"Home prices in the U.S. are likely to start to stabilize or touch bottom sometime in the first half of 2009," he said in an interview. Tracing a jagged curve with his finger on a tabletop to underscore the difficulty in pinpointing the precise trough, he cautioned that even at a bottom, "prices could continue to drift lower through 2009 and beyond."

He did offer one suggestion: "The most effective initiative, though politically difficult, would be a major expansion in quotas for skilled immigrants," he said. The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.

Greenspan Sees Bottom In Housing

As networks become ever more complex, securing them becomes more and more difficult. The solution is visualization. Using today’s state-of-the-art data visualization techniques, you can gain a far deeper understanding of what’s happening on your network right now. You can uncover hidden patterns of data, identify emerging vulnerabilities and attacks, and respond decisively with countermeasures that are far more likely to succeed than conventional methods.

In Applied Security Visualization, leading network security visualization expert Raffael Marty introduces all the concepts, techniques, and tools you need to use visualization on your network. You’ll learn how to identify and utilize the right data sources, then transform your data into visuals that reveal what you really need to know. Next, Marty shows how to use visualization to perform broad network security analyses, assess specific threats, and even improve business compliance.

He concludes with an introduction to a broad set of visualization tools. The book’s CD also includes DAVIX, a compilation of freely available tools for security visualization.

Applied Security Visualization

War Nerd:

There are three basic facts to keep in mind about the smokin’ little war in Ossetia:

1. The Georgians started it.
2. They lost.
3. What a beautiful little war!

For me, the most important is #3, the sheer beauty of the video clips that have already come out of this war. I’m in heaven right now.

South Ossetia, The War of My Dreams

"I need data for my blade server!"

In the curious way of technological evolution, we first had computers that occupied entire rooms, watched them shrink to desktop, laptop and palm-sized devices, and now find ourselves coming full circle, and then some, Alan Benner reports. He tells this MIT class about warehouse-sized data centers, linking processors, and ensembles of processors, in dizzyingly complex hierarchies. These gigantic operations, some with their own power and air conditioning plants, are central to the enterprise of Internet behemoths Google, Amazon and YouTube, but have not yet percolated out to more traditional companies like insurance firms -- a situation Benner and his IBM colleagues would like to remedy.

Benner describes in broad strokes how these data operations are organized into levels of “virtualization and consolidation,” where the hardware is hidden, yet the data is both fully accessible and secure, no matter where the user and the computers are located. These new enterprise data centers aim to maximize efficiency, both in utilization and power consumption. It’s better to have fewer, bigger and well-integrated machines, says Benner, working as much as possible. Since even idle servers use a lot of power, users should share processing time in a manner that keeps the processors occupied. Benner describes computer architecture and software that aims at “statistically multiplexing jobs,” matching peaks in one group’s workload to nonpeaks in another group’s. Ideally, users remain blissfully unaware of this traffic management, and need never worry whether their information is getting crunched next door, or on the other side of the planet.

Benner hopes that companies will see advantages in migrating their data and services to a bigger, shared infrastructure, especially now with the near-ubiquity of high bandwidth networks. Given the rapid rise of energy costs, and the burdens of supporting a growing IT administration, it may save money “to move work to where it can be done most efficiently,” he says.

See also:

I want to stress that last point because there is no denying it: the system failed. The active wrong-doing detailed in the two joint reports was not systemic in that only a few people were directly implicated in it. But the failure was systemic in that the system – the institution – failed to check the behavior of those who did wrong.

A Roadmap for the Edge of the Internet

Who doesn't love a tasty skewer of roasted author, now and then?

Despite its thrilling material, “Kingmakers” gets off to a slow start. Although Meyer and Brysac are strong on the texture and detail of historical events, they simply do not appear to be very interested in the early part of their story about British imperialism. The first few chapters are a patchwork of glamorous and entertaining anecdotes without much to hold them together. The authors stray into lengthy digressions, some of which — like a five-page diversion into the filming of “Lawrence of Arabia” — tend to have the same effect on the flow of their story as Lawrence’s bombs had on the Ottoman railways.

These weak chapters show up the worst of Meyer and Brysac’s writing style, which is sometimes pretentious to the point of incomprehensibility and becomes more so when they seem to lack interest in their subject matter. The thesaurus takes a battering: Meyer and Brysac will not have half of something if they can have a moiety; they will not give a gift if they can give a lagniappe; they will not quote a saying if they can quote an apothegm.

Sometimes it’s almost impossible to make out what they mean, as when Gladstone is said to have “habitually lofted oratorical rockets into the unassailable empyrean,” when all the poor man actually did was to answer a few questions. Or when the British agent St. John Philby is said “to glare at the world through his owlish shrubbery.” What is owlish shrubbery? A shrubbery full of owls? A shrubbery shaped like an owl? A prop from Monty Python? As to what glaring through such a thing might signify, this reviewer is at a loss to imagine.

See also:

The book is subtly subtitled “A Novel of December 8th” to signal its attention to the Japanese point of view. On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.”

And you would be spectacularly wrong. Because you would find phrases like “to withdraw backward was impossible,” sounds like “wretching noises” to accompany vomiting, or constructions like “incredulous as it seemed, America had not reacted.” Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

From the archive:

And yes, it's also true that whenever Gingrich utters the word "frankly," the words that follow almost always involve rank deception. And frankly, he says "frankly" a lot.

Meddle East

So remember, when John McCain and his surrogates call me a "celebrity," they're not insulting me; they're insulting you.

The phrase "celebrity culture" is an indictment of the culture, not the celebrity.

The Anonymous Liberal: How Obama Should Respond to the 'Celebrity' Charge

Fascination with what lies beneath the earth seems to have been shared by many different cultures. In the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries, however, the emergence of new technologies made it possible for the first time to dig into the earth on a scale that had been previously unimaginable. Whether undertaken in the service of science or in the name of public works, these colossal excavations dispelled many longstanding myths. Nevertheless, the subterranean imagination did not simply disappear. Instead, it reconfigured itself around a new set of ideas, fantasies, and fears.

In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams, Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology at MIT, examines how actual and imaginary underworlds shaped our attitudes toward the manufactured environments that we inhabit. Sina Najafi spoke to Williams by phone.

From the archive:

Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

Underworld: An Interview with Rosalind Williams

Compulsively readable ...

He compared what he did to being a spy: you changed superficial details while keeping your core intact. This approach not only made it easier to convince people; it allowed him to protect a part of his self, to hold on to some moral center. “I know I can be cruel, but I don’t want to become a monster,” he said.

Once he had imagined a character, he fashioned a commensurate appearance—meticulously shaving his face, plucking his eyebrows, using hair-removal creams. He often put on baggy pants and a shirt with long sleeves that swallowed his wrists, emphasizing his smallness. Peering in a mirror, he asked himself if others would see what he wanted them to see. “The worst thing you can do is deceive yourself,” he said.

See also, from earlier this year, The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar:

In 1912 a four year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in a swamp in Louisiana. Eight months later, he was found in the hands of a wandering handyman in Mississippi. (The picture at left was taken just days later.) In 2004, his granddaughter discovered a secret beneath the legend of her grandfather's kidnapping, a secret whose revelation would divide her own family, bring redemption to another, and become the answer to a third family's century-old prayer. We devote our entire episode to the story.

Annals of Crime: The Chameleon

Is **** down for everyone or just me?

Try it with recursion!

Down for everyone or just me?

However deep or long this year-old credit crunch proves to be, the financial system looks doomed to repeat the crisis in some form unless regulators look seriously at preventing banks and investors herding into booms and busts.

From the archive:

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

Scatter the herd or financial crises doomed to recur