoint Gap?

What are the consequences of all this information for the human brain, which must act as the final filter? And how does mere access to information translate to knowledge and, ultimately, intelligence?

Is it conceivable that today’s Internet, which resembles in so many ways the information utility that was envisioned back in 1964, is not amplifying our intelligence, but in fact making us stupid?

The Road to the Information Age

When a scientist is hired by a firm with a financial interest in the outcome, the likelihood that the result of that study will be favorable to that firm is dramatically increased. This close correlation between the results desired by a study's funders and those reported by the researchers is known in the scientific literature as the "funding effect."

Scientific malpractice does happen, but close examination of the manufacturers' studies showed that their quality was usually at least as good as, and often better than, studies that were not funded by drug companies.

It has become clear to medical editors that the problem is in the funding itself. As long as sponsors of a study have a stake in the conclusions, these conclusions are inevitably suspect, no matter how distinguished the scientist.

The answer is de-linking sponsorship and research.

From the archive:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

It's Not the Answers That Are Biased, It's the Questions

In this paper, we study certain geometric and topological properties of online social networks using the concept of density and geometric vector spaces. "Moi Krug" ("My Circle"), a Russian social network that promotes the principle of the "six degrees of separation" and is positioning itself as a vehicle for professionals and recruiters seeking each others' services, is used as a test vehicle.

Topology and Geometry of Online Social Networks