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ROBB ON RAY KURZWEIL AND BILL JOY

John Robb has a very interesting post up, “Recipe for Destruction” on the Kurzweil-Joy NYT op-ed “Recipe for Destruction“.

ON THE FUTURE OF BLOGGING AND SOME TOOLS

Recently, Dr. Daniel Nexon delivered his first video broadcast at The Duck of Minerva. Dan did a nice job for his first time out and while he may not have been as smooth as a CNN talking head he was far more substantive. A couple of weeks previously, Dan of tdaxp was the subject of an an extended podcast interview by Phil Jones which was enlightening and interesting, reminding me somewhat of Dr. Milt Rosenberg’s WGN720 radio show.

It is apparent that blogging is evolving toward a multimedia presentation of personal expression requiring a combination of platforms and media that are called “mash-ups“. What we see today is likely to look crude and primitive five years from now, perhaps less. Even so Bloggers will be wanting tools to organize the flow of information. Here are two:

The first is the GRAZR, the odd window that appeared on my blog margin a while back. My grazr is not currently being utilized to any great extent because I set it only to feed Discover The Rules, a blog for a project with Critt Jarvis, now on the backburner. If I wished, I could have bundles of feeds, podcasts, dynamic reading lists, files and a number of other possible options. There is also a grazr blog for the geek inclined.

Secondly, there’s an open source aggregation manager Blogbridge that also is starting a Blogbridge Feed Library . Even I, with my limited technical aptitude, found Blogbridge easy to begin using. I have not used aggregators all that much in the past because I don’t do news of the day blogging per se but Blogbridge has search tools that can be pre-set for topics I’m interested in and save me time.

Thanks to Critt for connecting me, once again, with new tech ideas.

COMPLEXITY, NETWORKS, SECURITY AND UNCERTAINTY

Not initially what I logged on to write about but interesting enough to merit passing along.

“Blogs Study May Provide Credible Information” at Transformation/DefenseLink

” The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

…“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” Ulicny said….Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog. Within blogs, hyperlinks act like reference citations in research papers thereby allowing someone to discover the most important events bloggers are writing about in just the same way that one can discover the most important papers in a field by finding which ones are the most cited in research papers.

…The new portfolio of projects consists of three areas of research emphasis – incomplete information and metrics; search, interactive design, and active querying; and cognitive processing.

…“Relevance involves developing a point of focus and information related to a particular focus,” Kokar said. Timeliness has to do with immediacy – how important is a topic now. “Credibility,” he continued, “is the amount of trust you have in an information source.”

“Credibility” ? Hmmm…I can think of a few big name blogs who won’t make the cut there. But then again neither, would CBS.

I would be intrigued to know how much weight here is being given to the information derived from aggregate patterns (or for that matter the pattern of the blogosphere as a whole and those of the Left vs. Right blogospheres) relative to drilling down to those blogs given 4 star credibility ratings. I would also speculate that the military and IC are very interested in discovering the “deep influencer” blogs – those that consistently or frequently demonstrate an ability to initiate the spread of new memes.

(Indirect Hat tip to YH)

Secondly, from Bruce Schneier – ” Complexity and Terrorism Investigations“:

“The Committee’s report accepts that the increasing number of investigations, together with their increasing complexity, will make longer detention inevitable in the future. The core calculation is essentially the one put forward by the police and accepted by the Government – technology has been an enabler for international terrorism, with email, the Internet and mobile telephony producing wide, diffuse, international networks. The data on hard drives and mobile phones needs to be examined, contacts need to be investigated and their data examined, and in the case of an incident, vast amounts of CCTV records need to be gone through. As more and more of this needs to be done, the time taken to do it will obviously climb, and as it’s ‘necessary’ to detain the new breed of terrorist early in the investigation before he can strike, more time will be needed between arrest and charge in order to build a case.

All of which is, as far as it goes, logical. But take it a little further and the inherent futility of the route becomes apparent – ultimately, probably quite soon, the volume of data overwhelms the investigators and infinite time is needed to analyse all of it. And the less developed the plot is at the time the suspects are pulled in, the greater the number of possible outcomes (things they ‘might’ be planning) that will need to be chased-up. Short of the tech industry making the breakthrough into machine intelligence that will effectively do the analysis for them (which is a breakthrough the snake-oil salesmen suggest, and dopes in Government believe, has been achieved already), the approach itself is doomed. Essentially, as far as data is concerned police try to ‘collar the lot’ and then through analysis, attempt to build the most complete picture of a case that is possible. Use of initiative, experience and acting on probabilities will tend to be pressured out of such systems, and as the data volumes grow the result will tend to be teams of disempowered machine minders chained to a system that has ground to a halt. This effect is manifesting itself visibly across UK Government systems in general, we humbly submit. But how long will it take them to figure this out? “

Some degree of probability analysis might be a start. Speaking of which…..

“Robust Decision Methodology for Reasoning Under Deep Uncertainty“

Despite the sexy title this not a ponderous tome but a sparkly powerpoint presentation. Worth looking at because time, politics, stress and human frailty causes us all to take cognitive short-cuts from time to time ( or in some cases, all the time). Echoes things I have read in Studies in Intelligence. Perhaps Art can be enticed to comment ?

UPDATE:

Curtis recommends the following article on Brain-nanotech interface and I agree.

IRAN’S PROXY WAR WITH ISRAEL

While it might be hard to tell sometimes, this is actually a blog that has something to do with foreign policy. After some appropriate links, my comments on the war between Israel and the PA, various terrorist groups, Islamist militias and their state supporters, Syria and most importantly, Iran.

Blogging the War:

Abu Aardvark, Atlas Shrugged, Aqoul , American Footprints, American Future, Austin Bay, Belmont Club, Bliss Street Journal, Captain’s quarters, Collounsbury, Chicago Boyz, Centerfield, Cliopatria, Coming Anarchy, Counterterrorism Blog, Dan Drezner, Deja Vu, Democracy Project,
Glittering Eye, Global Guerillas, History Unfolding, Instapundit, Iraq the Model, Juan Cole, Memeorandum, Michael Totten, Middle East Perspectives, OPFOR, Penraker, Rightwing Nuthouse, Shloky, Sic Semper Tyrannis, SyriaComment, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Whirledview

Now that the Right, the Left, the Middle, scholars, amateurs, soldiers, strategists, journalists, partisans and professors have had their say, I’ll weigh in with a brief analysis:

Iran, and specifically Ahmadinejad’s faction in the leadership, have sought to provoke Israel into action for some time now. Scratch Hezbollah enough and you find the Pasdaran – particularly when Hezbollah suddenly demonstrates newfound military capabilities.

Conflict serves to strengthen Ahmadinejad’s hand and allow Shiite Iran to pose as the champion of Islam against the “Zionist Entity”- a goal of the late Ayatollah Khomeini and a dual propaganda blow against both the conservative Sunni monarchies of the gulf and the radical Salafist movement that regards Shiites as “apostates”. Provoking Israel distracts the Europeans away from Iran’s illegal, covert, nuclear weapon program and toward the more comfortable and politically safer topic of condemning Israel for defending itself.

On the Israeli side of the equation, it is evident that invading Lebanon will not get any kidnapped soldiers back nor is it intended to do so. It is primarily intended to disrupt the Hezbollah, Pasdaran and Syrian intelligence networks in Southern Lebanon and secondarily as a punitive expedition against Lebanon for Hezbollah’s ( read Iran and Syria’s) transgressions. In principle a good thing, but it would be of more practical use directed against Syria and cause Israel far less political damage. The Lebanese state may be passively complicit in Hezbollah’s attacks and be legally responsible, but Damascus is actively complicit as Iran’s satellite, and is a better target in terms of maintaining Israel’s moral legitimacy. The Lebanese government no more controls its own territory than the Governor of Maine controls the Mexican border.

If Israel rolls through Lebanon, destroys and disperses the Hezbollah network, hangs Nasrallah or some other notorious figure from a nearby tree and gets out quickly, the Israelis will at least win some tactical gains. They will also send a message to Syria and Iran that proxy warfare is going to be regarded as warfare – particularly if some Syrian infrastructure takes some heavy hits along the way. If Olmert drags the military process out and replays Begin’s televisually shocking seige of Beirut, he courts strategic defeat.

As for the soldiers, they will only return through quiet negotiations, if at all, after the dust settles.

UNCERTAINTY AND PRECISION IN ANALYZING COMPLEXITY

Dr. Von had a timely and useful post today, one that will interest Steve, Dave and Curtis among others, addressing the issue of using network theory as a predictive model for social networks. In ” Will we ever be able to predict what social systems and networks will do? Perhaps globally, but likely not locally” Von differentiates between systems and individuals in terms of rule sets:

“In a physical system this is similar to studying gases. We can in principle use Newton’s laws to predict what should happen to individual atoms and molecules, but collectively we need to resort to a statistical/probabilistic approach. Collectively, there are set probability distribution functions for something like molecular speed, but that is meaningless to an individual molecule of the gas. In social systems, we are dealing with complex, unpredictable individual agents that make up the system, and this makes things considerably more difficult to analyze than a gas, whose individual agents are governed by deterministic rules (at least to a good approximation using classical physics). It will be quite difficult to accurately model emotion and religious fanaticism, for example, for individuals in a social system. We can guess and try to take a statistical approach, but this leaves some degree of uncertainty in results and predictions. It will be very difficult to model and predict what is going on in the head of a leader such as Osama bin Laden; there is a good deal we can only guess at, even though there has been research and progress in figuring out how his larger terror network operates and is structured. This is the difference between local and global environments and rulesets.”

The post should be read in full.

I’ll have a (somewhat distantly) related post up later tonight.