In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is fighting wars in which the effective communication of ideas and information is vital. Strategists in both these conflicts increasingly share with classic counterinsurgency theorists a keen appreciation that they are fighting for the support of the population, and that communication is a key part of the struggle.

This article sets out to explore the ramifications of this feature of modern war. Communications may be vital, but how should the operational and tactical commander use them to best advantage? Why have US military and civilian authorities found effective communication so difficult in the current struggle against militant Islamism?

Waging Communication War

California led the U.S. into the worst housing recession since the 1930s. Now the most populous state may be the first to find the bottom.

In Stockton, the U.S. metro area with the highest foreclosure rate, home sales more than doubled in the second quarter after prices fell by an average 37 percent.

From the archive:

Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the FIRE economy in need of $12 trillion. Where will that money come from?

California's Discount Foreclosure Sales Point to Housing Bottom

On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the world’s tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. James Marsh’s documentary brings Petit’s extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Philippe himself, and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that became known as “the artistic crime of the century.”

Man On Wire

In terms of strategy, Grantham summarizes his view in what he believes should be investors' motto: "Don't be brave, run away. Live to fight another day."

Specifically, as far as house prices are concerned Grantham looks at the ratio of US median house prices to family income and states: "In order for house prices to reach normal from here, they must either decline 17% immediately or experience four flat years while income catches up, or some combination." Even more worrying, however, is the normal tendency for bubbles to overrun on the downside.

Jeremy Grantham: "I'm officially scared!"

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said falling U.S. home prices are "nowhere near the bottom" and the resulting market turmoil isn't showing signs of abating.

Greenspan Says Housing Prices Not Yet Near Bottom

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

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?

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

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