Recommended Reading
Top Billing! Dr. David Ucko and Carl Prine’s Point -COINterpoint debate:
PRISM – Counterinsurgency After Afghanistan: A Concept in Crisis (Ucko)
LoD– Ucko is Wrong (Mostly) (Prine)
KoW – Prine is Wrong (Mostly): A Reply to a Critic (Ucko)
LoD– Ucko Attacks! (Prine)
KoW – Prine Attacks! (Again) (Ucko)
Can’t really summarize this much prose, so a short quote from each gentleman:
PRINE: Ucko’s obvious intelligence can’t compensate for a Prism essay that lacks a rudimentary understanding of recent Iraqi history, a grasp on guerrilla strategies employed there during the occupation and the political realignments that followed in the wake of the rebellions. It devolves into the same sort of scholarship about counter-insurgency ginned up five decades ago during an age of nationalist and communist revolt throughout the Third World, which surprised me because Ucko is an exceptionally well-read analyst….
UCKO: My crime, apparently, is writing a book on counterinsurgency that included a two-page foreword written by arch-nemesis John Nagl. This is sufficient for Prine to misinterpret the rest of my work as surge propaganda, even when my position is not so far removed from his own. For example, Prine seems to concede that local factors along with US inputs accounted for the decline in Iraqi casualties in 2006-2008, but when I say the same, he reads it as ‘COIN porn’.
CTOvision.com – Carrier IQ invades privacy ( Bryan Halfpap)
The application collects the following data:
- Phone Keypad Presses
- Website URLS (regardless of https encryption)
- Home/Properties/Back/Search button presses
- Battery State Changes
- Location
And requests access to many hardware and system resources in Android, including “services that cost you money” and “personal information”.
Admittedly, the collection of location on its own may not be a big deal to many people, but the fact that it is collecting URLs which should be encrypted is a problem. This could expose sensitive user credentials. Collecting phone call key presses is even worse because it can easily collect banking PINs, credit card numbers, passwords, and more. The application even has access to sound and recording functionalities, which means it could be turned into an all-in-one surveillance device.
There is absolutely no reason for a diagnostic application to collect the amount of data it is collecting. There is no reason for a diagnostic application to record key-presses or any other user action when crash reports are readily available from the phones operating system. This should not have happened.
SWJ – Toward a Gentler, Kinder German Reich (Dr. Tony Corn)
Corn on the emerging play by Berlin for an economic Festung Europa.
In the past two years, German elites have taken up the Rahm Emanuel doctrine (“never let a serious crisis go to waste”) all the more eagerly that Washington, in the process of rebalancing away from the Greater Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, is less interested than ever in following intra-EU affairs.
For the third time in less than twenty years, Germany is trying to force down the throat of Europe a federal “political union” which, in the eyes of too many European observers, eerily resembles a gentler, kinder Anschluss. While Europeans were able to push back against the first two attempts, the two-year long financial crisis has created within Europe a “German unipolar moment” and provided the kind of leverage that had eluded Germany earlier. With the German Chancellor as a de facto “EU Chancellor,” German elites are leveraging the crisis by playing a game of chicken in order to make their federal vision prevail.
Maggie’s Farm – Jews confront the Gentlemen’s agreement on campuses (Bruce Kesler)
Kesler looks at the de facto alliance between tenured leftists and pro-Palestinian student extremists on university campuses to promote antisemitic activities and even violence and the response of Jewish student organizations:
….In March 2011, the US Office of Civil Rights finally opened an investigation into Rossman-Benjamin’s Title VI complaint. There’s also a pending legal complaint against UC Berkeley for allowing harassment of Jewish students, and a weak court sentence, later further reduced, was levied against UC Irvine and UC Riverside students who illegally disrupted Israel Ambassador Oren’s speech at UC Irvine. Other legal challenges to colleges in other states allowing across-the-line infringements on laws and academic freedom are in process or development. Fear of threats and violent or illegal actions by pro-Palestinian activists on campuses continue to silence many pro-Israel speakers from being allowed a peaceful campus stage. Freedom of speech is being violated, in contradiction to tenets of academic freedom.
SLATE – “Narco Economics” (Ray Fisman)
“It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” Al Pacino’s classic line from The Godfathernicely sums up the economics profession’s basic view of human enterprise, criminal and otherwise: Human beings make decisions based on rational cost-benefit calculations, not passion or emotion. And it captures the approach employed by MIT Ph.D. student Melissa Dell in her recent work, which strips the seemingly senseless violence of the Mexican Drug War to its cold, rational essentials. Viewing Mexico’s drug cartels as calculating, profit-maximizing business operations, Dell’s model provides a framework for understanding how traffickers have adjusted their operations in response to President Felipe Calderón’s war on the drug trade. According to Dell, the cartels have behaved like textbook economic actors, shifting their trafficking routes in predictable ways to circumvent towns where the government has cracked down and raiding towns where competing cartels have been weakened by government efforts. By providing a basis for analyzing how traffickers react to government efforts, Dell’s work might help Calderón’s administration design a better strategy for defeating Mexico’s drug lords.
Hat tip to Feral Jundi
….For example, the most prominent conclusion of this body of evidence is that teachers are very important, that there’s a big difference between effective and ineffective teachers, and that whatever is responsible for all this variation is very difficult to measure (see here, here, here and here). These analyses use test scores not as judge and jury, but as a reasonable substitute for “real learning,” with which one might draw inferences about the overall distribution of “real teacher effects.”
And then there are all the peripheral contributions to understanding that this line of work has made, including (but not limited to):
- That experience does matter;
- That the quality of peers affects teacher performance;
- That teachers perform differently in different schools;
- And that students’ backgrounds explain more of the variation in their performance than school related factors
Prior to the proliferation of growth models, most of these conclusions were already known to teachers and to education researchers, but research in this field has helped to validate and elaborate on them. That’s what good social science is supposed to do.
Conversely, however, what this body of research does not show is that it’s a good idea to use value-added and other growth model estimates as heavily-weighted components in teacher evaluations or other personnel-related systems. There is, to my knowledge, not a shred of evidence that doing so will improve either teaching or learning, and anyone who says otherwise is misinformed. It’s an open question.*
That’s it.
December 5th, 2011 at 1:16 am
According to Dell, the cartels have behaved like textbook economic actors, shifting their trafficking routes in predictable ways to circumvent towns where the government has cracked down and raiding towns where competing cartels have been weakened by government efforts. By providing a basis for analyzing how traffickers react to government efforts, Dell’s work might help Calderón’s administration design a better strategy for defeating Mexico’s drug lords.
Dell’s work might help Calderon’s administration, if not design, identify the Mexican drug lords. Their strategic of circumvention and sounds like it is right out of the Taliban handbook. Oh yeah, I meant economic actors, ha!
December 5th, 2011 at 1:17 am
Darn, I meant to double-space to try this thing out.
Oh well, there is next time.
December 5th, 2011 at 2:31 pm
“For the third time in less than twenty years, Germany is trying to force down the throat of Europe a federal “political union” which, in the eyes of too many European observers, eerily resembles a gentler, kinder Anschluss.”
Hmmm so many things wrong here I’m not sure where to start.
The major problem is he has the situation ass backwards Vis a Vis Germany and the rest of Europe, the rest of Europe would love to see a transfer union in which German money acts as a bandage while the rest of europe puts itself back together. The main obstacle is German wants to avoid this role.
Also the use of the word Anschluss is obscene in any other context than Austria in 1936. This guy must have had the theme tune of the dam busters ringing in his ears when he penned this junk.
This is my favorite part
“From a socio-political standpoint, to be sure, this would-be Merkelian Reich would have none of the negative features associated with the autocratic Bismarckian Reich. In all likelihood, the new Reich would be a benign, metrosexual, post-modern.”
December 6th, 2011 at 2:12 am
“The major problem is he has the situation ass backwards Vis a Vis Germany and the rest of Europe, the rest of Europe would love to see a transfer union in which German money acts as a bandage while the rest of europe puts itself back together. The main obstacle is German wants to avoid this role.”
He who pays the piper can call the tune.
Corn is writing in his trademark style and I have not studied postwar Germany, only the Reichs. How strong German financial institutions really are, I don’t know. They took aid from our Fed on the sneak along with all the other big global players. That Germany is stronger than the Piigs though, politically and economically, seems clear
January 10th, 2012 at 3:21 am
“They took aid from our Fed on the sneak along with all the other big global players.”
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True, but wasn’t much of the idea built around the logic of the Fed was to entice banks to loan, and, not necessarily, to shore-up banks. So they, weak and strong, all got a share.
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From what I have read about Greece’s situation, the stronger banks were the ones that were least corrupted, and a part of that corruption was enabled by Wall Street.
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Germany is almost acting like it doesn’t want any of that “stink” from the corrupted market to fall on its sovereign debt. It would help to know where Germany is planning, not necessarily thousand-year terms, for growth. Africa, Turkey, China, or some other system on the move? Perhaps it is looking at the American heartland?