Columbia Journalism Review The Lies We Bought

"Shortly before American military forces invaded Iraq, a troubled Ellen Goodman raised a singularly important question about the Bush administration's propaganda campaign for war -- "How we got from there to here ."

There , according to Goodman, was innocent 9/11 victimhood at the hands of religious fanatics; here , was bullying superpower bent on destroying a secular dictator. I assumed that someone as astute as Goodman would reveal at least part of the answer -- that the American media provided free transportation to get the White House from there to here. But nowhere in her nationally syndicated column did she state the obvious -- that the success of "Bush's PR War" (the headline on the piece) was largely dependent on a compliant press that uncritically repeated almost every fraudulent administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein."

redux [05.14.03]
The New York Review of Books The Unseen War

"Before arriving in Doha, I had spent hours watching CNN back home, and I was sadly reminded of the network's steady decline in recent years. Paula Zahn looked and talked like a cheerleader for the US forces; Aaron Brown kept reaching for the profound remark without ever finding it; Wolf Blitzer politely interviewed Washington's high and mighty, seldom asking a pointed question. None of them, however, appeared on the broadcasts I saw in Doha. Instead, there were Jim Clancy, a tough-minded veteran American correspondent, Michael Holmes, a soft-spoken Australian, and Becky Anderson, a sharp and inquisitive British anchor. This was CNN International, the edition broadcast to the world at large, and it was far more serious and informed than the American version.

The difference was not accidental."

Global Vision News Network How Media Helped Bush Sell the War

"Behind the president were seated a small group of about 40 Iraqi Americans, some Shiites and some Chaldean. The audience was not seen, but the impression was created that it was an enthusiastic crowd representative of Michigan's 400,000 plus Arab Americans.

Cameras never focused on the audience, no one saw that the room was only one-third full - an estimated crowd of 300. The fact that the group was personally invited by the White House and was carefully screened to include Republicans and supporters of the president was not reported. Instead, the impression was created that the president was giving a victory message full of optimism and hope to his Arab American supporters. That was what the White House wanted to convey, and that was the story the media allowed them to uncritically convey."

SFGate The bright side of killer video games

"And now, the news that every parent dreads. Researchers are reporting today that first-person-shooter video games -- the kind that require players to kill or maim enemies or monsters that pop out of nowhere -- sharply improve visual attention skills."

"First-person action games increase the brain's capacity to spread attention over a wide range of events."

redux [04.25.03]
Wired Magazine High Score Education

"The fact is, when kids play videogames they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom. Learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts. It's about connecting and manipulating them. Doubt it? Just ask anyone who's beaten Legend of Zelda or solved Morrowind .

The phenomenon of the videogame as an agent of mental training is largely unstudied; more often, games are denigrated for being violent or they're just plain ignored. They shouldn't be. Young gamers today aren't training to be gun-toting carjackers. They're learning how to learn."

redux [01.16.01]
The Globe and Mail Why kids are smarter than you

"In a culture of couch potatoes where TV quiz shows pass for brain teasers and how-to books "for dummies" fly off the shelves, it can be hard to reconcile the notion that the human species is smarter than ever.

But if IQ tests are any measure -- and even critics say they have some value -- then there is evidence people are making mental gains. For the past two decades, researchers have collected information showing that IQs around the world rose steadily over the past century.

The rise has been too swift for genetics or evolution to explain. And researchers cannot precisely say what's driving the phenomenon. But many suspect that the very same TV-watching, video-game-playing cultural trappings we blame for "dumbing us down" may also be partly responsible for raising our IQs."

redux [07.23.02]
Netfuture Does Television Cause Violent Behavior? Wrong Question.

""The news will stimulate little change, but should be mentioned anyway. A seventeen-year study of 707 individuals, published in Science magazine (March 29, 2002), concluded that

"There was a significant association between the amount of time spent watching television during adolescence and early adulthood and the likelihood of subsequent aggressive acts against others."

"Anderson and Bushman also point out that the weight of the evidence from all the available studies is not trivial. The effects "are larger than the effects of calcium intake on bone mass or of lead exposure on IQ in children". Moreover, "recent work demonstrates similar-sized effects of violent video games on aggression"."

Business2.0 The Business of Fear

"In the aftermath of 9/11 and with each subsequent threat -- from anthrax to dirty bombs to fear of reprisals from the war with Iraq -- firms large and small have responded in an effort to capitalize on the nation's growing sense of insecurity. New venture capital funds are underwriting companies whose technologies now come wrapped in antiterror sales pitches. Trade councils and lobbyists devoted to this new market are appearing. And in the consumer market, sales are increasing on items ranging from "nuke pills" to al Qaeda-proof bomb shelters actually called Apocalypse Houses (see "Be Afraid. Be Very, Profligately Afraid"). The store is open. Call it the business of fear. Ka-ching."

redux [06.13.02]
News.Com Terror concerns spark nuke drug sales

"With the spotlight on terrorism and the U.S. Department of Justice's recent detainment of a suspected Al Qaeda operative who allegedly planned to detonate a dirty bomb in a major city, a cottage industry has formed around the morbid idea of protection against a radioactive blast."

""It's great on a personal level to have something successful, but on the other side I hope to hell no one has to use the products that they're buying," he said. "It's an odd state of mind to be in.""

redux [03.03.02]
Bad Subjects Social Fear and the Commodification of Terrorism

"Yet if economic fear is a persuasive mode of social coercion, it can also function as a mode of consumption. Preventative consumption is a fear response that seeks to avoid the consequences of unpreparedness or inaction. Consumption itself becomes a defense against fears, rational or irrational. Since September 11, the spectre of Islamic terrorism has generated a market for products that can locate themselves within this conceptual framework of preventative consumption. A product's precise relation to the political phenomenon is irrelevant. Rather, marketability in the fear market relies on associative links. Risk, ever-present in the economic calculus, suddenly has an attributable face. Preventative consumption takes those social risks caused by foreign, alien hatreds, and reduces them into the manageable features of known products."

Reason In Praise of Vulgarity

"In short, the first breath of cultural freedom that Afghans had enjoyed since 1995 was suffused with the stuff of commercially generated popular culture. The people seemed delighted to be able to look like they wanted to, listen to what they wanted to, watch what they wanted to, and generally enjoy themselves again. Who could complain about Afghans filling their lives with pleasure after being coerced for years to adhere to a harshly enforced ascetic code?

The West's liberal, anti-materialist critics, that's who.

"How depressing was it," asked Anna Quindlen in a December Newsweek column, "to see Afghan citizens celebrating the end of tyranny by buying consumer electronics?""

CNN Proposal: Webcams to keep homeland safe

"Despite such skepticism, more than 10,000 people have visited USHomeGuard's new Web site, and Walker said he could get hundreds of thousands of Americans to sign up for home-based, work-when-you-can jobs.

"We like to think of USHomeGuard as a digital victory garden," Walker told a recent tech conference, referring to vegetable patches Americans planted to help ease food rationing during World War II. "It lets people be part of the solution.""

redux [10.07.02]
The New York Times Protesting the Big Brother Lens, Little Brother Turns an Eye Blind
[requires 'free' registration]

"Confronted with the unblinking eyes of surveillance cameras, Michael Naimark believes he can hide in plain sight with the aid of a $1 laser pointer."

"In his research, Mr. Naimark discovered that there was already military literature widely available about using lasers to blind sensors, and that it was relatively simple to become invisible in front the cameras that now watch over many public spaces in this country."

The Chicago Tribune Surveillance on rise, and so are concerns
[requires 'free' registration]

"I have lots of worries about how this technology is being used," said John Graham, who is the founder of BroadWare Technologies, a Cupertino, Calif., maker of software for video camera networks, and who was one of the first researchers to send audio and video over the Internet.

"I've become Big Brother, but I didn't mean to be," Graham said. "It's just that there's no money in education or scientific collaboration.""

redux [09.09.02]
SFGate Surveillance Society Don't look now, but you may find you're being watched

"These days, if you feel like somebody's watching you, you might be right.

One year after the Sept. 11 attacks, security experts and privacy advocates say there has been a surge in the number of video cameras installed around the country. The electronic eyes keep an unwavering gaze on everything from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Washington Monument."

redux [03.11.02]
Wired News Spying: The American Way of Life?

"In the six months since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans may not have exactly embraced a surveillance society, but they appear to have grown to accept portions of it. A Zogby poll conducted last December says that 80 percent of respondents favored video monitoring on public places such as street corners.

Especially in the dark days after the Pentagon was hit, the White House targeted, the Capitol anthraxed, and the World Trade Center leveled, that public reaction was predictable. In national emergencies, the uneasy relationship between freedom and order edges toward greater restrictions on individual liberty."

redux [02.25.02]
NPR: Morning Edition The Video Surveillance Debate

"It hangs over Times Square, looking more like a street lamp than what it really is: a police video surveillance camera that can swivel 360 degrees and zoom in close enough to read a Broadway ticket in a scalper's hand 50 feet away.

As Jad Abumrad reports for Morning Edition, the camera and thousands of others like it in New York City and millions across the country are at the center of an escalating debate: is the use of such devices to combat crime and terrorism worth the loss of privacy and other guaranteed constitutional freedoms?"

redux [11.14.01]
MSNBC Warming to Big Brother

"Khalid al-Midhar was on an INS "watch list" -- and being hunted by the FBI -- when he boarded American Airlines Flight 77 on Sept. 11. A simple computer link between federal agencies could have stopped al-Midhar's suicide mission cold. Frustrated investigators and a nervous American public are wondering why such an intelligent network of police data isn't already in place. But a project to create that kind of gigantic database is now being built -- it's called Golden Shield, and it's been designed by the Chinese Communist Party's police agency to control Chinese citizens."

"Two months ago, even the thought of such a project in the U.S. would likely have elicited immediate outrage. Even today, as just described, Golden Shield might not sound very palatable."

But piece by piece, a skittish American public seems willing to go along with many of Golden Shield's tactics."

redux [10.12.01]
The New York Times Magazine A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
[requires 'free' registration]

"Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity. But in fact, over the past decade, this precise state of affairs has materialized, not in the United States but in the United Kingdom. At the beginning of September, as it happened, I was in Britain, observing what now looks like a glimpse of the American future."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

The Economist The big three-O

"The vast majority of the internet's traffic begins and ends its journey on Ethernet networks, which are found in nearly every office network and home broadband connection.

It was not supposed to be this way. Few imagined that this particular networking protocol would last as long as it has. Indeed, the landscape is littered with better-financed, better-backed rival protocols that failed against Ethernet. IBM's Token Ring system is one famous casualty. Asynchronous Transfer Mode, supported by the telephone industry, is another. So the case of Ethernet is worth examining: the reasons for its longevity may offer lessons to the information-technology industry."

The Boston Globe Ethernet inventor looks ahead

"For the first decade of the personal computer age, most machines worked in splendid isolation. People hadn't realized that PCs wouldn't fulfill their potential until they were bound together in networks. That was Metcalfe's point. When he began pushing the idea of networks, computer users shrugged. Why not just carry information by hand from machine to machine? Why bother with a maze of wires plugged into costly circuit boards?"

"Nearly unknown a couple of years ago, WiFi is now a $2 billion market, and it's just getting warmed up. These days nobody asks why we'd buy wireless ethernet gear, when good old Category 5 cables still work fine. We're considerably more open-minded about such things, thanks in part to Bob Metcalfe."

News.Com 30 years of Ethernet gains

"There are four business models out there today. The first is the vertical model exemplified in the 1980s by the IBM monopoly. The second, which dominates today, is the horizontal model dominated by AOL, Cisco, Intel and Microsoft. They are also monopolies, I might add. The third is the Linux/open-source business model. And the fourth is the Ethernet business model.

It's based on de jure standards with proprietary implementations of those de jure standards, and it is unlike open source in that competitors don't give their intellectual property away. The competition is fierce, but there is a market ethic that products will be interoperable. And the standard evolves rapidly based on market engagement in such a way to value the installed base. There is a heavy value placed on sustaining and maintaining the installed base. That's the Ethernet business model."

Washington Post High Speed With the Highest Anxiety

"Both sides agreed on one point: Nobody has any idea how to turn Wi-Fi into a profitable business.

Of all the talk, Babbio's prickly attack on MCI -- along with his lukewarm comments about Wi-Fi -- perhaps best reflected the painful disputes consuming the troubled telecom industry. While studies show broadband Internet access has reached nearly a third of American homes, it remains unclear what kind of pricing, quality and add-on services consumers should expect from their beleaguered suppliers."

News.Com Time Warner Cable dials in phone service

"AOL Time Warner's entry into voice service Thursday highlights the latest headache for regional phone companies, whose lock on the so-called local loop is looking increasingly precarious."

"Until recently, telephone companies didn't worry about cable adding voice services into their bundles. But the growing sophistication of voice over IP, which turns voice calls into digital packets for dispatch over the Internet, allows cable companies to sell cable TV, telephone service and broadband connections on one bill. That's one more service--specifically cable television--than telephone companies can offer."

Wired Magazine Why Voice Over Wi-Fi Has Telcos Dialing 911

"Think of it as the love child of the two hottest developments in telecom: voice over IP and wireless broadband. There are more than 3.5 million VoIP phones in the US - mostly at work - up from practically none five years ago. Meanwhile, the number of commercial Wi-Fi hot spots in the US exploded from 2,000 to 12,000 last year. Combine the two and any gadget - laptop, PDA, tablet PC, whatever - can become a voice communication device."

"For big providers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, voice over Wi-Fi isn't pretty. Those companies blew billions on licenses for next-gen cellular networks. Now they may find themselves undercut by the same grassroots groups bringing free, unregulated Wi-Fi to the urban masses."

redux [12.16.02]
The New York Times Web Calling Roils the Telecom World
[requires 'free' registration]

"After all, telecommunications and technology companies lost $7.6 billion in global market value from March 2000 to September 2002, as the industry was gripped by stunning collapses, financial scandals and an effort to absorb excess capacity on globe-spanning communications systems.

But alongside the industry's search for its direction after such turmoil are trends that threaten to destabilize global telecommunications further in 2003. These trends could be described as the start of a cannibalization of established services by disruptive new technologies."

redux [08.07.02]
Bob Frankston The Economist, the Internet, Telecom and the Dow

"Of course The Economist is not alone in this fundamental error but "Crash" story is a useful foil for addressing this misunderstanding.

It is a tragic misunderstanding since the woes of the Telecom industry are seen as representing the state of the economy rather than the collapsing of a facade of a Potemkin industry. In 1900's there was a real telecommunications industry just like in the 1800's when there was a thriving business in transporting ice from frozen lakes to warmer climes. Just as refrigeration put an end to the need for buying ice, the Internet has put an end to the need to buy telecommunications services from others. We just need commodity connectivity."

redux [07.22.02]
The Economist The great telecoms crash

"The telecoms bust is some ten times bigger than the better-known dotcom crash: the rise and fall of telecoms may indeed qualify as the largest bubble in history. Telecoms firms have run up total debts of around $1 trillion. And as if this were not enough, the industry has also disgraced itself by using fraudulent accounting tricks in an attempt to conceal the scale of the disaster."

"The danger is that the traumatic scale of the telecoms crisis will cause the pendulum to swing back too far in favour of the former monopolies. In the short term, they are likely to attract investment, to pick up the assets of bankrupt rivals, and to lead the way in consolidating the industry."

redux [06.18.02]
The New York Times Telecom Outlook: First the Bad News, Then the Bad News
[requires 'free' registration]

"The turmoil continues in telecommunications, making the long-awaited turnaround increasingly difficult to call. Indeed, in light of a wave of bad news last week and through the weekend, some analysts say the industry's problems could actually become worse before they become better."

" "I foresee a near total collapse as the endgame," said Susan Kalla, a senior telecommunications analyst at Friedman, Billings & Ramsey. "I've become more reactionary in the last month as it becomes clear that almost nothing is working in the industry's favor.""

redux [03.15.02]
MSNBC A telecom hangover ...that won't go away

"After nearly $2 trillion of investment, the build-out of the information superhighway has run out of gas. The mountain of money invested by wannabe global telecom providers continues to go up in smoke. Though the smaller upstarts were first to pull the plug, major carriers like Global Crossing are now hitting bankruptcy court. And analysts say it could be years before the industry shakes off its debt hangover, absorbs a glut of capacity and begins to grow again."

redux [02.08.02]
BusinessWeek The Tidal Wave Bearing Down on Telecom

""Some of the more highly leveraged companies are really struggling. They don't have the cash flow to make their payments," says James Glen, a telecom economist with Economy.com."

Worse, Baby Bells such as Verizon (VZ ) and SBC (SBC ) continue to eat away at consumer long-distance monopoly of AT&T, Sprint, and WorldCom. That's on top of the woes the big three already face in operating backbone undersea and land-based networks, which they resell to other operators in some places. While Sprint, WorldCom, and AT&T don't face the type of imminent cash crunch as Global Crossing does, a consolidation among even the major long-distance providers is now a possibility."

SMART Letter The Enronization of Telecom

"The fundamental health of the [telecom] sector is likely to get worse before it gets better . . . The combination of: the sector's anemic growth outlook, the cannibalizing competitive mega-trends of wireless substitution, voice to data migration, Bell entry into long distance combined with local competition, and the bubble-induced excesses in debt and over-capacity, all create a powerful wealth destroying dynamic. Telecom's 'debt spiral' has gotten so bad that even the relatively strongest players who are still able to raise significant capital (VZ, SBC, and BLS) don't want to assume any more liabilities or business risk. Consequently, Precursor is reversing its long held view that consolidation can help improve the sector from excess capacity and debt any time soon."

David Isenberg and David Weinberger The Paradox of the Best Network

"Despite the darkened outlook, new communications capabilities are within reach that will make the current Internet look like tin cans and string. The technical know-how exists. Radically simplified technologies can blast bits a million times faster than the current network at a millionth of the cost. These are sitting in laboratories undeveloped, in warehouses undeployed, and in the field underutilized.

It's not even that the communications revolution has been derailed by inept or self-aggrandizing behavior by incumbent telephone companies and their government regulators. Something more fundamental is at work."

Forbes George Soros back doing what he does best

"Financier George Soros is back doing the two things he does best -- punishing a global currency and spending some of his billions on projects that irk those in power.

This week Soros, who "broke" the British pound in 1992, helped push the U.S. dollar down to a near all-time low against the euro by announcing he was selling greenbacks.

The self-proclaimed "dissident by nature" also said he was setting up a watchdog group to make sure Washington does not misspend oil revenues from Iraq."

The Age Billionaires bash Bush tax plan

""However, this move is not designed to have much effect now. It is meant to have an effect over an extended period and is basically using the recession to redistribute income to the wealthy," Soros told CNBC financial news television.

"I think that is really not a very effective way of using a deficit. I think we do need right now both a stimulative monetary policy and a temporary deficit, not a permanent one.""

redux [05.07.02]
The New York Review of Books A Fair Deal for the World

"George Soros has written a brilliant, powerful book, On Globalization , which goes beyond just describing the failures of the current international arrangements. He proposes concrete, practical reforms. Soros, having made his fortune on the international capital markets, should know something about them. But what makes this book so impressive is that he combines these insights with a humanity that comes through in every subject he touches on.

What makes some of his proposals so convincing, especially those concerning foreign assistance, is that he has acted on them. He has been as successful as a social entrepreneur as he has been as a financier. He has put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, and his network of Open Society foundations has had enormous influence, especially in Eastern Europe, first in supporting dissidents and then in setting up post-Communist institutions such as the Central European University in Budapest. His overall program has been far more successful--and far more influential--than those of most governments, including that of the US."

redux [03.04.01]
The New York Review of Books The World on a String

"George Soros is the best-known financial speculator of our time, godfather of hedge funds, those fast-moving and largely unregulated raiders in the corporate jungle that make their killings from fluctuations in the prices of stocks, commodities, currencies. When he writes books readers might reasonably expect tips on how to make money. They will be disappointed. Soros's ambitions are altogether more exalted. Having become a billionaire, he has set himself up as the philosopher and statesman of global capitalism, tirelessly telling the world that it now needs to remove the ladder by which he himself climbed to fame and fortune.""

The Philanthropy Roundtable Colossal Speculation

"Remember that very embodiment of the Peter Principle, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara? Once the Ford chief executive who unveiled the Edsel, at the Pentagon he introduced body counts as quantitative measures of success in Vietnam, and a self-defeating doctrine of slow escalation. As its director, he reoriented the World Bank to giving fish to poor nations rather than teaching them to fish. And as a 1980s eminence grise he added to his nonsensical nuclear notion of "purposeful vulnerability" by proposing to foreswear first strikes.

It is this oracle who comes to mind in reading financier George Soros's latest book on the international financial system and tensions between capitalism and democracy. The guilt which inspired McNamara's commitment to a "Basic Human Needs" doctrine at the World Bank and apology for Vietnam in In Retrospect can be found in Soros as well, whose penitent critique of capitalism's inequities is probably not unrelated to his colossal success in currency speculation." ."

The Nation George Soros's Long Strange Trip

"One thing about George Soros everyone can agree on: He isn't worried what people think of him. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad blamed the American billionaire for nearly ruining Malaysia's economy with massive currency speculation. Hard-core Russian nationalists decried as "meddling" his funding of progressive newspapers and institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Now, it's a prickly domestic cause--drug policy--that has folks taking aim at this hard-nosed financier and controversial philanthropist."

Wired News A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams

"It's a memory aid! A robotic assistant! An epidemic detector! An all-seeing, ultra-intrusive spying program!

The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.

What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?"

redux [05.07.03]
PC World Feds Defend Data-Mining Plans

"Leaders of two much-criticized projects that privacy advocates fear will collect massive amounts of data on U.S. residents defended those projects before the U.S. Congress Tuesday, saying the projects will be much more limited in scope than opponents fear."

"Asked how DARPA would ensure that any information about U.S. residents caught in TIA's net would be correct, Tether said that's up to agencies like the FBI to decide. "At DARPA, we develop the tools," he said. "We don't collect any data. We're not the people who collect data; we're the people who supply the analytical tools to the people who collect the data.""

redux [03.25.03]
The New York Times Data Expert Is Cautious About Misuse of Information
[requires 'free' registration]

"As the government gears up its domestic security program, the chief executive of a venture capital firm founded by the Central Intelligence Agency warned today of the danger of amassing a large, unified database that would be available to government investigators -- as some technology executives have advocated.

"I think it's very dangerous to give the government total access," said Gilman Louie, chief executive of In-Q-Tel, a venture fund established by the C.I.A. in 1999."

redux [02.12.03]
The New York Times Conferees in Congress Bar Using a Pentagon Project on Americans
[requires 'free' registration]

"House and Senate negotiators have agreed that a Pentagon project intended to detect terrorists by monitoring Internet e-mail and commercial databases for health, financial and travel information cannot be used against Americans."

"One important factor in the breadth of the opposition is the fact that the research project is headed by Adm. John M. Poindexter. Several members of Congress have said that the admiral was an unwelcome symbol because he had been convicted of lying to Congress about weapons sales to Iran and illegal aid to Nicaraguan rebels, an issue with constitutional ramifications, the Iran-contra affair."

WashFile FBI Chief Says Al-Qaeda Threat Still Strong

"If we are to defeat terrorists and their supporters, a wide range of organizations must work together. I am committed to the closest possible cooperation with the Intelligence Community and other government agencies. Accordingly, I strongly support the President's initiative to establish a Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) that will merge and analyze terrorist-related information collected domestically and abroad. This initiative will be crucially important to the success of our mission in the FBI, and it will take us to the next level in being able to prevent another terrorist attack on our nation."

redux [01.29.03]
News.Com Bush proposes antiterror database plan

"A forthcoming government database will compile information from all federal agencies and the private sector on people deemed possible terrorist threats, President Bush said Tuesday evening."

" The White House offered few details about how TTIC will evolve, but critics of an existing data-mining program under development by the U.S. government were quick to draw comparisons to the controversial Total Information Awareness (TIA) project."

"The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions on Wednesday about what information on Americans would be accessible to the TTIC. One government official with knowledge of the center, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was not designed to supplant Poindexter's efforts but was instead "an effort by the president to bring together elements of agencies that are focused on terrorism.""

The Washington Post Terrorism Agency Planned

"The threat integration center will analyze intelligence and ensure the information is shared throughout the federal government as well as with state and local authorities. It also will have the authority to set requirements for all intelligence agencies and assign collection operations to the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI and, through Homeland Security, to state and local law enforcement authorities.

"This will be the first time in our history that all of these elements come together," the official said."

GovExec.Com Bush orders FBI, CIA to build new terror intelligence office

"The new terrorist information center would be headed by a senior government official reporting to the director of the CIA, which raises the question of how much control over intelligence operations the FBI is being given, even in light of its expanding mission."

"Treverton added that the new intelligence structure probably reflects some battling over turf among intelligence agencies. The CIA director, George Tenet, will not cede any of his authority over intelligence collection and analysis under the new plan, nor will his access to the president decrease. Quite the opposite, Anderson said. "It will probably strengthen his role and his visibility.""

The Mercury News Growing up wired

"In the coming weeks, the first wave in a generation of teens unlike any other will graduate from Silicon Valley high schools: The vast majority of them will remember an adolescence lived to an astonishing degree on the Internet.

These teens, some of whom have been online nearly a decade, are among the Internet's first natives, at home in the wired world to a degree their parents may never wholly understand."

redux [12.12.02]
The Christian Science Monitor 'r u online?': the evolving lexicon of wired teens

""Instant messaging has just replaced the phone ... for their generation," says Mary Anne Thomas, a Houston mother on the other side of town, with two teen boys addicted to IM.

She has noticed that her oldest son, who's normally quite shy around girls, feels more comfortable talking to them online - a positive, she thinks."

"Some parents worry that teens could get into trouble by talking to so many different - and sometimes unknown - buddies. Certainly, that's happened. But Dr. Randall says he found in his study that teens are quite aware of that issue and know how to protect themselves."

redux [09.04.02]
Wired News When Text Messaging Turns Ugly

""Text messaging is extremely powerful," Herbert said. "It is devastating for the children it affects. You don't know who did it, but you know it's someone you know. Someone who has your number and knows personal stuff about you. You start wondering if it was your best friend that did it. You can't get away from it, and two of our children got rid of their phones because of this very problem."

"SMS bullying is like stalking," said ChildLine's Turner. "It is far more insidious than other forms of bullying.""

redux [01.23.02]
The Christian Science Monitor The new 'Inteenet': Adolescents surf - and shape - the Web

"It's like a seminar - of millions. With teens spending more time online than ever, a new study finds them turning to the Web as a cultural forum, shaping their own "electronic commons.""

"The report finds 3 in 4 12-to-17-year-olds using the Web, often as an arena of unfiltered teen discussion - analysis of everything from high-school trends to the ramifications of Sept. 11."

Center for Media Education A Field Guide to the New Digital Landscape

"In many ways, teens are the defining users of this digital media culture. They are the first generation to grow up surrounded by and immersed in digital technologies. With nearly three-quarters of twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds online, teens surpass adults in their use of chat, instant messaging, and other forms of Internet communications."

"Teens are more than just consumers of media content; they are also active participants and creators of this new media culture, developing content themselves, designing personal Web sites, and launching their own online enterprises. As one trade publication observed, young people have not simply adopted digital media, they have internalized it."

redux [06.21.01]
Pew Internet and American Life Project Teenage Life Online: The rise of the instant-message generation and the Internet's impact on friendships and family relationships

"The Internet is the telephone, television, game console, and radio wrapped up in one for most teenagers and that means it has become a major "player" in many American families. Teens go online to chat with their friends, kill boredom, see the wider world, and follow the latest trends. Many enjoy doing all those things at the same time during their online sessions. Multitasking is their way of life. And the emotional hallmark of that life is the enthusiasm for the new ways the Internet lets them connect with friends, expand their social networks, explore their identities, and learn new things."

redux [05.09.01]
Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies Conversational Technologies

"Conversations are an important part of our daily lives. For most people, in fact, they are the most important way to acquire and spread knowledge during a normal working day."

"Conversations provide a comfortable medium in which knowledge flows in both directions, and where contributors share an inherent context through their subjects and relationships. In addition to old forms of conversations--direct interaction and communication over the phone and in person--conversations are becoming an increasingly important part of the networked world. Witness the popularity of email, chat, and instant messaging, which enable users to increase the range and scope of their conversations to reach those that they may not have before."

"Still, little attention has been paid in recent years to the popular Internet channels that most naturally support conversations."

redux [02.18.01]
First Monday Content is Not King

"The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."

The primacy of connectivity over content explains phenomena that have baffled wireless industry observers, such as the enthusiastic embrace of SMS (Short Message System) and the tepid reception of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol). Combined with statistics showing low cell phone usage, this also suggests that the 3G systems that are about to be introduced will serve primarily to stimulate more voice usage, not to provide Internet access.

For the wired Internet, the secondary role of content will likely mean that the dangers of balkanization are smaller than is often feared. Further, symmetrical links to the house are likely to be in greater demand than is usually realized. The huge sums being invested by carriers in content are misdirected."

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king

"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."

The Guardian Unlimited The truth about Jessica

"Jessica Lynch became an icon of the war. An all-American heroine, the story of her capture by the Iraqis and her rescue by US special forces became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict. It couldn't have happened at a more crucial moment, when the talk was of coalition forces bogged down, of a victory too slow in coming.

Her rescue will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon's media managers, and has produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars."

BBC Saving Private Lynch story 'flawed'

""We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital.

"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan.""

Reason Trusting the Media

" Suddenly Private Jessica Lynch is back in the news, with several stories that suggest her famous rescue was staged. This follows on another brouhaha over the now famous footage of U.S. tanks helping Iraqis tear down a statue of Saddam Hussein, which detractors denounced as a staged photo op. On close examination, these debates relate to semantics as much as facts: No one doubts that Lynch was a prisoner or that many Iraqis were glad to see Saddam's statuary fall. Instead, people are worried about the blurred lines between reality and showmanship--at the idea that the war could be reduced to action-movie agitprop with all the vexing nuances ironed out."

The New York Review of Books The Unseen War

"Before arriving in Doha, I had spent hours watching CNN back home, and I was sadly reminded of the network's steady decline in recent years. Paula Zahn looked and talked like a cheerleader for the US forces; Aaron Brown kept reaching for the profound remark without ever finding it; Wolf Blitzer politely interviewed Washington's high and mighty, seldom asking a pointed question. None of them, however, appeared on the broadcasts I saw in Doha. Instead, there were Jim Clancy, a tough-minded veteran American correspondent, Michael Holmes, a soft-spoken Australian, and Becky Anderson, a sharp and inquisitive British anchor. This was CNN International, the edition broadcast to the world at large, and it was far more serious and informed than the American version.

The difference was not accidental."

Global Vision News Network How Media Helped Bush Sell the War

"Behind the president were seated a small group of about 40 Iraqi Americans, some Shiites and some Chaldean. The audience was not seen, but the impression was created that it was an enthusiastic crowd representative of Michigan's 400,000 plus Arab Americans.

Cameras never focused on the audience, no one saw that the room was only one-third full - an estimated crowd of 300. The fact that the group was personally invited by the White House and was carefully screened to include Republicans and supporters of the president was not reported. Instead, the impression was created that the president was giving a victory message full of optimism and hope to his Arab American supporters. That was what the White House wanted to convey, and that was the story the media allowed them to uncritically convey."

Wired News AI Founder Blasts Modern Research

""AI has been brain-dead since the 1970s," said AI guru Marvin Minsky in a recent speech at Boston University. Minsky co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959 with John McCarthy.

Such notions as "water is wet" and "fire is hot" have proved elusive quarry for AI researchers. Minsky accused researchers of giving up on the immense challenge of building a fully autonomous, thinking machine."

redux [12.18.02]
The New York Times Magazine Approximating Life
[requires 'free' registration]

"Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated, intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn't that complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then artificial intelligence didn't need to be particularly intelligent in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been focused on self-learning ''neural nets'' and mapping out grammar in ''natural language'' programs, but Wallace argued that the reason they had never mastered human conversation wasn't because humans are too complex, but because they are so simple."

redux [02.27.03]
Salon Artificial stupidity, Part 2

"If Hugh Loebner's contest is just hokum, and the Turing test has outlived its usefulness, why should we care about it or its various squabbling participants?

A vocal camp in the brainy "philosophy of mind" profession believes that the Turing test should be relegated to the history books, but I'm going to assert axiomatically that the test, as it is generally understood by ordinary humans like you and me, is interesting. The question of whether computers can successfully pose as human beings has obsessed writers, filmmakers and computer scientists for decades. Therefore, without getting sucked into a philosophical vortex about the nature of minds, machines, intelligence and so forth, all we need to find out -- if we want to know if the Loebner competition matters -- is whether there exists a more respectable variant of the Turing test. As far as I can determine, there doesn't. The Turing test is, as it were, state-of-the-art."

N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

"Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human lifeworld. The Turing test was to set the agenda for artificial intelligence for the next three decades. In the push to achieve machines that can think, researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at the heart of the Turing test. All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to think of information as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form."

"Think of the Turing test as a magic trick. Like all good magic tricks, the test relies on getting you to accept at an early stage assumptions that will determine how you interpret what you see later. The important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman."

Wired News Sims Don't Translate Online

"Investment analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities in Los Angeles believes it was simply the wrong game for the wrong demographic. He says the universe of online gamers willing to pay subscriptions is very narrow. It has principally been in core gamer niches such as medieval-fantasy role-playing games that have upwards of 700,000 subscribers in the U.S. and Europe.

"The Sims Online was flat out the wrong game," said Pachter. "They took a very popular franchise that's a single-player game in which you play with dolls, and when you play with dolls, they follow rules and behave in predictable ways. With The Sims Online, you're playing real people, and real people don't behave the way you'd expect them to.""

redux [02.09.03]
Washington Post Sims Don't Translate Online

"The Sims Online tried to translate the game into a more social experience, with players' Sims interacting with other player-controlled Sims on the Internet. Some reviewers have complained that the experience turns the game into either a popularity contest or a glorified, $10-a-month chat room.

It seems that Sims players aren't necessarily interested in either experience.

"I like to play video games alone, as a break from socializing," said Jean Holman, a Sims player in Washington who has not tried the online version. "What appeals to me is being like God and controlling all the Sims and their interaction with one another.""

Business 2.0 Burning Down the Sims

"Because the program didn't meet all the expectations and live up to all the hype immediately upon arrival, it was deemed an instant failure.

This is stupid. Anyone who's thought about online communities for more than five minutes knows that the most successful and lasting ones are those that develop over time, sometimes without the operators having anything to do with that development. Social games are built on familiarity and trust. Last time I checked, in both the real and virtual worlds, familiarity and trust can't exist until time has passed."

redux [12.14.02]
News.Com Will "Sims Online" alter gaming world?

""The Sims" succeeded, Wright said, by appealing to people who weren't interested in conventional games that pursue a fixed set of goals.

"The Sims was just an empty cup players pour their fantasies into," Wright said. "People will still do that with 'The Sims Online,' but now it's not just your fantasies...This feels more like a zoo, with a bunch of different fantasies running around."

"The Sims Online" will expand potential social interactions to thousands of other characters, all controlled by real people. Add a complex, free-market economic system, tools for creating in-game items and multiple chat vehicles, and you've got a game that emphasizes creativity and socializing over the swords-and-sorcery dynamics of the fantasy role-playing games that currently dominate online gaming."

redux [11.23.02]
The New York Times Magazine Oversimulated Suburbia
[requires 'free' registration]

"Unlike the fictional worlds that flow from the precious prose academies, the Sims world has the feel of real suburban life. It has the same emphasis on money making, shopping, coupling and party throwing. The Sims characters have real-estate fantasies, just as real people do. They have consumer longings. And most of all, they have this desperate need to carve out a place for themselves amid the sprawl.

Unlike people, say, in a traditional Italian village, Sims characters have weak bonds -- if any -- to extended family or past generations, and they feel this intense need to tie themselves to others, to create some local community in which they can be happy. And all the shopping and decorating and party giving and bonding is part of that quest -- the need to create your own roots in a mobile and individualistic world. That doesn't sound so strange for anybody living in modern America. Indeed, it's kind of inspiring. The creative process isn't just for art students and design professionals. It's alive out there amid the subdivisions."