tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69283272024-03-13T16:52:25.251-05:00BlogspotAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.comBlogger1099125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-55874003616065621662009-11-23T21:05:00.000-06:002009-11-24T21:07:58.364-06:00Hello WordPress, God speed Blogger.<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I am happy to announce that I am finally moving my blog from Blogger to WordPress. Yes you heard it right, <a href="http://roymitsuoka.wordpress.com/">Roy Mitsuoka blog site</a> will have a new look and a new domain name. I will be quite busy with this work, as such my blog will not be updated for about few weeks.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Even so, the new domain is still in progress. I am also searching and woking with old buddies of mine for a new design for my blog. If you have any new templates in mind, feel free to submit me a suggestion.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Few weeks, be on WordPress. See you at WordPress.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-78475463855769185342009-11-23T11:32:00.001-06:002009-11-23T13:35:31.452-06:00Iran: Preps for Strike on Nuke Sites<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Iran today began large-scale air defense war games aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from attack, state TV reported, as an air force commander boasted the country could deter any military strike by Israel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It said the five-day drill will cover an area a third of the size of Iran and spread across the central, western and southern parts of the country.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Gen. Ahmad Mighani, head of an air force unit in charge of responding to threats to Iran's air space, said Saturday the war games would cover regions where Iran's nuclear facilities are located.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The drill involves Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard, the paramilitary Basij forces affiliated with the Guard as well as army units.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The United States and its European allies accuse Iran of embarking on a nuclear weapons program. Iran denies the charge and insists the program is only for peaceful purposes.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Israel has not ruled out military action to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The commander of the Guard's air force, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, meanwhile sought on Sunday to play down the significance of Israel's threats against his country, saying they amounted to psychological warfare.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"We are sure they are not able to do anything against us since they cannot predict our reaction," Hajizadeh was quoted as saying by the Guard's official Web site, Sephahnews.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"If their fighter planes could escape from Iran's air defense system, their bases will be hit by our devastating surface-to-surface missiles before they land," he said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Also today, Iran's defense minister, Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said Iran planned to pursue designing and producing its own air defense missiles, according to the official IRNA news agency.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">His comments were apparently in response to the delay in the delivery from Russia of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, meant to be a key component of Iran's air defense.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Iran complains that the delay is apparently the result of Israeli and U.S. pressure.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Israel and the United States have opposed the missile deal out of fear Iran could use the system to significantly boost air defenses at its nuclear sites — including its main uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Commenting on this week's war games, a senior Obama administration official urged Iran to engage with the international community.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"We would prefer that the Iranian regime follow through on their offer to engage," said Ellen Tauscher, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"It is more important for them to build confidence with the international community," she said at a news conference Sunday at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-73534271373654010882009-11-23T10:42:00.000-06:002009-11-23T12:51:10.456-06:00Brazil: World Should Engage, Not Isolate Iran<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Engaging, not isolating Iran is the way to push for peace and stability in the Middle East, said Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva as he headed into private talks Monday with his increasingly alienated Iranian counterpart.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For Silva, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's first-ever visit to Brazil provides an opportunity to boost the international political clout of South America's largest nation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For Ahmadinejad, it could provide some sorely needed political legitimacy for his nation as it engages in large-scale war games aimed at protecting its nuclear facilities from attack and refuses to back down from developing a nuclear program.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Oil prices rose above $78 a barrel Monday amid deepening tensions in the Middle East following the start of the war games and boasts by an air force commander that Iran could deter any military strike by Israel.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Silva, who has defended Iran's nuclear program, didn't mention the war games ahead of his meeting with Ahmadinejad but gave him a big bear hug and called for diplomacy to push for peace in the Middle East and ease tensions between Iran, the United States and other nations.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"There's no point in leaving Iran isolated," the Brazilian leader said on his weekly radio program hours before the two met. "It's important that someone sits down with Iran, talks with Iran and tries to establish some balance so that the Middle East can return to a certain sense of normalcy."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Ahmadinejad is the third high-ranking Middle Eastern leader to visit Brazil in recent weeks. Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestine Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas were here shortly before him. During his radio show, Silva proposed a soccer game next March pitting Brazil's national team against a team comprising Israelis and Palestinians.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Silva, a deft negotiator whose skills were honed as a union leader, says a new tact is needed with the Iranians. It may not be as embracing as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a close ally whom Ahmadinejad will also visit during his South America tour.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But it also shouldn't be as punitive as the U.S. or European approach, Silva said.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"I told President (Barack) Obama, I told President (Nicolas) Sarkozy, I told (German) Chancellor Angela Merkel that we will not get good things out of Iran if we corner them. You need to create space to talk," Silva said last month.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The Iranian leader will next visit allies in Bolivia and Venezuela to shore up more South American support.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"With Brazil he gets more bang for his buck in the sense you're getting legitimacy from a more mainstream player," said Daniel Brumberg, an Iran expert at the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace. "One would hope Brazil's diplomacy would be skillful enough to get certain types of messages across to the Iranians and not just give Ahmadinejad the red-carpet treatment."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Ahmadinejad said Sunday that the two countries may discuss cooperation in the nuclear field, where Iran is under intense international pressure to stop uranium enrichment for fear that it is developing atomic weapons.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"We can build partnerships to build nuclear plants," he said in an interview with Brazil's Globo TV News. "Our two countries need nuclear power to generate electricity. Both Brazil and Iran are entitled to benefit from nuclear technology."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes. Ahmadinejad said in Sunday's interview that critics are politically motivated and believe only wealthy countries should have the technology.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Several dozen Ahmadinejad supporters and opponents held demonstrations in Brasilia on Monday, a day after about 500 people gathered at Rio de Janeiro's Ipanema Beach to protest his visit.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Groups representing gays, Afro-Brazilian artists, Christians, Jews, and Holocaust survivors carried protest banners and a giant cage Sunday containing white balloons, which they said was a symbol of Iran's "repressed values."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The Iranian leader has called for the destruction of Israel and repeated in Sunday's interview that homosexuality goes against human nature.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Israel is voicing concern about Iran's push in Latin America. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman visited Brazil and Argentina in July and Israeli President Shimon Peres visited the same nations last week - the first such high-level visits in decades.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Brazil has the world's seventh-largest uranium reserves and enriches it for its own nuclear energy program. The nation has flatly said it would not sell enriched uranium to Iran, or any other nation.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In addition to encouraging Brazil to press Iran on its uranium enrichment, the U.S. State Department said it hopes Brazil raises the case of three American hikers being held in Iran after they crossed an unmarked border while hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan in July. Ahmadinejad didn't mention the hikers during his interview with Globo TV. </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-82716750339681140752009-11-23T08:04:00.001-06:002009-11-23T10:07:17.208-06:00Security by Accident, or Security by Design? by Paul Ducklin<span style="font-family:times new roman;">I can't imagine blaming anyone other than the author for last week's <a href="http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/11/08/iphone-worm-discovered-wallpaper-rick-astley-photo/">iPhone virus outbreak</a>. The virus wasn't an accident -- the self-confessed creator wrote and disseminated the virus quite deliberately.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">However, the virus only infects apostate iPhones whose owners have removed Apple's restrictive software cocoon -- so-called jailbroken devices. Additionally, the virus only infects iPhones which have not been properly secured after liberation. So there are many who blame the virus on the the jailbreakers, claiming they brought the problem on themselves.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And a few observers have even blamed the virus author's mobile phone operator, claiming that the company should have been using Network Address Translation (NAT) on its 3G network as a security measure which would have prevented the virus.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is a curious argument, and it begs two questions: what is NAT, and what security purpose, if any, is is supposed to serve?</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">You can read about traditional NAT, which was first codified as RFC1631 in 1994, in <a href="http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3022.txt">RFC3022</a>, published in 2001. NAT's primary objective was to make 32-bit IP numbers go further, in order to buy us time to update to IPv6. (Given that IPv6 adoption is still very limited, 15 years later, NAT has obviously achieved this goal.)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The basic idea is simple: take a single, public IP number issued by your ISP, and assign this number to a router at your network edge. Give all the PCs inside your network a range of non-unique, private IP numbers, and let the router translate all outbound packets so they appear to come from the network address of the router itself. Similarly, let the router translate and redirect all reply packets to the network address of the originating PC. And there you have it: Network Address Translation.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">One side-effect of this behaviour is that inbound connection requests must be aimed at the router, since it has your network's only public-facing IP number. Until you instruct the router which inbound requests should be forwarded to which internal servers, inbound connections can't be accepted -- the router simply doesn't know where to send them.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So, as RFC3022 points out, "traditional NAT can be viewed as providing a privacy mechanism, as sessions are uni-directional from private hosts and the actual addresses of the private hosts are not visible to external hosts." In other words, by default, NAT limits the extent to which your network structure is visible to outsiders, and prevents outsiders from connecting into your network.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">However, it is a large -- and, in my opinion, unwarranted -- leap of faith to consider NAT to be a security measure. Indeed, the original RFC authors seem to agree, warning that "unfortunately, NAT reduces the number of options for providing security." In particular, NAT makes it much more difficult to track troublesome behaviour back to source -- including security violations -- since the IP address of any offending host is masked by the NATting router.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In short, NAT is a necessary evil in contemporary networking, since we don't have enough IPv4 addresses for every device on the internet. Used responsibly, NAT can increase your resilience to external attack, because of its systematic resistance to unwanted inbound connections. But it is a snake-oil substitute for a proper network security regimen. It was designed to help the internet stretch further, not to make it more secure.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In particular, the PCs inside a NATted network enjoy no protection from each other because of NAT. Even if NAT helps to stop a virus like Conficker from sneaking into your LAN through your router, it won't stop the virus from wandering around inside your LAN if it gets in via other means. Indeed, when Conficker was widespread earlier this year, most organisational outbreaks I dealt with seem to have entered quietly on infected USB keys, and then spread liberally across the intranet -- whether the network was NATted or not.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Remember: security doesn't happen by accident.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">(Nor do viruses, so don't try to <a href="http://www.sophos.com/blogs/gc/g/2009/11/11/duck-savages-ikee-iphone-worm-author/">shift the blame</a> away from the people who create them in the first place.)</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-14028698613843667002009-11-23T07:48:00.000-06:002009-11-23T09:51:09.570-06:00Intego Security Memo – November 23, 2009 (Jailbroken iPhone Worm Creates Botnet, Copies Personal Data)<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Exploit: iPhone/iBotnet.A</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Discovered: November 21, 2009</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Risk: Medium</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Description: For the third time this month, malware targeting the iPhone has surfaced. The first such malware changed wallpaper on iPhones1, and the second harvested personal data from iPhones2. This new malware, that Intego calls iBotnet.A, is by far the most sophisticated iPhone malware yet: it is not only a worm, capable of spreading across a network, but also hijacks iPhones or iPod touches for use in a botnet.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It is important to note that standard, non-jailbroken iPhones or iPod touches are not at risk; it is extremely dangerous to jailbreak an iPhone because of the vulnerabilities that this process creates. (Estimates suggest that 6-8% of iPhones are jailbroken.) Jailbroken iPhones at risk are those where ssh is installed, and where the default password has not been changed.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This worm starts by searching its local network, as well as a number of IP address ranges, for available devices to infect. The address ranges it scans include those of ISPs in the Netherlands, Portugal, Hungary, Australia, and if an appropriately unprotected iPhone is found, the worm can copy itself to these devices.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">When active on an iPhone, the iBotnet worm changes the root password for the device (from “alpine” to “ohshit”), in order to prevent users from later changing that password themselves. It then connects to a server in Lithuania, from which it downloads new files and data, and to which it sends data recovered from the infected iPhone. The worm sends both network information about the iPhone and SMSs to the remote server. It is capable of downloading data, including executables that it uses to run and carry out its actions, as well as new files, providing botnet capabilities to infected devices. (A botnet is a network of infected computers or devices that can be controlled by hackers to attack other computers, serve malware, send spam, serve pages or images, and much more.)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The worm also gives each infected iPhone a unique identifier; this to be able to reconnect easily to any iPhones on which valuable information is found, but also to ensure that only infected iPhones can connect to the server. Finally, it changes an entry in the iPhones /etc/hosts file for a Dutch bank web site, to lead Dutch users who connect to this bank site to a bogus site, presumable to harvest user names and passwords.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Means of protection: Intego VirusBarrier X5 detects and eradicates this malware, which it identifies it as iPhone/iBotnet.A, on iPhones that it can scan from Macs with VirusBarrier X5 installed, with its virus definitions dated November 22, 2009 or later. The only other way to remove this malware is to totally wipe and restore the iPhone using iTunes.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">We would like to stress that users who jailbreak their iPhones are exposing themselves to known vulnerabilities that are being exploited by code that is circulating in the wild. If users install ssh, they should change the default password, which is widely known. While the number of iPhones attacked may be minimal, the amount of personal data that can be compromised, and the ability of this new worm to create a botnet, strongly suggests that iPhone users should stick with their stock configurations and not jailbreak their devices.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Intego thanks Scott McIntyre, Chief Security Officer of the Dutch ISP XS4ALL, for his help in isolating and analyzing this worm.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-66233914991327190602009-11-22T02:55:00.000-06:002009-11-22T02:55:00.142-06:00Hasan had Intensified Contact with Cleric: Suspect Raised Prospect of Financial Transfers by Carrie Johnson, Spencer Hsu, and Ellen Nakashima<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In the months before the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan intensified his communications with a radical Yemeni American cleric and began to discuss surreptitious financial transfers and other steps that could translate his thoughts into action, according to two sources briefed on a collection of secret e-mails between the two.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The e-mails were obtained by an FBI-led task force in San Diego between late last year and June but were not forwarded to the military, according to government and congressional sources. Some were sent to the FBI's Washington field office, triggering an assessment into whether they raised national security concerns, but those intercepted later were not, the sources said.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hasan's contacts with extremist imam Anwar al-Aulaqi began as religious queries but took on a more specific and concrete tone before he moved to Texas, where he allegedly unleashed the Nov. 5 attack that killed 13 people and wounded nearly three dozen, said the sources who were briefed on the e-mails, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the case is sensitive and unfolding. One of those sources said the two discussed in "cryptic and coded exchanges" the transfer of money overseas in ways that would not attract law enforcement attention.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">"He [Hasan] clearly became more radicalized toward the end, and was having discussions related to the transfer of money and finances . . .," said the source, who spoke at length in part because he was concerned the public accounting of the events has been incomplete. "It became very clear toward the end of those e-mails he was interested in taking action."</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said Friday that he would investigate the handling of the e-mails -- 18 or 19 in all -- and why military officials were not aware of them before the deadly attack. Levin told reporters after a briefing from Pentagon staff members that "there are some who are reluctant to call it terrorism, but there is significant evidence that it is."</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Bits and pieces of Hasan's communications with Aulaqi have become public since the Fort Hood massacre, but the sources provided the most detailed description yet of the messages. The e-mails will help investigators determine whether Hasan's alleged actions were motivated by psychological deterioration or inspired by radical religious views he found online and through e-mail exchanges with Aulaqi.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The sources said the e-mail correspondence is particularly troubling because Aulaqi, who has been on the law enforcement radar for years, is considered by U.S. officials to be an al-Qaeda supporter who has inspired terrorism suspects in Britain, Canada and the United States. Lawmakers and counterterrorism experts have questioned why no one in the government interceded earlier given Aulaqi's history and Hasan's military position.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The disclosures came as investigators in the FBI and the Army's Criminal Investigation Division continue to interview witnesses and execute search warrants in and around the Army's largest post, in Killeen, Tex., and elsewhere.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">This week Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates launched a department-wide review to determine whether military procedures hinder the identification of service members who pose a threat to their fellow troops.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hasan faces 13 charges of premeditated murder. He is scheduled to have his first formal court hearing Saturday, in his hospital room in the intensive care unit at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where he is recovering from gunshot wounds that have left him paralyzed.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hasan's contacts with Aulaqi were not publicly disclosed until after the shootings, which the cleric subsequently praised, calling the Army psychiatrist a "hero" in a posting on his Web site.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In the months before the shootings, the two discussed how Hasan could make several transactions of less than $10,000, a threshold for reporting to U.S. authorities, according to the source who spoke extensively. Hasan did not explicitly vow to fund terrorist activities or evade tax and reporting laws for contributions, the source said.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">"I believe they were interested in the money for operational-type aspects, and knowing that he had funds and wouldn't be around to use them, they were very eager to get those funds," he said.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">To date, investigators have not unearthed evidence that Hasan sent money to charities with strong or suspected ties to Islamist militant groups, but they are continuing to probe his financial dealings as one aspect of a many-pronged case, other sources cautioned.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The FBI obtained the e-mails pursuant to court-ordered wiretaps, according to a former intelligence official. After receiving a wiretap order, Internet providers generally set up accounts that allow cloned copies of e-mails to go to the government agency in real time. Stored e-mails also may be provided with a search warrant.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In this case, a first batch of Hasan's e-mails was sent by agents in San Diego to the bureau's Washington field office, where a terrorism task force began to assess them in December. But months later, additional messages emerged, according to government and congressional sources. Those e-mails were reviewed only in San Diego, where authorities determined they did not pose a national security risk. The FBI said last week, without going into details about the process, that "all of the e-mails were known."</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Hasan's commanding officer ordered him to "pre-trial confinement" on Friday, John Galligan, the suspect's attorney, said in an interview at his Belton, Tex., office. Galligan described pre-trial confinement as the strictest confinement in military court and said it usually means the suspect is locked in a military jail. Because Hasan is paralyzed and has substantial medical needs, Galligan said he will ask for his client to remain in intensive care under guarded supervision.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">"He's in a hospital bed," Galligan said. "He's not going to get up and walk away."</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In several of their applications for search warrants, authorities are approaching the matter as a regular criminal investigation rather than invoking special legal authority available in terrorism cases, the sources said.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">What, if anything, authorities on the task force and in the Army should have done differently after Hasan emerged as a possible problem is the subject of multiple congressional and executive branch investigations, including one ordered by President Obama.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">At a congressional hearing Thursday, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said that Hasan had conducted a "homegrown terrorist attack" -- a conclusion investigators have yet to reach.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">But several current and former investigators who handle high-profile cases said that not citing terrorism as a possible motivation for Hasan at this stage may be a function of the legal standards imposed by prosecutors preparing the search applications.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Investigators within the FBI and the Defense Department continue to operate on the theory that Hasan acted alone, though they have demonstrated interest in his relationships with other soldiers including Duane Reasoner Jr., a convert to Islam who dined with Hasan at a local restaurant in the months before the attack.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-32890121181286525752009-11-21T19:21:00.001-06:002009-11-21T20:04:23.752-06:00When the Iranian Clergy Switch Sides by Thomas Barnett<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">ARTICLE: <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/223345">Future Perfect</a>, By Geneive Abdo, Newsweek , Nov 18, 2009</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">This fits nicely with the mullahs-have-lost-power scenario unfolding. Khamenei has so sold his soul to the Revolutionary Guard that the clergy are slowly coming to the conclusion that the faith would be better served detached from the government.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">When this happens, a major portion of the clergy then switch over to the green movement and we get a Poland / Solidarnosc scenario that moves with great power.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-56487948257095645462009-11-21T17:52:00.000-06:002009-11-21T19:53:09.859-06:00The LHC is back II (CERN)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Particle beams are once again circulating in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, CERN1’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o'clock this evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The LHC circulated its first beams on 10 September 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. A failure in an electrical connection led to serious damage, and CERN has spent over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers. “We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made.”</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Recommissioning the LHC began in the summer, and successive milestones have regularly been passed since then. The LHC reached its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, or about -271 Celsius, on 8 October. Particles were injected on 23 October, but not circulated. A beam was steered through three octants of the machine on 7 November, and circulating beams have now been re-established. The next important milestone will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now. These will give the experimental collaborations their first collision data, enabling important calibration work to be carried out. This is significant, since up to now, all the data they have recorded comes from cosmic rays. Ramping the beams to high energy will follow in preparation for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) next year.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Particle physics is a global endeavour, and CERN has received support from around the world in getting the LHC up and running again.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“It’s been a herculean effort to get to where we are today,” said Myers. “I’d like to thank all those who have taken part, from CERN and from our partner institutions around the world.”</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-91510244427760612602009-11-21T17:48:00.001-06:002009-11-21T19:50:08.096-06:00Military Video System Is Like YouTube With Artillery by David Hambling<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Making footage shareable and searchable online has sparked a revolution in the cute animal, stupid human, and delicious tamale communities. New software just might mean a similar upgrade for military video intelligence: Think of it as a real-time YouTube with heavy artillery. The release of the new version has just been announced.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The U.S. military’s Task Force ODIN demonstrated the effectiveness of combining the video inputs from networked drones, aircraft and helicopters. When a roadside bomb went off, the team could wind back the video to see who planted it — and where they went. ODIN allegedly assisted in the takedown of thousands of insurgents in Iraq; their counterparts are starting work in Afghanistan.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The process of handling, archiving and then searching through a large number of video feeds is a challenging one. That’s one of the reasons why something like YouTube can be so helpful: Instead of having to search through a pile of videotapes, you can just type in a few keywords. Even better, you can search all your friends’ video collections and they can search yours. And this is where a system like adLib produced by EchoStorm Worldwide LLC comes in. It does the same sort of thing for the military by automatically archiving video feeds along with the associated telemetry data.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">For example, suppose you want to find out what happened at point X at 8:30 yesterday. You don’t even have to know which platforms were in the area at the time.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">“You can ask for video that matches a specific location using latitude and longitude or the MGRS (Military Grid Reference System) or by clicking and dragging on a map,” David Barton of EchoStorm told Danger Room. “You can even define a specific point and specify a radius to search from that point.”</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Barton says that the system can take video feeds from all sorts of drones. It even works right down to the individual soldier level: FLIR Recon III binoculars have built-in video, GPS and a laser range finder which can feed straight into adLib.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The system requires some rack-mounted hardware, but once the data has been archived, it’s freely available to everyone: Like YouTube, users can access it on the internet without any special software. EchoStorm’s Multiplayer allows users to look at what’s happening right now. Looking into the past is one thing, but you might also want to look at how things are right now. It even allows for “Artillery Correction support,” so a fire support officer can redirect an barrage of shells from a video feed on his PC. Try doing that with your ninja cat videos.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-4319506794754160252009-11-21T17:43:00.000-06:002009-11-21T19:46:19.231-06:00The Illustrated Man: How LED Tattoos Could Make Your Skin a Screen by Charlie Sorrel<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chips to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Chips are already used inside bodies, most notably the tiny RFID tags injected into pets. But the flexible nature of these “tattooed” circuits means they can move elastically with the body, sitting in places that a rigid circuit board couldn’t.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The first displays are sure to be primitive, but likely very useful for the patients that receive them. You won’t be getting the full-color, hi-res images that come with ink, but functional displays. This doesn’t mean that the commercial and artistic possibilities are being ignored. Philips, the electronics giant, is exploring some rather sexual uses:</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><object id="flashObj" width="486" height="412" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0"><param name="movie" value="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/23188062001?isVid=1&publisherID=1875254528"><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><param name="flashVars" value="videoId=25240201001&playerID=23188062001&domain=embed&"><param name="base" value="http://admin.brightcove.com"><param name="seamlesstabbing" value="false"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="swLiveConnect" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/23188062001?isVid=1&publisherID=1875254528" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashvars="videoId=25240201001&playerID=23188062001&domain=embed&" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" width="486" height="412" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" swliveconnect="true" allowscriptaccess="always" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed></object></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">It’s certainly rather creepy, but we’re sure that the inevitable next stage of playing adult movie clips on your partner’s back will be appealing to some. We, of course, are considering the geekier side of this tech. GPS, with a map readout on the back of the wrist would certainly be useful, as would chips that cover your eyeballs and can darken down when the sun is shining too bright.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">And a full-body display will eventually be used for advertising. Combine this with bioluminescent ink, for example, and you could turn yourself into a small, walking version of Times Square. At least, unlike a real tattoo, you can switch this one off.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">In fact, if you start to imagine the possible uses, they seems almost endless. Just like the stories that play across the body of the Illustrated Man.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-32308866212046338582009-11-20T09:07:00.002-06:002009-11-20T12:52:32.423-06:00Conflict and Computer Science by Aaron Mannes<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Conflict has often been a driver for technological advances and computer science has been no exception. The requirements of code breaking during World War II led to the construction of Colossus – the first totally electronic computer device, while the Internet was originally constructed to provide a secure communications network for the military in the event of a nuclear war. While terrorist use of technology, and particularly the Internet, receives tremendous press, the current conflict is also sparking important developments in computer science that will have impacts far beyond the security realm.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">My employer, the <a href="http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/research/LCCD/">Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics (LCCD) at the University of Maryland</a> is one group seeking to develop the theory and algorithms required for tools to support decision-making in cultural contexts. LCCD has developed numerous systems including T-Rex, which can rapidly scan text in several languages and convert it into a database and SOMA (Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents) which can extract rules of likely behaviors by organizations from their past behaviors.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">LCCD sponsors an annual conference, the International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD2009) – to be held this year on December 7-8 at the University of Maryland. Papers being presented include efforts to model insurgencies as well as piracy in Somalia, a tool used to map the Indonesian blogosphere, and SCARE (Spatial Cultural Abduction Reasoning Engine) which can help predict the locations of weapons caches in an urban environment. (<a href="http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/conferences/icccd2009/program.html">See the full program here.</a>)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Augmenting the Mind</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The human brain is an impressive system, which also builds models. In some regards it far exceeds anything on the horizon in the realm of computer science. The ability of human beings to take information and place it in context and draw conclusions from it is profound. We build complex models of how the world works in order to function in it. But computers can process some forms of data far faster than humans and will do so systematically. Human minds cannot quickly process large quantities of data. In attempting to make sense of large amounts of information a human beings may discount or ignore information that does not fit in their model of how the world works – or alternately draw significant conclusions based on a very limited amount of data. Imagine an economist ignoring issues of ethnic identity in analyzing a nation’s policies or a political philosopher focusing on ideology while ignoring logistics in studying a terrorist group’s behavior. In short, computer systems are capable of substantially augmenting the power of human reason.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Things to Come</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The impacts of these technologies will be profound. Real-time data collection and processing will potentially improve decision-making in many ways. Beyond providing better intelligence, it will allow the creation of in-depth virtual environments, which facilitate training to operate in different cultures. The Marines and Army have built mock Afghan and Iraqi villages staffed by actors for this kind of training. These are terrific facilities, but a computer simulation could inexpensively augment the real world training.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">According to the late Alexander George, a renowned scholar of the presidency, many foreign policy accidents have occurred because leaders were unable to see the situation from the perspective of their counterpart. Leaders make assumptions about their opposite number and his (or her) actions based on an intuited model of their behavior. Models not operating on limiting assumptions may provide alternate explanations for behaviors and thereby give leaders the insight to avoid escalating conflicts that arose from misunderstandings.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But these systems will also have civilian applications. Game theory systems used to predict the behavior of adversaries may also be used to understand the behavior of business competitors. Tools that can analyze the opinions expressed on jihadi websites could also be used to analyze public opinion for marketing research. Models that identify the outbreak of terrorism and insurgency may also be turned to studying the outbreak of disease.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But this focuses on applications designed for policy-makers – and no doubt there will be many such tools. But only twenty years ago, very few people imagined a ubiquitous, international system that facilitated instantaneous communications and put vast amounts of information virtually at every user’s fingertips. Models and game theory will not remain in the realm of executives and professional analysts. They will also become everyday tools used by regular people to better plan their activities and make decisions about their lives.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In this vein, <a href="http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/conferences/icccd2009/index.html">ICCCD2009</a> could prove to be a fascinating glimpse into the future.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-51084093732977753852009-11-20T08:17:00.000-06:002009-11-20T12:26:36.170-06:00Liquid Battery Big Enough for the Electric Grid? by David L. Chandler<span style="font-family:times new roman;">There’s one major drawback to most proposed renewable-energy sources: their variability. The sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t always blow, and tides, waves and currents fluctuate. That’s why many researchers have been pursuing ways of storing the power generated by these sources so that it can be used when it’s needed.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So far, those solutions have tended to be too expensive, limited to only certain areas, or difficult to scale up sufficiently to meet the demands. Many researchers are struggling to overcome these limitations, but MIT professor Donald Sadoway has come up with an innovative approach that has garnered significant interest — and some major funding.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The idea is to build an entirely new kind of battery, whose key components would be kept at high temperature so that they would stay entirely in liquid form. The experimental devices currently being tested in Sadoway’s lab work in a way that’s never been attempted in batteries before.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This month, the newly established federal agency ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy) announced its first 37 energy-research grants out of a pool of 3,600 applications, and Sadoway’s project to develop utility-scale batteries received one of the largest sums — almost $7 million over five years. And within a few days of the ARPA-E announcement, the French oil company Total — the world’s fifth-largest — announced a $4 million, five-year joint venture with MIT to develop a smaller-scale version of the same technology, suitable for use in individual homes or other buildings.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Because the technology is being patented and could lead to very large-scale commercialization, Sadoway will not discuss the details of the materials being used. But both Sadoway and ARPA-E say the battery is based on low-cost, domestically available liquid metals that have the potential to shatter the cost barrier to large-scale energy storage as part of the nation's energy grid. In announcing its funding of Sadoway’s work, ARPA-E said the battery technology “could revolutionize the way electricity is used and produced on the grid, enabling round-the-clock power from America's wind and solar power resources, increasing the stability of the grid, and making blackouts a thing of the past.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Andrew Chung, a principal at Lightspeed Venture Partners in Menlo Park, Calif., which has no equity stake in Sadoway’s project at this point, says that “grid-scale storage is an area that’s set to explode in the next decade or so,” and is one that his company is following closely. The liquid battery concept Sadoway is developing “is an exciting approach to solving the problem,” he says.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Big is Beautiful</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Most battery research, Sadoway says, has been aimed at improving storage for portable or mobile systems such as cellphones, computers and cars. The requirements for such systems, including very low weight and high safety, are very different from the needs of a grid-scale, fixed-location battery system. “What I did was completely ignore the conventional technology used for portable power,” he says. The different set of requirements for stationary systems “opens up a whole new range of possibilities.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A large, utility-owned system “doesn’t have to be crash-worthy; it doesn’t have to be ‘idiot-proof’ because it won’t be in the hands of the consumer.” And while consumers are willing to pay high prices, pound-for-pound, for the small batteries used in high-value portable devices, the biggest constraint on utility-sized systems is cost. In order to compete with present fossil-fuel power systems, he says, “it has got to be cheap to build, cheap to maintain, last a long time with minimal maintenance, and store enormous amounts of energy.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">And so the new liquid batteries that Sadoway and his team, including graduate student David Bradwell, are designing use low-cost, abundant materials. The basic principle is to place three layers of liquid inside a container: Two different metal alloys, and one layer of a salt. The three materials are chosen so that they have different densities that allow them to separate naturally into three distinct layers, with the salt in the middle separating the two metal layers —like novelty drinks with different layers.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The energy is stored in the liquid metals that want to react with one another but can do so only by transferring ions — electrically charged atoms of one of the metals — across the electrolyte, which results in the flow of electric current out of the battery. When the battery is being charged, some ions migrate through the insulating salt layer to collect at one of the terminals. Then, when the power is being drained from the battery, those ions migrate back through the salt and collect at the opposite terminal.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The whole device is kept at a high temperature, around 700 degrees Celsius, so that the layers remain molten. In the small devices being tested in the lab, maintaining this temperature requires an outside heater, but Sadoway says that in the full-scale version, the electrical current being pumped into, or out of, the battery will be sufficient to maintain that temperature without any outside heat source.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">While some previous battery technologies have used one liquid-metal component, this is the first design for an all-liquid battery system, Sadoway says. “Solid components in batteries are speed bumps. When you want ultra-high current, you don’t want any solids.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Inspiration from Aluminum</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The initial inspiration for the idea came from thinking about a very different technology, Sadoway says: one of the biggest users of electrical energy, aluminum smelting plants. Sadoway realized that this was one of the few existing examples of a system that could sustain extremely high levels of electrical current over a sustained period of years at a time. “It’s an electrochemical process that runs at high temperatures, and at a current of hundreds of thousands of amps,” he says. In a sense, the new concept is like an aluminum plant running in reverse, producing power instead of consuming it.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Chung says that from the point of view of a venture capitalist, the research is particularly intriguing for several reasons. Not only does it offer the potential to significantly lower the cost and increase cycle life [the number of times it can be charged and discharged] of large-scale electricity storage, but it also suggests that the risk typically associated with an early stage research project may be lower because the system draws on decades of experience in the design and operation of aluminum production facilities. “That gives us added confidence that some of the targets around cost, scalability and safety have merit,” he says.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The team is now testing a number of different variations of the exact composition of the materials in the three layers, and of the design of the overall device. Sadoway says that thanks to initial funding through the Deshpande Center and the Chesonis Family Foundation, he and his team were able to develop the concept to the point of demonstrating a proof-of-principle at the laboratory scale. That, in turn, made it possible to get the large grants to develop the technology further.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“It’s an example of work that sprang from basic science, was developed to a pilot scale, and now is being scaled up to have a real transformational impact in the world,” says Ernest Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The laboratory tests have provided “some measure of confidence,” Sadoway says. But many more tests will be needed to “demonstrate that the idea is scalable to industrial size, at competitive cost.” But while he is very confident that it will all work, there are a lot of unknowns, he says, including how to design and build the necessary containers, electrical control systems, and connections.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“We’re talking about batteries of a size never seen before,” he says. And the system they develop has to include everything, including control systems and charger electronics on an unprecedented scale.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For Sadoway, the project is worth pursuing despite its daunting challenges, because the potential impact is so great. “I’m not doing this because I want another journal publication,” Sadoway says. “It’s about making a difference … It’s an opportunity to invent our way out of the energy problem.”</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-4244277990129236012009-11-19T16:52:00.001-06:002009-11-19T16:55:29.245-06:00Leaked UK government plan to create "Pirate Finder General" with power to appoint militias, create laws by Cory Doctorow<span style="font-family:times new roman;">A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson -- or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. Mandelson elaborates on this, giving three reasons for his proposal:</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a "three-strikes" plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to "confer rights" for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">3. The Secretary of State would get the power to "impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement" (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright "militias" can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Mandelson is also gunning for sites like YouSendIt and other services that allow you to easily transfer large files back and forth privately (I use YouSendIt to send podcasts back and forth to my sound-editor during production). Like Viacom, he's hoping to force them to turn off any feature that allows users to keep their uploads private, since privacy flags can be used to keep infringing files out of sight of copyright enforcers.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This is as bad as I've ever seen, folks. It's a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">More to follow, I'm sure, once Open Rights Group and other activist organizations get working on this. In the meantime, tell every Briton you know. If we can't stop this, it's beginning of the end for the net in Britain.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-5051950976901707392009-11-19T12:57:00.001-06:002009-11-19T12:58:39.214-06:00What They Really Believe by Thomas L. Friedman<span style="font-family:times new roman;">If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Yes, the opponents of any tax on carbon to stimulate alternatives to oil must believe all these things because that is the only way their arguments make any sense. Let me explain why by first explaining how I look at this issue.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America. That is why I have been saying “green is the new red, white and blue.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The first is that the world is getting crowded. According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion ... passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Now, add one more thing. The world keeps getting flatter — more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“What happens when developing nations with soaring vehicle populations get tens of millions of petroleum-powered cars at the same time as the global economy recovers and there’s no large global oil supply overhang?” asks Felix Kramer, the electric car expert who advocates electrifying the U.S. auto fleet and increasingly powering it with renewable energy sources. What happens, of course, is that the price of oil goes through the roof — unless we develop alternatives. The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia hope we don’t. They would only get richer.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Green hawks believe otherwise. We believe that in a world getting warmer and more crowded with more “Americans,” the next great global industry is going to be E.T., or energy technology based on clean power and energy efficiency. It has to be. And we believe that the country that invents and deploys the most E.T. will enjoy the most economic security, energy security, national security, innovative companies and global respect. And we believe that country must be America. If not, our children will never enjoy the standard of living we did. And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon — combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech — and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">So, as I said, you don’t believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I’ll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don’t believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you’re hurting America’s future to boot.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-36551762807792432572009-11-19T11:48:00.001-06:002009-11-19T11:50:36.710-06:00A bipartisan push is needed to tame ballooning national debt by Evan Bayh<span style="font-family:times new roman;">America's national debt cannot grow beyond a limit imposed by Congress known as the "debt ceiling."</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In 1919, just after World War I, the limit on U.S. borrowing was $43 billion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">By 2001, it had grown to $5.9 trillion.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Today, the debt ceiling is at an all-time high of $12.1 trillion.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, our public debt amounted to 33 percent of our economy. Today, it is 60 percent of our gross domestic product. If we do nothing, our debt is projected to swell to over 70 percent by 2019.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">To put those numbers in perspective: If you divided the debt equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child living in the United States today would owe more than $39,000.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Next month, members of Congress will be asked to vote to raise the roof on our allowable debt for the ninth time this decade.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Before such votes, it has become customary for Treasury officials to write members of Congress warning of the dire consequences of restricting the federal government's ability to borrow. There should be no mistake: These consequences are real.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What those letters often fail to mention, however, are the equally dire consequences of the status quo. Long-term deficits drive up interest rates for consumers, raise prices of goods and services, and weaken our country's financial competitiveness and security.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The bigger our deficits, the fewer resources we have to make critical investments in energy, education, health care and tax relief for small businesses and middle-class families.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The bigger our deficits, the more we must borrow from foreign creditors like China, allowing governments with competing interests to influence our economic and trade policies in ways that run counter to our national interest.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Last week, I was joined by a handful of my colleagues at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on strategies for reining in our exploding debt. United in our concern that Congress lacks the will to get our fiscal house in order, we mounted what I termed an "institutional insurrection."</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Our unsustainable debt is neither a Democratic nor a Republican problem. It is rooted in the DNA of both political parties. Some in Congress like to spend more than we can afford, and some like to cut taxes more than we can afford. The easy path is simply to borrow until the credit markets will no longer allow it.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This approach violates something fundamental in the American character. Every generation before us has been willing to make the tough decisions and hard sacrifices required to ensure our children and grandchildren inherit a better way of life and stronger country. Now, it is our turn.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The path of least resistance that we have trod for so long is the path to national weakness. If you have the same people and the same process, you are going to get the same results.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For this reason, I will vote "no" on raising the debt ceiling unless Congress adopts a credible process to balance our books and eliminate the red ink.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The proposal I am supporting with Sens. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, and Judd Gregg, R-New Hampshire, would create a new debt-fighting commission. Conventional wisdom in Washington is that commissions are something politicians create to defer hard decisions. But our bipartisan panel would put all options on the table, including spending cuts and revenue raisers. Congress would then be compelled by law to debate the recommendations and take an up-or-down vote on the entire plan.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A debt commission will force members of Congress to take -- or reject -- a single gulp of politically difficult medicine to treat the fiscal problems that are ailing our country. Those who choose not to take that medicine would be forced to explain to their constituents why a $12 trillion national debt doesn't make them queasy.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">There is precedent to create this type of commission with real teeth. President Ronald Reagan created a commission, chaired by Alan Greenspan, to shore up Social Security in the early 1980s. Congress created a special process to take parochial politics out of decisions on military base closures, and it worked.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Some of my colleagues in Congress believe that efforts to reduce the deficit should go through the regular committee system, but the national debt has doubled this decade. The existing process has not only failed to respond to this problem, it has made it worse.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">There are rare moments of leverage in Congress when a few resolute members can force fundamental change. The upcoming vote to raise the debt ceiling is one of them.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Before we borrow more money from our children and grandchildren, we need to commit to a new fiscal process that ensures a legacy of which all Americans can be proud.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-39743975557637864792009-11-19T11:22:00.000-06:002009-11-19T11:44:26.931-06:00Apple Researching Methods for 'Pushing' User Interfaces to Accessories from Media Devices by Eric Slivka<span style="font-family:times new roman;">In a <a href="http://www.macrumors.com/c.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fappft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO1%26Sect2%3DHITOFF%26d%3DPG01%26p%3D1%26u%3D%252Fnetahtml%252FPTO%252Fsrchnum.html%26r%3D1%26f%3DG%26l%3D50%26s1%3D%252220090284476%2522.PGNR.%26OS%3DDN%2F20090284476%26RS%3DDN%2F20090284476&t=1258651801">patent application filed in May 2008</a> and published today, Apple discloses that it has been researching methods to allow media devices such as the iPod to "push" their graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to accessory devices for the purposes of controlling the media devices remotely. In pursuing this technology, Apple notes that while remote control accessories for media devices are common, the interfaces are generated by the accessory itself, leading to incomplete functionality and varying experiences when multiple devices are used with a single accessory or a single device is used with multiple accessories.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But existing remote GUIs are defined and controlled by the remote control device, and consequently, they may bear little resemblance to a GUI supplied by the portable media device itself Certain functions available on the portable media device (such as browsing or searching a database, adjusting playback settings, etc.) may be unavailable or difficult to find. Thus, a user may not be able to perform desired functions. Further, GUIs provided for the same portable media device by different remote control devices might be quite different, and the user who connects a portable media device to different accessories with remote control may find the inconsistencies frustrating.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">As a response to these issues, Apple proposes methods for media devices to "push" their own GUIs to accessory devices, allowing for full functionality and a consistent user experience across compatible devices and accessories.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The portable media device can provide the accessory with an image to be displayed on the video screen; the image can include various user interface elements that can resemble or replicate a "native" GUI provided directly on the portable media device. The accessory can send information to the portable media device indicative of a user action taken in response to the displayed image; such information can indicate, for example, that a particular button was pressed or that a particular portion of a touch-sensitive display screen was touched by the user. The portable media device can process this input to identify the action requested by the user and take the appropriate action. The action may include providing to the accessory an updated GUI image to be displayed, where the updated GUI image reflects the user action.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The lead inventor on the patent application is William Bull, former iPod User Interface manager at Apple and currently Senior Director of Mobile User Experience at Yahoo. Also among the inventors is former Apple executive <a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2004/07/64286">Tony Fadell</a>, the "father of the iPod".</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-35409646047542651562009-11-18T18:25:00.004-06:002009-11-18T20:49:51.343-06:00Look out! Outlook Wants to become your New Social Media and Collaboration Hubby by Sebastian Anthony<span style="font-family: times new roman;">It's been a long time coming, and perhaps a little too late, but you can now track your friends' and colleagues' social networking activity in </span><a style="font-family: times new roman;" href="http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2009/11/18/announcing-the-outlook-social-connector.aspx">Outlook 2010</a><span style="font-family: times new roman;">. Dubbed the 'Outlook Social Connector' (OSC), the functionality is available right now to all Office 2010 Beta testers.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The list of much-needed features that OSC brings to Outlook is long and juicy. 'Activity Feeds' is the new social media technology, collating the activities of your contacts into your Outlook screen. </span><a style="font-family: times new roman;" href="http://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a><span style="font-family: times new roman;font-family:times new roman;" > support is included in the current beta version, but there's no mention of anything like Twitter or Facebook support yet.<br /><br />There's also neat functionality to show you all of the attachments sent between you and another contact, a communication history that shows you your recent emails with that contact, Next year, there will be added connectivity with Windows Live Messenger! There are numerous mentions of 'extensibility' and an easy-to-use developer kit, however, so I'm sure lots of other add-ons will emerge in due course.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-84912391783854474882009-11-18T16:57:00.001-06:002009-11-18T18:52:08.775-06:00World Tries to Buck Up Dollar by Joanna Slater, William Mallard, and Bob Davis<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Governments around the world stepped up efforts to stem the U.S. dollar's slide, as officials grow increasingly concerned about the impact of the weak greenback on their nascent economic recoveries.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Thailand, South Korea, Russia and the Philippines have been snapping up dollars this week in order to hold down the value of their currencies, traders said Wednesday, as the U.S. currency wallowed near 15-month lows.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">China is one of the few exceptions among developing nations, seeing continued strong exports despite its currency's tie to the dollar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In Latin America, Brazil's finance minister said the country's currency remained too strong, sparking speculation that the government would intensify recent efforts to curb the real's ascent. On Tuesday, Taiwan banned foreign investors from parking time deposits in the country in an effort to ease upward pressure on the local currency.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The fresh buzz over the dollar's fall prompted Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, visiting Tokyo on Wednesday, to repeat the Obama administration's commitment to a strong dollar. Still, Washington hasn't taken any concrete steps to arrest the slide. The weaker dollar is actually benefiting the U.S. as it struggles to come out of recession by helping keep U.S. exports competitive.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">China is coming under new pressure from Pacific Rim countries to let its dollar-linked currency rise in value. On Wednesday, China's central bank made a nod to concerns about the declining dollar and yuan by issuing a rare change to the official language of its exchange-rate policy. The central bank said it would take major currency trends into account in setting policy, though it wasn't clear what impact that may have on the yuan's future value.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The U.S. wants to see a stronger yuan, though Washington has avoided explicit public pressure on China to abandon its policy of managing its currency. But in the jargon of finance ministers, Mr. Geithner has made clear that's what he thinks should happen. In an op-ed piece in Thursday's Wall Street Journal Asia, he emphasized the advantages of "market oriented exchange rates in line with economic fundamentals."</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">On Wednesday, the dollar briefly sagged to a 15-month low against a basket of major currencies before recovering slightly. It fell slightly against the euro, which was quoted at $1.4982 at 4 p.m. in New York. So far this year, the dollar is down 7% against the European currency.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Asian finance ministers, now gathered in Singapore for a meeting of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, are expected to raise their concerns about both the dollar's decline and the inflexibility of the Chinese yuan.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The fear is two-fold. If currencies surge against the dollar, it damages the ability of countries in the region to compete in world markets, by making their exports more expensive. What's more, one of their major competitors -- China -- ties its currency to the dollar. As the yuan sinks in tandem with the dollar, China is able to keep its export prices low and price out competition.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A concluding statement from the assembled APEC officials is expected to underline the importance of flexible exchange rates to sustainable global growth -- generally viewed as code for a rise in the Chinese yuan. Such efforts are unlikely to bear fruit in the near term, which means these countries must act on their own to slow their currencies' rise.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Experts estimate that some of the largest emerging economies may have spent as much as $150 billion on currency intervention over the past two months, judging from the growth of their international reserves, according to data from Brown Brothers Harriman. While that's not a huge amount in the currency markets, which have turnover of more than $3 trillion a day, traders pay keen attention to what the authorities are doing and where they are likely to intervene.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Thailand alone has bought $15 billion trying to push the dollar higher against the baht, Korn Chatikavanij, Thailand's finance minister, said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"Quite clearly, all Asian central banks have found it necessary to intervene, and it's costing us," Mr. Korn said.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The Chinese authorities aren't going to tip off financial markets in advance of a move in their currency, said Jim O'Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. But the fact that they adjusted the phrasing of their exchange-rate policy in a quarterly report Wednesday could be a response to the growing attention to the yuan, particularly from fellow developing nations.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;color:#ff0000;">"It's one thing for the Chinese to ignore the U.S. and Europe," he said. "But when they start ignoring the developing G-20 it's a bit trickier."</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For the last three years, the International Monetary Fund has been pressing China to revalue its currency. At the recent meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Scotland, the IMF once again said the yuan "remains significantly undervalued from a medium-term perspective."</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Emerging nations are recovering from the global slump far faster than their developed counterparts and investors are flocking to buy their stocks and bonds. That in turn puts upward pressure on their currencies.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Efforts to stem the flow of foreign capital or to intervene in currency markets pose serious challenges for governments and aren't always successful. Unless a government takes radical steps, it can't affect a U-turn in its currency. However, it "can lean against the wind," says Win Thin, a currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman, in this case by slowing the pace of currency strengthening.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Developing nations aren't the only ones uncomfortable with the dollar's slide. European governments, especially Germany, will be increasingly uneasy if the euro continues to gain on the dollar.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Governments that try to check the rise of their currency often end up accumulating dollars which they may not need.</span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">"I'm convinced that in the long term the dollar is more likely than not to decline in value, so we're building up assets that are declining in value over time," says Mr. Korn of Thailand. "That's not healthy."</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-2672998353242001502009-11-15T16:36:00.003-06:002009-11-15T16:39:39.872-06:00Lost There, Felt Here by Thomas L. Friedman<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Belem, Brazil</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“One million dollars?”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The question was asked with eyes wide and a voice of incredulity. The person asking was Antonio Waldez Góes da Silva, the governor of the Amazonian state of Amapá, which has the biggest national park in the world. I had just shared with Gov. Waldez Góes a recent news article in The Hill, the Congressional newspaper, which said the total cost of stationing one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">What if we kept just one soldier back from Afghanistan and gave you the money, I asked the governor? What would it buy you? Gov. Waldez Góes mulled that over: “If you kept three soldiers back, that would be enough for me to keep the State University of Amapá running for one year, so 1,400 students could take different courses on sustainable development for the Amazon.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">O.K., I know. It is a bit misleading to take a war budget and assume that if it weren’t spent on combat, it would all go to schools or parks. And we do have real enemies. Some wars have to be fought, no matter the cost. But such comparisons are still a useful reminder that our debate about Afghanistan is not taking place in a vacuum. We will have to make trade-offs, and there are other hugely important projects today crying out for funding, as my colleague Nick Kristof has pointed out regarding health care.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Well, if America is going to assume the primary burden of fixing Central Asia, maybe, say, China, could help pick up the tab for saving what is left of the Amazon and the world’s other great tropical forests. Could President Obama raise that idea in Beijing?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">An intergovernmental working group for saving the rainforests estimates that for about $30 billion we could reduce deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo by 25 percent by 2015. After that, financing from global carbon markets, plus these countries’ own resources, could save much of the rest. China now has $2.2 trillion in reserves. How about it, Beijing? Why don’t you step up and provide some public goods for the world for once — not because you get a direct benefit, but just because it would make the world a better place for everyone?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Sure, America should still lead such efforts. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over. China should pay its fair share — and more — since it will benefit every bit as much as the U.S., Europe and Japan. Indeed, the U.N. Foundation estimates that because living tropical forests are such huge storehouses of carbon — which gets released when we chop the trees down — if we just stop deforestation, we get a big chunk of the carbon-emissions reductions the world needs between now and 2020.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“And forest-rich developing countries, like Brazil, are now ready to do their part because they depend on the water that the rainforests provide for energy and agriculture, and because they see a new model for growth based on their natural capital,” said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International and my traveling companion here. “Brazil has developed the science, political will and basic rules and institutions for preserving its rainforests. What Brazil and other rainforest nations like Indonesia lack, though, are the funds to take this new economic model to scale.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">I was struck by how many of the building blocks for “natural capitalism” that Gov. Waldez Góes — whose state sits at the mouth of the Amazon — is putting in place, so that he can have an economy based on preserving the rainforest rather than stripping it. He’s building on the three P’s — creating protected forest areas, improving productivity on lands that have already been cleared so farmers there will not need more, and establishing property rights for Amazonian lands, which are a legal mess, inviting Wild West land grabs and scaring off investors in sustainable agriculture.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Gov. Waldez Góes has already protected 75 percent of his state as rainforest and has enacted the laws and created a technical college to provide for sustainable logging and eco-tourism and for developing medicinal and cosmetic products from rainforest plants. But he needs funds to implement and monitor at scale and prove that “natural capitalism” can deliver more than the extractive version.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“I am the son of a rubber tapper,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the jungle, so even before becoming a politician I had a strong connection to nature.” The world is facing this relentless “development path that brings pollution and degradation and deforestation,” he added. He and other Brazilians want to prove you can do better by bringing “conservation and development together.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tropical forests represent some 5 percent of the earth’s surface but harbor 50 percent of all living species. Conservation International has a motto: “What is lost there is felt here.” If we lose what is left of the Amazon, we’ll all feel the climate effects, changing rainfall and loss of biodiversity that enriches our world. Brazil seems ready to do its part. Are we? What about you, China? </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-21169365287559079922009-11-15T16:27:00.003-06:002009-11-15T16:41:20.424-06:00Triumph of a Dreamer by Nicholas D. Kristof<span style="font-family:times new roman;">Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time you’re discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra: Tererai Trent.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps the most remarkable story belongs to Tererai (pronounced TEH-reh-rye), a middle-aged woman who is one of my heroes. She is celebrating a personal triumph, but she’s also a monument to the aid organizations and individuals who helped her. When you hear that foreign-aid groups just squander money or build dependency, remember that by all odds Tererai should be an illiterate, battered cattle-herd in Zimbabwe and instead — ah, but I’m getting ahead of my story.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tererai was born in a village in rural Zimbabwe, probably sometime in 1965, and attended elementary school for less than one year. Her father married her off when she was about 11 to a man who beat her regularly. She seemed destined to be one more squandered African asset.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A dozen years passed. Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called Heifer International, passed through the village and told the women there that they should stand up, nurture dreams, change their lives.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Inspired, Tererai scribbled down four absurd goals based on accomplishments she had vaguely heard of among famous Africans. She wrote that she wanted to study abroad, and to earn a B.A., a master’s and a doctorate.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tererai began to work for Heifer and several Christian organizations as a community organizer. She used the income to take correspondence courses, while saving every penny she could.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In 1998 she was accepted to Oklahoma State University, but she insisted on taking all five of her children with her rather than leave them with her husband. “I couldn’t abandon my kids,” she recalled. “I knew that they might end up getting married off.”</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tererai’s husband eventually agreed that she could take the children to America — as long as he went too. Heifer helped with the plane tickets, Tererai’s mother sold a cow, and neighbors sold goats to help raise money. With $4,000 in cash wrapped in a stocking and tied around her waist, Tererai set off for Oklahoma.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">An impossible dream had come true, but it soon looked like a nightmare. Tererai and her family had little money and lived in a ramshackle trailer, shivering and hungry. Her husband refused to do any housework — he was a man! — and coped by beating her.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“There was very little food,” she said. “The kids would come home from school, and they would be hungry.” Tererai found herself eating from trash cans, and she thought about quitting — but felt that doing so would let down other African women.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“I knew that I was getting an opportunity that other women were dying to get,” she recalled. So she struggled on, holding several jobs, taking every class she could, washing and scrubbing, enduring beatings, barely sleeping.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">At one point the university tried to expel Tererai for falling behind on tuition payments. A university official, Ron Beer, intervened on her behalf and rallied the faculty and community behind her with donations and support.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">“I saw that she had enormous talent,” Dr. Beer said. His church helped with food, Habitat for Humanity provided housing, and a friend at Wal-Mart carefully put expired fruits and vegetables in boxes beside the Dumpster and tipped her off.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Soon afterward, Tererai had her husband deported back to Zimbabwe for beating her, and she earned her B.A. — and started on her M.A. Then her husband returned, now frail and sick with a disease that turned out to be AIDS. Tererai tested negative for H.I.V., and then — feeling sorry for her husband — she took in her former tormentor and nursed him as he grew sicker and eventually died.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Through all this blur of pressures, Tererai excelled at school, pursuing a Ph.D at Western Michigan University and writing a dissertation on AIDS prevention in Africa even as she began working for Heifer as a program evaluator. On top of all that, she was remarried, to Mark Trent, a plant pathologist she had met at Oklahoma State.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Tererai is a reminder of the adage that talent is universal, while opportunity is not. There are still 75 million children who are not attending primary school around the world. We could educate them all for far less than the cost of the proposed military “surge” in Afghanistan.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Each time Tererai accomplished one of those goals that she had written long ago, she checked it off on that old, worn paper. Last month, she ticked off the very last goal, after successfully defending her dissertation. She’ll receive her Ph.D next month, and so a one-time impoverished cattle-herd from Zimbabwe with less than a year of elementary school education will don academic robes and become Dr. Tererai Trent. </span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-52511750807717672102009-11-15T15:32:00.003-06:002009-11-15T16:42:26.153-06:00The Evolution of the God Gene by Nicholas Wade<span style="font-family:times new roman;">In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">In natural selection, it is genes that enable their owners to leave more surviving progeny that become more common. The idea that natural selection can favor groups, instead of acting directly on individuals, is highly controversial. Though Darwin proposed the idea, the traditional view among biologists is that selection on individuals would stamp out altruistic behavior (the altruists who spent time helping others would leave fewer children of their own) far faster than group-level selection could favor it.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">But group selection has recently gained two powerful champions, the biologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, who argued that two special circumstances in recent human evolution would have given group selection much more of an edge than usual. One is the highly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, which makes everyone behave alike and gives individual altruists a better chance of passing on their genes. The other is intense warfare between groups, which enhances group-level selection in favor of community-benefiting behaviors such as altruism and religion.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">A propensity to learn the religion of one’s community became so firmly implanted in the human neural circuitry, according to this new view, that religion was retained when hunter-gatherers, starting from 15,000 years ago, began to settle in fixed communities. In the larger, hierarchical societies made possible by settled living, rulers co-opted religion as their source of authority. Roman emperors made themselves chief priest or even a living god, though most had the taste to wait till after death for deification. “Drat, I think I’m becoming a god!” Vespasian joked on his deathbed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Religion was also harnessed to vital practical tasks such as agriculture, which in the first societies to practice it required quite unaccustomed forms of labor and organization. Many religions bear traces of the spring and autumn festivals that helped get crops planted and harvested at the right time. Passover once marked the beginning of the barley festival; Easter, linked to the date of Passover, is a spring festival.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;color:#ff0000;">Could the evolutionary perspective on religion become the basis for some kind of detente between religion and science? Biologists and many atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles. Religion is often blamed for its spectacular excesses, whether in promoting persecution or warfare, but gets less credit for its staple function of patching up the moral fabric of society. But perhaps it doesn’t deserve either blame or credit. If religion is seen as a means of generating social cohesion, it is a society and its leaders that put that cohesion to good or bad ends.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-81877910482986176342009-11-14T07:02:00.000-06:002009-11-14T07:02:00.659-06:00Act II: Half Way Around the LHC (CERN)The LHC operations teams are preparing the machine for circulating beams and things are going very smoothly. ALICE and LHCb are getting used to observing particle tracks coming from the LHC beams. During the weekend of 7-8 November, CMS also saw its first signals from beams dumped just upstream of the experiment cavern.<br /><br /><div style="font-family: times new roman;" class="phlwithcaption"><div style="text-align: center;"> </div><div style="text-align: center;" class="imageScale"><img src="http://doc.cern.ch//archive/electronic/cern/others/PHO/photo-misc-com/bul/bul-pho-2009-109.jpg" style="width: 264px; height: 175px;" alt="" /></div> <p>Operators in the CMS control room observe the good performance of their detector.<span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Particles are smoothly making their way around the 27 km circumference of the LHC. Last weekend (7-8 November), the first bunches of injection energy protons completed their journey (anti-clockwise) through three octants of the LHC’s circumference and were dumped in a collimator just before entering the CMS cavern. The particles produced by the impact of the protons on the tertiary collimators (used to stop the beam) left their tracks in the calorimeters and the muon chambers of the experiment. The more delicate inner detectors were switched off for protection reasons.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Six of the eight sectors of the LHC have now been hardware commissioned to allow the passage of beams at 1.2 TeV. The remaining two (Sectors 3-4 and 8-1) will be powered up in the coming week.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times new roman;">If all goes well, in just over one week from now, the beams could circulate in both pipes of the LHC. The first low-energy collisions should follow shortly after.</span><br /></p> </div><br /><br /><object style="font-family: times new roman;" width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/LMo9f1aJs7s&hl=en_US&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/LMo9f1aJs7s&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-82178627187509091772009-11-13T19:05:00.004-06:002009-11-13T20:02:17.426-06:00PARADIGM SHIFTS IN SECURITY STRATEGY: Why Does It Take Disasters to Trigger Change? by Dominic D. P. Johnson and Elizabeth M. P. Madin<span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.<br />- Samuel Coleridge</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">.<br /><br />Prior to 9/11, U.S. counterterrorism policy and intelligence suffered from numerous problems. The striking feature about this is not the flaws themselves, but rather that these flaws were long appreciated and nothing was done to correct them. It took a massive disaster—3000 American deaths—to cough up the cash and motivation to address what was already by that time a longstanding threat of a major terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />A second striking feature is that this failure to adapt is no novelty. Pearl Harbor, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War were also belated wake up calls to adapt to what in each period had become major new challenges for the United States.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Just as the military is accused of “fighting the last war,” nations fail to adapt to novel security threats. The status quo persists until a significant number of lives or dollars are lost. Only at these times can we be sure that nations, institutions, and elected representatives will fully adapt to novel security threats. If we understand why this is so, we will be better able to avoid further disasters in the future.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />We suggest that it takes disasters to trigger change because (1) dangers that remain hypothetical fail to trigger appropriate sensory responses, (2) psychological biases serve to maintain the status quo, (3) dominant leaders entrench their own idiosyncratic policy preferences, (4) organizational behavior and bureaucratic processes resist change, and (5) electoral politics offers little incentive for expensive and disruptive preparation for unlikely and often invisible threats.</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">The Curse of the Status Quo</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Even a highly adaptable state might be able to prevent only 99 out of 100 disasters from happening. Such successes rarely make the news. By contrast, the 1% of disasters that do occur will be dramatic and visible and may therefore attract undue attention. Even so, the argument of this chapter is that human nature, and the nature of the institutions that humans create, exhibits a number of self-defeating phenomena that impede efficient adaptation to novel security threats, increasing the probability of periodic disasters. Indeed, under certain unfavorable conditions, we may be pathologically and institutionally unable to avoid disasters. This curse is sustained by a number of biases rooted in biology, psychology, advocacy, organizational behavior, and politics, all of which converge to preserve the status quo.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The same phenomenon is evident in everyday life. Accident prone highways, dangerous machinery, or hazardous flight paths are often not altered until after significant numbers of people are killed or injured, or significant financial losses are incurred. In one sense this is logical: since disasters are hard to predict, only cumulative data exposes whether the costs of occasional disasters outweigh the costs of change (Perrow 1999). However, this logic is often flawed or inapplicable for two reasons. First, the costs of dis- asters, if they are measured in human lives, may be unacceptable. We cannot simply wait to see if or how often they happen. Second, the costs of disasters, however they are measured, are often known beforehand to outweigh the costs of not acting, yet still nothing is done to prevent them.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />This phenomenon has parallels in other disciplines, including the history of science, epistemology, policy analysis, and economics, suggesting that it is a common denominator of human nature and human institutions, not something specific to a particular issue, culture, or context. For example, Thomas Kuhn described how scientific progress is characterized by lengthy periods of relative stasis where established models reign supreme, but that this status quo is punctuated by “paradigm shifts” that follow from exceptional findings such as those by Gallileo or Einstein (Kuhn 1970). Similarly, Michael Foucault argued that history itself does not proceed smoothly as a steady, linear continuum but is defined, rather, by moments of rupture that overturn prevailing systems of knowledge (Foucault 1970, 1977). Another example is the “punctuated equilibrium” theory in policy analysis, which describes how U.S. domestic policy follows periods of relative stasis during which decision processes and bureaucracies act to preserve a status quo, but this is punctuated by major periods of reform following the adoption of innovations, attention-riveting external events that grab government or public attention, and windows of opportunity when conducive factors coincide or when advocacy groups rise to prominence (Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002; Busenberg 2003). Finally, economics is famous for its quip that the field progresses only with each funeral.</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />PARADIGM SHIFTS IN SECURITY STRATEGY<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Individuals corroborate, advertise, and propagate their favored theories as they grow older and more powerful. Only when they are gone can fresh alternatives take solid root. The same is true of other disciplines and organizations.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />In many aspects of human endeavor, it appears that we fail to adapt to changing circumstances until there is a major event that wrenches us from established paradigms. We argue that this failure to adapt is, if anything, more likely in the domain of international politics than other domains because the ambiguity inherent in judgments of other cultures, ideologies, and motives allows false interpretations to prosper and persist at especially high levels (Johnson and Tierney 2006). We are, simply put, doomed to periodic foreign policy disasters.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">The good news is that research in biology, psychology, organizational behavior, and political science reveal systematic causes of this phenomenon, offering the opportunity to predict when and where it will occur, and ways to correct it in the future. Policy makers may therein find ways to improve national security as well as maximize public and congressional support. Before expanding on the biases at work, we outline a series of events that illustrate the failure to adapt to novel security threats: the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Examples of Disasters Triggering Change</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 is widely regarded as a colossal U.S. intelligence failure spanning the lowest to the highest levels of command (Iriye 1999; Kahn 1999). The striking thing is not that U.S. intelligence and strategic posture were inadequate, it is that they were known to be inadequate and yet failed to be changed. Although U.S. intelligence had no specific information or dates regarding the raid on Pearl Harbor, Japanese diplomatic codes had been broken, and a number of sources pointed to the likelihood of some kind of Japanese attack on the United States. It was the failure of the U.S. government to recognize the changing motives and intentions of the Japanese decision makers that led to a poor level of readiness in the U.S. Pacific Fleet. These inadequacies reflect a status quo bias in U.S. strategy toward Japan in the prewar period, summed up by historian of intelligence David Kahn (1999, 166):</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> American officials did not think Japan would attack their country. To start war with so superior a power would be to commit national hara-kiri [suicide]. To Western modes of thought, it made no sense. This rationalism was paralleled by a racism that led Americans to underrate Japanese abilities and will. Such views were held not only by common bigots but by opinion-makers as well. These preconceptions blocked out of American minds the possibility that Japan would attack an American possession. . . . An attack on Pearl Harbor was seen as all but excluded. Though senior army and navy officers knew that Japan had often started wars with surprise attacks, and though the naval air defense plan for Hawaii warned of a dawn assault, officials also knew that the base was the nation’s best defended and that the fleet had been stationed that far west not to attract, but to deter, Japan.<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br /><br />Having committed errors of planning and intelligence that heightened both the probability and severity of the Pearl Harbor attack, the shock and moral outrage following the “day of infamy” led to major changes in U.S. security strategy. The entire foundations of U.S. intelligence were uprooted. The National Security Act of 1947 established the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency, in large part to ensure the integration of military and diplomatic intelligence so that such a disaster could never befall the country again. The Pearl Harbor disaster was exacerbated by the status quo bias in U.S. policy, but the shock of the attack itself caused a paradigm shift in U.S. security strategy.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 also represented a massive failure of U.S. intelligence (Allison and Zelikow 1999). When Soviet SS-4 and SS-5 missile sites were discovered on the island in October 1962, it sparked a major diplomatic crisis and military standoff in which the superpowers came perilously close to war. “American leaders,” wrote Robert Jervis, “were taken by surprise in October 1962 because they thought it was clear to the Soviet Union that placing missiles in Cuba would not be tolerated” ( Jervis 1983, 28). The U.S. deterrence strategy, in other words, had failed. War was in the end averted through a negotiated agreement, but the popular memory of U.S. victory masks the significant concessions that the United States also made, and the brinkmanship that could so easily have resulted in war (Johnson and Tierney 2004). Khrushchev is widely regarded, by Soviet as well as western contemporaries and historians, as having taken an enormous risk in deploying mis- siles on Cuba (Lebow 1981; Fursenko and Naftali 1997). In the face of such extreme risk taking, U.S. deterrence was based on faulty premises. The crisis sparked significant changes in U.S. policy, including opening direct lines of communication between the White House and the Kremlin, and a major restructuring of chain of command authority in the U.S. military (including the President’s control over nuclear weapons). The Cuban Missile Crisis was exacerbated by the status quo bias in U.S. policy, but the shock of the crisis itself caused a paradigm shift in U.S. Cold War security strategy.</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />The Vietnam War also represented a failure of U.S. policy and intelligence. Policy suffered from the Cold War obsession with halting the spread of communism and failed to address the root cause of the insurgency as a war of national liberation (Gilbert 2002). Military strategy suffered because it sought to replicate traditional tactics of open combat. Intelligence suffered because it focused on conventional war metrics, such as body counts</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> and weapons captured, and only belatedly shifted to address the key elements of nationalist sentiment and counterinsurgency (Gartner 1997). The realities of guerilla war were widely understood after the experience of the British in Malaya (1948–1960) and the French in Vietnam (1946–1954), but this had little impact on U.S. policy. The U.S. leaders believed that the gradual escalation of American military power combined with coercive diplomacy, which seemed to have worked well in the past, would work just as well in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s press secretary, Bill Moyers, said after resigning in 1967 that in Johnson’s inner circle “there was a confidence, it was never bragged about, it was just there—a residue, perhaps of the confrontation over the missiles in Cuba—that when the chips were really down, the other people would fold” (Janis 1972, 120). It came as a major shock for the United States to lose a war for the first time in its history. Fol- lowing the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1973, and the fall of Saigon in 1975, the “Vietnam syndrome” made the U.S. public, Congress, and subsequent administrations especially wary of military intervention overseas (limiting the country to small-scale actions, such as in Grenada and Panama). When the next big confrontation did occur, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force and limited military objectives represented an enormous shift in strategy (Powell 1995). The Vietnam War was exacerbated by the status quo bias in U.S. policy, but the shock of defeat caused a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy with a legacy that survives to this day.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />This now familiar pattern repeated itself on September 11, 2001. As William Rosenau put it, “although some policymakers and analysts have tried, it is impossible to deny that the events of 11 September 2001 represented a massive failure of intelligence” (Rosenau 2007, 143). The 9/11 commission and other sources reveal that a major terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland was by no means unexpected (Simon and Benjamin 2000; 9/11 Commission 2004; Clarke 2004). Intelligence agencies and counterterrorism experts had long argued that al-Qaeda presented a growing and significant threat in the 1990s—indeed, major terrorist plots of the scale of 9/11 had already been averted—but U.S. policy makers failed to adapt to meet this new threat (Gell- man 2002; Rosenau 2007). In a replica of Pearl Harbor, the precise timing and method of attack was of course not predicted, but not preparing for an attack of this kind was the result of a huge intelligence failure. The structure and function of government agencies, as well as many key individuals, were stuck in a Cold War mindset, and had not adjusted adequately to the new threats of transnational terrorism. It took 9/11 to set in motion—too late of course—sweeping changes of government and intelligence organization that many had clamored for years to achieve (the U.S. Commission on National Security for the Twenty-first Century, for example, had warned of terrorist attacks on the United States in early 2001 and recommended the creation of a Department of Homeland Security). Today, “combating al-Qaida has</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">become the central organizing principle of U.S. national security policy” (Rosenau 2007, 134). Why did it take 9/11 to get it there?</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Common Patterns</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Although the examples above have much to distinguish them—different periods, locations, opponents, ideologies, geopolitics, and administrations— they nevertheless share common properties. In each event (1) the United States was faced with a novel threat, (2) the potential consequences of this threat were evident, and (3) the United States failed to adapt to this new threat.</span> Nor are these cases anomalies in an ocean of otherwise efficient adaptation; numerous other such cases throughout history could fill several volumes (see, e.g., Dixon 1976; Perlmutter 1978; Snyder 1984; Tuchman 1984; Gabriel 1986; Cohen and Gooch 1991; Regan 1993; Perry 1996; David 1997; Hughes-Wilson 1999). All sides in World War I expected the war to be short and victorious, despite copious evidence to the contrary, and only the carnage of the war itself brought the end of an era in military thinking and the establishment of the League of Nations (Snyder 1984). In the 1930s, the allies thought Hitler had limited goals, despite his accumulating gains, and the horrors of World War II led to the dismemberment of Germany, an open-ended commitment to U.S. military deployments overseas, and the establishment of the United Nations. Similarly, the U.S. reliance on the use of force as a tool of policy was significantly curtailed by the Presidential War Powers Act (triggered by the shock of defeat in Vietnam), and the Goldwater-Nicholls Department of Defense Reorganization Act (triggered by the failed Iranian hostage rescue attempt in 1980). The need for these changes was well appreciated long before they came about, but only major disasters actually made them happen.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />It is not only the United States that is subject to these failures. The same phenomenon is common in the history other nations. For example, the 1973 Yom Kippur War exposed a massive failure of Israeli intelligence. There were numerous warning signs of a joint Egyptian and Syrian attack that Israeli military and political leaders failed to acknowledge (Blum 2003; Rabinovich 2004). Following the hugely successful 1967 Six-Day War, and Israeli preconceptions of what it would take for the Arabs to fight Israel again, war was believed to be all but impossible. It took a full-scale invasion for Israel to reject these faulty beliefs. Following the war, Israel’s security and foreign policy shifted dramatically. Prime minister Golda Meir resigned along with much of her cabinet, and both the military chief of staff and the chief of intelligence were dismissed. Not only did Israelis tend to see the war as a disaster (even though they won a military victory on the ground), the Yom Kippur War paved the way to a peace process that Israel would never have considered prior to the war (Johnson and Tierney 2006).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />Relying on massive shocks to trigger change in security policy is bad for at least seven reasons. First, it increases the probability of disasters happening in the first place (because the victim fails to act to prevent them). Second, it increases the costs of disasters when they do happen (because the victim is unprepared). Third, it limits future policy options because Congress and/or public opinion disallow similar policies or ventures, even in unrelated contexts (e.g., the “no more Vietnams” rhetoric significantly constrained U.S. military power). Fourth, enemies perceive the victim as vulnerable and ill prepared, encouraging future exploitation or attacks (e.g., 9/11 proved that the U.S. homeland can be struck). Fifth, enemies and allies alike perceive that the victim’s deterrence pol- icy has failed, leading them to reconsider their own strategies (e.g., NATO allies were rattled by the Cuban Missile Crisis). Sixth, suffering a disaster compromises a state’s credibility, which can demote its effective influence in subsequent international relations (e.g., following the Vietnam war, communists in Southeast Asia could do what they wanted with- out fear of U.S. intervention, as exemplified by their take over of Cambodia and Laos in 1975). Seventh, the immediate consequences of the disaster give the opponent a first-mover advantage (e.g., the naval losses at Pearl Harbor meant the United States was unable to engage Japanese forces in the Pacific for several months, giving them free reign to conquer the Philippines, Malaya, Hong Kong, Thailand, and numerous Pacific islands, making the Pacific war harder for the United States once it was under way). Any or all of these seven factors can undermine a state’s immediate national security, its future influence and power, and the electoral success of its leaders.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Does It Always Take Disasters to Trigger Change?</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Our hypothesis is not that adaptation to novel security threats only ever occurs after major disasters, but rather that they often do. But perhaps the United States usually does, in fact, adapt appropriately to new security threats before disaster strikes, and the examples above are merely prominent exceptions to the norm. Further work is needed to provide a comprehensive test of these competing claims. Nevertheless, we offer here a minitest of our hypothesis, as a way of checking how universal the basic problem may be. In order to test the hypothesis that adaptation to novel security threats tends to occur after major disasters, we need an unbiased sample of case studies. For this purpose, we use a list of “watersheds” or turning points in U.S. security policy since World War II, a list that originated in the National Security Department of the U.S. Air War College and has been used in other studies since (True 2002). Table 13.1 lists these cases and, for each, tests the following predictions.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />TABLE 13.1. The Seven Post–World War II “Policy Watersheds” in U.S. Security Strategy and Their Conformity to, or Violation of, The Predictions of Our Hypothesis</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Truman Doctrine; Marshall Plan, 1947–1949 [Hogan 1998]</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Rearmament for U.S. containment policy, 1950–1953 [Hastings 1987]</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Kennedy defense buildup, 1961–1963 [Allison and Zelikow 1999]</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Precipitating Event</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Postwar Soviet influence in Europe</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Korean War</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Berlin and Cuban crises</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Disaster?</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (Iron Curtain falls; spread of communist insurgencies)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (South Korea invaded)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba; West Berlin threatened)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Predictions</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Unexpected?</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Partially (e.g., Truman doubted implications)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (as Dean Acheson assured Congress 5 days before the invasion)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (Kennedy surprised; deterrence strategy failed)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Unprepared?</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (massive U.S. policy goals took many years)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (U.S. troops unavailable to assist)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (no plans for a superpower crisis of this type)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Americanization, 1964–1968 [Kaiser 2000]</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Vietnamization, 1969–1973 [Wirtz 1991]</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Reagan defense buildup, 1979–1985 [Hayward 2001]</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Reordering of entire U.S. strategic posture, 1990–1991 [Gaddis 1988]</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Vietnam War</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Vietnam War</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Soviet invasion of Afghanistan</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Dissolution of the Soviet Union; Gulf War</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (communist expansion in Asia)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (Tet offensive in 1968; ultimate defeat)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (Soviet expansion)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Mixed (collapse of U.S.S.R.; Kuwait invaded)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">No (but the cost of the war was)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (Tet was a major intelligence failure; U.S. didn’t expect to lose war)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (full-scale invasion not expected)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (end of Cold War and invasion of Kuwait unexpected)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (badly aligned goals, methods and strategy)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (at Tet troops deployed in wrong places; war strategy misguided)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (realignment of budget and forces)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Yes (U.S. policy changed overnight; Kuwait undefended)</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">note: From True 2002. Conformity to predictions is indicated by plain text, and violation of predictions is indicated by boldface text.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">1. Disasters tend to precede major changes in security policy. 2. Disasters tend to be unexpected (confirming a failure to foresee it). 3. Disasters tend to be unprepared for (confirming a failure to plan for it).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />These predictions are tested against the null hypothesis that the seven policy watersheds resulted from events that were not disasters, and that the United States both expected and was prepared for—in other words, representing a rational, timely adaptation to shifting security threats.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />As is clear from Table 13.1, all seven policy watersheds followed dramatic disasters, none of which the United States expected, and for all of which the United States was unprepared. There are just three partial exceptions (boldface text): (1) Postwar Soviet influence in Europe was not entirely unexpected, although the United States and western European allies did not fully recognize Stalin’s wider goals until late in World War II. (2) The Vietnam War itself was not unexpected—the United States had already been escalating its commitment under two previous administrations (Eisenhower and Kennedy). Nevertheless, the fighting was far more costly than had been expected. Therefore, the Vietnam War was no less an unexpected disaster than any of the other cases. (3) The collapse of the Soviet Union was a disaster only for the U.S.S.R.; it was the opposite for the United States. However, associated events such as the invasion of Kuwait (along with the spread of civil conflicts in Europe, Asia, and Africa) were very much disasters.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Why Does It Take Disasters to Trigger Change?</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Although states rarely face extinction, their failure to adapt to novel security threats incurs significant costs in blood and treasure. With such a premium on effective adaptation, the pattern of repeated failure in human history begs the question: why does it take disasters to trigger change? It would surely be better to adapt to novel threats incrementally as they arise. Waiting for disasters to happen before adapting begets and worsens those disasters in the first place, and signals weakness to enemies and allies.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Three basic factors impede change. First, change is hard to assess—the consequences are unknown and disasters are rare. Second, change brings uncertainty—if the status quo has worked until now, why risk an uncertain outcome over a familiar one? Third, change entails costs—the reorganization or acquisition of extra resources adds weight to the argument to do nothing.</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Beyond these three basic factors, however, a failure to adapt is powerfully exacerbated by converging biological, psychological, organizational, and political phenomena, summarized in Figure 13.1 and explored in detail below.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Ideal Process: Direct Adaptation Over Time</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Actual Process: Impeded Adaptation Until There is a Disaster</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Figure 13.1 scheme of our hypothesis that adaptation to novel security threats tends to occur after major disasters. The causal mechanism is that key biases pre- serve the status quo and impede adaptation until there is a disaster.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Sensory Bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />A number of sensory and physiological biases predispose us to maintain the status quo and to avoid expending resources on threats outside our personal realm of experience (see also Blumstein, this volume). Humans have a biological predisposition to react to stimuli that reach our five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch), and not to stimuli that remain beyond our personal experience. The machinery of the brain does not fully react to something until we experience it in the flesh. This is unsurprising. Our sensory organs, cognitive architecture, and mental processing evolved in order to respond to real threats and opportunities in our immediate local environment, not to abstract, vague, distant, or hypothetical threats that happen else- where, or to others. Of course, our brain does generate vicarious emotional reactions to events that we observe or learn is happening to others, but not as powerfully as if we experience them for ourselves (Simonsohn et al. 2006). Such effects are evident in international relations as well. Decisions about military intervention were found to be influenced more by a state’s own experience than merely observing the experience of others (Levite et al. 1992). The United States, for example, was unperturbed about the French experience of war in Vietnam—Kennedy reminded a reporter, “That was the French. They were fighting for a colony, for an ignoble cause. We’re fighting for freedom” (Tuchman 1984, 287). Later on, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, citing French errors</span></span><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">and indecision in the conflict, noted wryly, “The French also tried to build the Panama Canal” (U.S. Department of Defense 1971, Vol. 3, 625).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Adaptation</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />More likely if disaster: •Deadly •Expensive •Dramatic</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />•Novel</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Novel Security Threat</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Sensory bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Disaster</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />More likely if state: •Undemocratic •Weak •Uninnovative •Inattentive</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Psychological bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Leadership bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Organizational bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Political bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Also very important is the general principle, across a wide range of psychological phenomena, that negative events and information are processed more thoroughly and have greater impact than positive events, and negative impressions and stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than positive ones (Baumeister et al. 2001). In terms of the effects of experience on human psychology, “bad is stronger than good.” In international politics as well, failure, as opposed to success, appears to have an intrinsic leverage: “People learn more from failure than from success . . . past success contributes to policy continuity whereas failure leads to policy change” (Levy 1994, 304). This appears to result from an interaction with expectations. “Outcomes that are consistent with expectations and achieve one’s goals generate few incentives for a change in beliefs, whereas unexpected results and those that fall short of one’s goals are more likely to trigger a change in beliefs and policy. Thus the most likely outcomes to trigger learning are failures that were either unexpected at the time or unpredictable in retrospect” (Levy 1994, 305). A classic study by Dan Reiter found that alliance behavior was most influenced by a state’s experience of success or failure in previous wars, and ignored actual cur- rent threats (Reiter 1996). States switched their policy only if it was deemed a failure in the past.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />In summary, we are most likely to react to a threat (1) if it reaches us through first-person experience (rather than via newspapers, radio, the Inter- net, or television), and (2) if it is a negative event (such as a disaster) rather than a positive one. It may therefore take a Pearl Harbor of 1941, a threat of nuclear holocaust as in 1962, defeat in war, or a 9/11 to surmount our sensory barriers, acknowledge major new threats, and goad us into action.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Psychological Bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />A number of psychological biases also predispose us to maintain the status quo and to avoid expending resources on threats outside our normal realm of perception. Perhaps most important is cognitive dissonance. Conflicting information must be resolved in order to generate a coherent interpretation, and cognitive dissonance tends to select, organize, or distort incoming information so that it matches our preferred or preexisting beliefs (Vertzberger 1990; Tetlock 1998; Sears et al. 2003; McDermott 2004). Even experts often discount potential problems due to the cognitive demands of complex events (Dorner 1996). For example, Irmtraud Gallhofer and Willem Saris found that despite at least seven distinct strategies being floated during the Cuban Missile Crisis executive committee meetings, decision makers tended to con- sider only two at a time (Gallhofer and Saris 1996).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />Experimental research in cognitive and motivational psychology reveals a vast array of biases that tend to preserve the status quo: deformation professionelle (a tendency to see things from the perspective of the conventions of one’s profession); the mere exposure effect (a preference for things that are more familiar); the availability heuristic (a tendency to make predictions that are based on perceived rather than actual salience); projection bias (a tendency to assume that others share similar beliefs to oneself); the band- wagon effect (a tendency to do or believe the same as others); false consensus effect (a tendency to expect others to agree with oneself); discounting (to prefer immediate over long-term payoffs); and, finally, the well-documented and pervasive effects of in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, groupthink, and overconfidence (Janis 1972; Jervis 1976; Kahneman et al. 1982; Vertzberger 1990; Tetlock 1998; Johnson 2004).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />Overconfidence appears to have a particular importance. We tend to hold positive illusions of our abilities, our control over events, and of the future, all of which lead to overconfidence about our vulnerability to risk, and therefore to discount the need for change (Johnson 2004). Positive illusions in U.S. decision making may account for the failure to deter Japan in 1941, the Soviet Union in 1962, and Saddam Hussein in 2003, among other cases. However, harking back to the importance of sensory biases, once personally involved in a disaster, optimistic illusions disappear. Psychologists found that Californians were overly optimistic about the risk of earthquakes until they lived through one (Burger and Palmer 1992). Yechiel Klar’s study of Israelis living with the threat of terrorist attacks found that people maintain positive illusions as long as threats are “hypothetical” and “psychologically unreal.” But, “when the group to which people belong is the target of some significant ongoing calamity, even when the participants themselves are currently not the direct victims, the unreality of the event dissolves and optimism (both absolute and comparative) decreases or vanishes altogether” (Klar et al. 2002, 216). Disasters serve to wake us up to reality. They are very effective at doing so, but, by definition, the wake up call comes too late.</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Leadership Bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Particular leaders and their ideas often compel us to maintain the status quo and to avoid expending resources on threats outside the accepted realm of attention. These individuals’ preferences can also become institutionalized such that they persist beyond their worth until, or sometimes even after, the original proponent falls from power, resigns, or dies. It has been a recurrent historical theme for leaders to derail their own intelligence services by favoring positive reports, punishing the bearers of bad news, setting different agencies in competition with each other, and interfering with the methods</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">and targets of information gathering (Handel 1989; Van Evera 2003). A recent example is the Bush administration’s use of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and the postwar challenges of Iraq in order to support their favored policy (Clark 2003; Jervis 2003; Fallows 2004; Woodward 2005). With such strong incentives to control information and policy, and to protect their political reputation, leaders can exert enormous impediments to effective adaptation.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Organizational Bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Numerous organizational biases also predispose us to maintain the status quo and to avoid expending resources on threats outside the realm of standard operating procedures. Bureaucratic procedures, vested interests, competition for promotions, sunk costs, access to the elite, and turf wars over budgets and responsibilities favor a rigid focus on past events and successes, and a rigid avoidance of rocking the boat to advocate some new and unproven revision of strategy (Kovacs 1997; Allison and Zelikow 1999; Van Evera 2003). An entire literature has built up around this principle (orga- nizational learning) and forms the classic “bureaucratic politics model” of decision making in political science—a default explanation for bizarre or failed policies (Allison and Zelikow 1999). Although organizational biases may create problems, these very characteristics are to some extent inten- tional: “Indeed, the value of institutions typically lies in their persistence or ‘stickiness,’ which allows actors to make plans, invest and organize their affairs around institutions and, in general, lends certainty and predictability to their interactions” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 5).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />At times, however, the costs will outweigh the benefits. Prior to 9/11, the machinery, professionals, and mindsets of the Cold War era still exerted a significant legacy. There was a “failure of imagination”—a dearth of lateral thinking or fresh ideas—in the intelligence community even though the threats of transnational terrorism were evident (Simon and Benjamin 2000; Rosenau 2007). In addition to the failures to actually plan for novel threats, Stephen Van Evera has laid out reasons why institutions have little incentive to self-criticize or evaluate their own performance at all (Van Evera 2003). The entire institutional environment is hostile to adaptation: “Myths, false propaganda, and anachronistic beliefs persist in the absence of strong evaluative institutions to test ideas against logic and evidence, weeding out those that fail” (Van Evera 2003, 163). The maintenance of bureaucracy itself can sometimes become an all engrossing task. When Donald Rumsfeld took over at the Pentagon, for example, he began issuing numerous white memos (“snowflakes”) around the Pentagon demanding information on who actu- ally does what and how they do it, until some people were spending more time answering snowflakes than doing normal work (Woodward 2005).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">A further problem with organizations is that the “sensors”—the people with their ears to the ground—are disjointed from the decision-making structure (in an interesting corollary to the sensory failures noted above). Leaders are sometimes the last to know about impending (or even actual) disasters. The middle managers or those below them are the ones who deal on an everyday basis with the outside world and are therefore more likely to detect novel threats, or to recognize that old methods are no longer appropriate. For example, when a minor flaw was found in the Pentium processor in 1994, Intel suffered half a billion dollars of damage in under six weeks. The fault caused a rounding error in division just once every nine billion times, however, this tiny flaw quickly became significant—the news spread rapidly on the Internet and was amplified by Intel’s new global prominence and identity. According to Intel CEO Andrew Grove, “I was one of the last to understand the implications of the Pentium crisis. It took a barrage of relentless criticism to make me realize that something had changed—and that we needed to adapt to the new environment” (Grove 1999, 22).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">This echoes the intelligence situation before 9/11 and the reaction of administration officials. CIA director George Tenet and terrorism expert Cofer Black say they could not have laid out the serious possibility of a major attack on U.S. soil any clearer to Condi Rice in a meeting in July 2001. “The only thing we didn’t do,” according to Black, “was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head” (Woodward 2005, 79). If the National Security Adviser is unreceptive to such an issue, then it is unlikely to win the President’s attention. The administration as a whole was simply not geared to respond to the growing threat of al-Qaeda (Gellman 2002; Clarke 2004). Even if they had been receptive, as one insider noted, “The U.S. government can only manage at the highest level a certain number of issues at one time—two or three. You can’t get to the principals on any other issue” (Gellman 2002).</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Organizational and bureaucratic impediments to security appear to be severe. Eventually, budgets or political obstacles get in the way. Richard Betts’s analysis of surprise attacks in international relations found that “most of the options available to the West for reducing vulnerability to surprise are limited by political or financial constraints” (Betts 1983, 311). Effective readiness against major threats was simply too expensive or complicated to maintain on a regular basis.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Political Bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Electoral politics also predispose us to maintain the status quo and to discount genuinely important threats in favor of politically salient ones. There is no reason to expect efficient adaptation (or sometimes any adaptation at all) to address the most important national security threats. What is</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">threatening in secret intelligence reports is irrelevant to an oblivious public— or rather, an oblivious electorate. Politics provides numerous alternative motivations for individual leaders, political parties, lobby groups, and the public to steer policy and incentives in their own preferred direction, often to the detriment of adaptation to national security threats. The reality of politics means that radical shifts in policy, especially toward a novel hypo- thetical threat (about which the key intelligence information may be known only to elites) are often indefensible in Congress, hard to obtain the necessary budget to initiate or complete, and politically suicidal. There are few points to be scored (or as many to lose) in pushing for rapid or comprehensive change, for admitting mistakes, or for adapting. As long as the threat is at least four years away, or can be blamed on extraneous causes or opposing political parties, other concerns are likely to take precedence.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Incumbency is an important component of this problem. A high turnover of civil servants or politicians allows for continual and gradual adaptation to changing circumstances over time. By contrast, a low turnover reduces the ability and inclination to adapt, gradually bottling up problems until the whole system collapses under the pressure of a major disaster. In the U.S. government, a number of factors operate to empower incumbents and entrench particular elites and procedures. Disasters may be particularly effective at bringing down an incumbent regime, whose failings—real or perceived—often become a central motivation and electoral strategy for opposition parties or congressional inquisitions.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">To summarize this section, numerous features of human nature and the nature of institutions that humans create limit our ability to detect and react appropriately to novel security threats. Because these features stem from independent sources at different levels of analysis (e.g., individual behavior, organizational behavior, elite decision making, etc.), they are likely to generate a status quo bias across a wide range of circumstances. For example, even a forward-looking bureaucracy may have to work against a short sighted leadership, or vice versa. To put it bluntly, society seems pre- disposed to preserve the status quo until something goes wrong. As Henry Petroski noted in his book Success through Failure, “Good design always takes failure into account and strives to minimize it. But designers are human beings first and as such are individually and collectively subject to all the failings of the species, including complacency, overconfidence, and unwar- ranted optimism” (Petroski 2006, 193–194).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />When Are Disasters More or Less Likely to Trigger Change?</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />When are states more likely to suffer disasters? And what types of disasters are more or less likely to generate appropriate and lasting change? In other words, what are broad-brush circumstances (or “independent variables”)</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">that work to exacerbate or suppress the biases we have noted above? Such sources of variation are crucial to future tests of our hypothesis. But they also have practical significance: if we can get a handle on the basic conditions that make disasters more or less likely, we can attempt to steer our behavior and institutions toward those conditions that reduce the probability of being the victim of disaster. Below we consider characteristics (of both states and disasters) that are most and least likely to cause adaptation to novel security threats.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Characteristics of States That Promote Adaptation</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Democracy. Democracies promote journalistic inquiry, congressional review, opposition criticism, and the regular turnover of political representatives. By contrast, authoritarian regimes deter or silence messengers of bad news and favor long-term incumbents. Hitler’s generals, for example, rarely told him the truth about the impending disasters such as at Stalingrad (Handel 1989; Beevor 1998). The influence of democracy is a matter of degree, however, rather than just a binary distinction between democracy and tyranny. For example, the Bush administration’s handling of intelligence prior to the Iraq War served to undermine the Washington system of checks and balances, handing the authority to wage war to the President— exactly what the founding fathers designed the U.S. government to avoid (Fisher 2003).</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Power. Powerful states can create expensive and extensive intelligence agencies, equipment, and personnel. By contrast, weak states are more likely to be constrained by the resources they have to detect, prepare for, and react to disaster. Of course, 9/11 and many other examples given above demonstrate that even massive amounts of resources available to powerful states such as the United States do not solve the problem. Power must be applied effectively. Nevertheless, on average, more powerful states should be more likely to achieve effective adaptation.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Innovation. Security strategies adapt more effectively in a more innovative culture. For example, Germany and Britain were far more innovative in developing their military strategies and tactics than the French in the interwar period, and this directly led to differential combat outcomes in World War II (Posen 1984).</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Attention. When a state is focused and committed to dealing with a potential threat, it has a much higher chance of adapting to meet it. By contrast, when a state is mired in serious domestic or international crises, it is far less likely to detect or respond appropriately to novel threats.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Characteristics of Disasters That Promote Adaptation</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Deadly. High numbers of casualties, especially civilians. Expensive. High levels of damage (or lost opportunity). Dramatic. Symbolic or salient targets. Novel. Not just a big version of an existing threat.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Can Change Occur without Disaster?</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Our hypothesis is that adaptation to novel security threats tends to occur after major disasters. Like any hypothesis, this does not mean that policy changes only ever occur following major disasters. We only suggest that it may be more commonly the case than the other way around. But there are likely to be exceptions. Indeed, our discussion above sets out explicit conditions under which we may expect major policy change to occur without disaster—powerful, democratic states that are innovative and attentive, especially ones with minimal biases in their psychology, organizational behavior, leadership, and politics. Therefore, not only do we expect there will be exceptions, but we propose specific variables that will characterize these exceptions. Future studies could test this hypothesis with, for exam- ple, matched pairs of otherwise similar cases: one that adapted successfully, and one that did not.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />One can think of a number of potential counterexamples in which security strategy changed significantly without any disaster. For example, people often cite the remarkable lack of a disaster following the break up of the Soviet Union and the democratization of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, it is important to realize that this is a distinctly western perspective. From the perspective of the U.S.S.R., it was the biggest disaster of its history—indeed, it signaled its own extinction. Even from a western perspective, though, the lack of disaster may be misleading: the new security environment represented the collapse of a formidable enemy, followed by a power vacuum, not the emergence of a new threat per se. There was no agent to bring disaster (barring a renegade general with Soviet nuclear missiles, or something along those lines). Similar problems arise with many other prominent examples of major security changes that appeared to escape disaster: the fall of the British Empire, the reunification of Germany, the nuclear armament of India and Pakistan. Such cases deserve further scrutiny in the context of our hypothesis.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />It is easier to think of counterexamples that do not reside in the realm of security. For example, numerous social, economic, and technological trans- formations occur without disaster, ranging from awarding women the right to vote, to the introduction of the Euro, to the space race. One could also argue that major environmental efforts are underway to avert the looming</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">disaster of global climate change (as evidenced by such forward thinking as the Stern Review). However, it is not at all clear that anywhere near enough is actually being done, whatever the proposals and plans.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Perhaps, then, there is something special about the domain of security that links change and disaster. After all, lapses in security are almost by definition associated with violence, death, and destruction, so security disasters may be more dramatic, more visible, and more likely to compel policy makers and organizations to change.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);">Even if adaptation is rare in the domain of security, future studies can identify cases where adaptation was more successful than others. One example might be the Malaya Emergency of 1948–1960 (see Johnson and J. Madin, this volume). In that conflict, the British and Malayan counterinsurgency forces revealed themselves as organizations able to learn and adapt—though tellingly this occurred through a series of disasters. According to a recent survey, “one of the things that allowed the British army to innovate and adapt during its counterinsurgency operations in Malaya in the 1950s (and thus attain success) was its willingness at all levels to admit failure” (Metz and Millen 2004, 26; Nagl 2002). The key comparison may therefore be between states that do learn from disasters, and states that do not learn even from disasters. On that note, we now turn to possible solutions to minimize the likelihood of disasters.</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Solutions</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The bright side of this story is that the reasons for our failure to adapt are systematic, not random. Empirical evidence from cognitive and social psychology offers a taxonomy of causes and consequences of key biases (reviewed in Jervis 1976; Tetlock 1998; Sears et al. 2003; Van Evera 2003). We therefore have scientific tools to identify when, where, and why we fail to adapt to new threats, who is most susceptible, and how to make corrections to compensate (or even overcorrections as insurance policies against these biases). It is likely, however, to be a difficult task—we are often bliss- fully unaware of these biases in the first place, and that is precisely why we fall prey to their influence. Moreover, solutions require us to look beyond our typical experience and plan for things that seem unlikely and far- fetched—hardly things that motivate urgent action. Nevertheless, a careful study of causes and consequences can, in principle, help to design institutions and decision-making procedures that will improve adaptation to novel security threats.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Some of the problems outlined above are already well recognized by the policy community. Indeed, many of the key problems are already being addressed by the post-9/11 reorganization of the intelligence services. For example, the U.S. National Intelligence Council was set up to look ahead at</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">emerging threats that remain “over the horizon.” Other changes include more scenario-based planning exercises, more “red teaming” (role-playing the enemy), and recruiting lateral and imaginative thinkers such as the novelist Tom Clancy to think through possible future threats. However, reforms may be more successful if they exploit the scientific insights emerging from biology and psychology. If history is any guide, the same mistakes will be repeated unless we try something new. We need innovative solutions if we are to escape the recurrent failures of imagination that litter the past so liberally. We discuss a number of potential solutions below.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Lessons from Evolutionary Biology</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The best model of successful adaptation to changing security threats may lie in evolutionary biology, where adaptation is the core process underlying billions of years and millions of examples of survivors. Adaptive processes in nature are magnificently diverse, fine tuned over countless generations of trial and error, and well documented. In his analysis of security insights from biological evolution, Vermeij (this volume) notes seven key strategies that can be employed in the face of novel security threats: tolerance, active engagement, increase in power or lifespan, unpredictable behavior, quarantine and starvation of the threatening agent, redundancy, and adaptability. He finds that “the most successful attributes of life’s organization—redundancy, flexibility, and diffuse control—are also the characteristics of human social, economic, and political structure that are best suited to cope with unpredictable challenges.” We list Vermeij’s conclusions in Table 13.2, along with some suggested applications to security.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Vermeij’s key insight is that adaptations to everyday threats often also turn out to be effective adaptations to unpredictable threats. The owners of these serendipitous adaptations will be more likely to avoid or withstand rare and unpredictable disasters. As Vermeij puts it, a trait that enabled an organism to “endure the extraordinary conditions prevalent during times of mass extinction cannot be considered an adaptation to those circumstances but is instead an accidental if welcome consequence of adaptation to more commonplace phenomena” (Vermeij, this volume). There are numerous examples in human history in which commonplace adaptations were used to deal with novel threats. For example, when Soviet tanks escort- ing convoys in Afghanistan discovered they could not elevate their guns high enough to engage hostile forces high on the mountainsides, the Soviet Army resorted to using self-propelled anti-aircraft artillery instead (Beckett 2001). States that accumulate diverse and flexible technologies, practices, or institutions over time are more likely to be able to fall back on a broader range of alternatives in unusual circumstances.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Lessons</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />There will always be unpredictable threats, and no adaptations to them can ever be perfect.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Adaptation to threats comes with costs and constraints.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Passive resistance, though highly effective, is inconsistent with activity and the exercise of power and by itself is not an acceptable option for most human societies.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Exclusively active engagement exposes entities to ecological collapse engendered by interruptions in resource supplies and, therefore, by itself is an unreliable long-term strategy.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Redundancy and a modular structure of semiautonomous parts under weak central control provide the most flexible, adaptable, and reliable means of making unpredictable challenges predictable.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The history of life in general, and of extinction in particular, shows that adaptation to everyday as well as unpredictable circumstances has improved over the course of time.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Lessons from the Immune System</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Application</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />We should expect ongoing arms races rather than perfect solutions.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Even imperfect adaptations lead to improved strategies.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Adaptation may be costly, but stasis may be worse.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Adaptation must be allocated rolling budgets (not one-off lump sums). Proactive strategies are essential if a</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> state wants to play other</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> international roles. U.S. isolationism is inconsistent with its</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> defense. Unlimited commitment to active</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> engagement is risky and may be counterproductive.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Policy making, military, and intelligence resources should be decentralized, granted independence, and have back-up systems.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Adaptations that can be co-opted to alternative uses offer dual protection against commonplace and unpredictable threats.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">TABLE 13.2. Vermeij’s Lessons from the History of How Biological Organisms Evolved to Deal with Unpredictable Threats in Nature (Vermeij, this Volume), and Some Possible Applications to Security<br /><br />Policy Derived from Our Study</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Immune systems also offer intriguing models for human security. They are especially interesting because of their efficiency, lying low in normal times but wielding an extraordinary capacity for an enormous surge in response to a threat. As Villarreal (this volume) writes, “Biological systems are inherently local, rapid, robust and adaptable systems. They are able to rapidly</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">marshal all the needed diverse and central resources, but inherently reduce resource consumption when no longer needed. They are capable of search- ing for, finding, destroying, and sterilizing threats, both hidden and apparent. They are even able to respond to threats never before seen.” The prominence of immune responses in nature attests to the advantages of flexibility and adaptability in the face of novel threats. However, the immunity model presents an additional point: locally focused responses may be far more adept at contending with new threats than those requiring central control or approval. This has potential implications for security strategy in human systems; central command and control structures are often less able to detect, understand, and respond adequately to new threats than local organizations in direct and immediate contact with the threat. Interestingly, there are cases in which the immune system can overreact, drain significant resources, and become dangerous to the organism itself. This also has parallels in human security, in which perceived threats can initiate overblown and costly responses (Mueller 2005; Blumstein, this volume).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Lessons from Institutional Design</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Institutions and organizations could be redesigned to hard wire mechanisms for effective adaptation, just as DNA and the process of natural selection assure adaptation in biology. A recent study by Viola and Snidal (2006) argues that evolutionary mechanisms offer a “potentially powerful way to account for the persistence, adaptation, and abandonment of international institutions” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 3). Although current international institutions exhibit many features that arose by design, they also exhibit many other features that arose from a process of “decentralized emergence” over time, without conscious planning. For example, norms of sovereignty, diplomacy, and customary international law arose largely “from the on-going practices of states” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 1). Ideally, institutions would include such organic attributes in order to “adapt and respond to unanticipated elements in their environment” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 4). Designers could identify how these processes of adaptation occur, the conditions under which they are successful, and ways to exploit them. Of course, adaptability often already exists: some degree of flexibility is granted in most organizations, decisions may be delegated to lower level units, and mechanisms are often in place to seek and respond to feedback. Nevertheless, an evolutionary approach may help to identify successful adaptive processes, their likely causes, and their likely consequences.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />In addition, the methods and quantitative tools developed in biology to study adaptation may prove useful in understanding the adaptation of human institutions as well. Viola and Snidal note that “it is unlikely that institutions would develop without growing in some way out of the previous institutions,” and “in a given issue area it is common to see institutions with</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">family resemblances” (Viola and Snidal 2006, 8). These echo the notions of common ancestry and evolutionary legacy central to evolutionary biology, for which there are well-developed statistical methods to test for evidence of adaptation, correlations with associated traits, and points of divergence, all while controlling for characteristics shared by common ancestry.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />In a fast-moving world of rapid communication, some have argued that even forward planning is no longer the best strategy to prepare for the future. Instead, organizations can be structured to be automatically adapt- able and flexible by nature, so that the system is self-geared to adapt and exploit change as it happens (Brown and Eisenhardt 1998). This violates many traditional views of organizational design, but at least one prominent firm is based on this kind of unstructured system: Google (Lashinsky 2006). Google actively promotes innovation and experimentation through the independence of its subunits and workers. One strategy is encouraging its engineers to spend one day a week working on pet projects and submit- ting new ideas for product development to the Google “ideas list” (Elgin 2005). This list is monitored by the upper levels of management (as opposed to first passing through multiple middle levels) and screened for highly innovative and potentially investment-worthy ideas.</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Finally, even if an organization itself cannot easily be restructured, incen- tive structures can be created within it (via financial, budgetary, or professional rewards) to encourage flexibility, adaptation, and review instead of rigidity, policy stasis, and nonevaluation.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Lessons from the Insurance Industry</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />In order to remain financially viable, insurance companies must be able to either predict or build in buffers against novel catastrophes. The insurance industry thus provides another interesting model for contending with future threats—both known and unknown. In a sense, these companies provide a form of “preadaptation” to novel threats—a guarantee of being able to rebuild following damage. Although it is inherently costly, adopting insurance strategies can provide the necessary buffers against occasional disasters. Although the disasters themselves may not be possible to avoid, their negative consequences can be mitigated. However, it is important to recognize that insurance companies have the luxury of passing on these costs to their clients; government agencies do not.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Lessons from Futures Markets</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; color: rgb(255, 0, 0);"><br /><br />If humans are bad at detecting novel threats, an alternative is to maximize the number of individuals contributing to assessment. It is a well- recognized phenomenon that the average of a large number of estimates can be extremely accurate—the so called “wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki 2004). As long as the group is diverse, independent, and decentralized, then individual biases will cancel each other out, leaving available information from a wide range of sources to converge on the correct assessment. For exactly this reason, even expert analyses by intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, may be expected to be inaccurate, because they are not diverse (analysts are all Americans), not independent (analysts share methods, sources, and information), and not decentralized (they work for the same organization). By contrast, an ideal assessment would include opinions from across the globe, including the full spectrum of ideological, cultural, and political differences, and exploiting multiple sources of local information. This has direct practical applications. Harnessing this phenomenon and using it for predictions can be achieved by the use of “futures markets,” in which one buys a contract that will pay, say, $10 if a given event occurs by a certain date. The market price of these futures contracts then reveals a probability that the event will happen (Leigh et al. 2003). For example, on February 14, 2003, the price of $10 futures on Saddam Hussein no longer being president of Iraq on June 30 were trading at $7.50 on tradesports.com, suggesting the probability of war was 0.75.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />The Pentagon proposed a “Policy Analysis Market” to exploit the opportunities of futures prediction in 2003. The idea was to use futures markets to evaluate growth, political stability, and military activity in eight nations, four times a year. The project swiftly attracted the misnomer of “terrorism futures” and was scrapped by nervous politicians— yet another example of institutional bias working against innovation. Nevertheless, a number of political futures markets do exist on commercial web sites. One can bet, for example, on the likelihood of U.S. military action against North Korea, air strikes against Iran, or the capture of Osama bin Laden. If these futures markets can be expanded, they may well outperform expert assessments of the likelihood of important events in national security, bypassing the impediments and biases to adaptation outlined above.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Conclusions</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />If humans, institutions, and states were rational, security policy would change in step with the shifting threats of the day. Our examples of Pearl Harbor, Cuba, Vietnam, and 9/11 indicate that this logic is often violated, and the United States failed to adapt to novel security threats until they caused a major disaster. Our mini case study suggests that these examples are not unusual (Table 13.1). On the contrary, all seven U.S. security policy “watersheds” since World War II were initiated by major disasters, which the United States neither expected nor prepared for. This is further supported by the fact that the U.S. defense budget has not changed in line with shifting</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">threats but rather as significant step-changes after major international events (True 2002). Adaptation to novel security threats is most likely to occur when a state suffers a major disaster—especially among states that are democratic, powerful, innovative, and attentive, and especially if the disaster is deadly, expensive, dramatic, and novel. In other, “normal” times, adaptation to novel security threats is severely impeded because (1) dangers that remain hypothetical fail to trigger appropriate sensory responses, (2) psychological biases serve to maintain the status quo, (3) dominant leaders entrench their own idiosyncratic policy preferences, (4) organizational behavior and bureaucratic processes resist change, and (5) electoral politics offers little incentive for expensive and disruptive preparation for unlikely and often invisible threats. The sudden disasters that break intervening periods of stasis are analogous to the paradigm shifts that Thomas Kuhn (1970) noted in the progress of science, and the punctuated equilibrium theory that Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993, 2002) proposed to explain the dynamics of U.S. policy making.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Even when adaptations do follow disasters, they often turn out to be short-lived. Soon enough the powerful impediments to change, whether psychological, organizational, or political, come to the fore. The human brain tends to cast our perception of past events in an overly positive light (Greenwald 1980; Schacter 1995). Even after the unprecedented carnage of World War I, for example, John Stoessinger noted that the “old people to whom I spoke about the war remembered its outbreak as a time of glory and rejoicing. Distance had romanticized their memories, muted the anguish, and subdued the horror” (Stoessinger 1998, xii). Organizations and soci- eties also work to downplay failure and construct myths that deflect blame and reinterpret history (Van Evera 1998; Schivelbusch 2004; Johnson and Tierney 2006). For example, German society embraced the myth after World War I that the army was undefeated on the battlefield and had been stabbed in the back by politicians. Meanwhile, political elites go through the motions, creating the image of change without any intention of bearing its real costs, or doing just enough to tick the boxes in the eyes of Congress or the public. Even with 9/11, for example, the disaster appears to have paled enough into the past that essential reforms have fallen far below the recommendations of the 9/11 commission (9/11 Public Discourse Project 2005). A similar process occurred after the bombing of the London Underground: “The atrocities of July 7th 2005 turn out to have been the kind of alarm call that is followed by intemperate grunts and a collective reaching for the snooze button” (Economist 2006). It is noticeable that political, media, and public attention has already strayed from terrorism and the war on terror in favor of a new sensory-rich disaster on which everyone is focused: Iraq.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Fortunately, cumulative major disasters such as 9/11 usually generate a kind of ratchet effect, such that even after the initial impact wears off, we</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">are still left with some, perhaps imperfect, novel adaptations (e.g., improved airport security, or the U.K. Civil Contingencies Secretariat to “prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies,” see www.ukre- silience.info). It is often noted that in Chinese, the word for “crisis” includes the notion of opportunity as well as danger. If humans are not good at avoiding disasters, we should at least learn to react to them in ways that best utilize the opportunity for change. Cumulative change can be maximized even if it is frustratingly imperfect.</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">TABLE 13.3. Policy Prescriptions to Maximize Effective Adaptation in Each of the Key Problem Areas</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Policy Prescriptions</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Ensure decision makers see frontline personnel and victims</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Ensure decision makers hear opposing viewpoints Ensure decision makers travel to places at issue<br />Increase diversity and sources of information Increase turnover in appointees and decision </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">making groups<br />Install high-level devil’s advocates in policy</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> discussions<br />Limit power<br />Limit terms of office<br />Insist on periodic reevaluation of existing policies<br />Encourage “bottom-up” development and</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> communication of ideas (Google model)<br />Solicit recurring internal and external review<br />Create incentives for continual change Increase public information (so that electorate and</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> government see the same threats)<br />Increase congressional oversight of security policy<br />Reduce campaign financing and duration</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Sensory bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Psychological bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Leadership bias Organizational bias</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br />Political bias</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Democratic, powerful, innovative, and attentive states may have the best chance of avoiding security disasters. But whether a state meets these con- ditions or not, there are a number of policy prescriptions that could improve effective adaptation to novel security threats (Table 13.3). Future studies will be able to improve, expand, and test these ideas, and there is clearly a wealth of models from which to derive effective tricks of adapta- tion, including evolutionary biology, the immune system, institutional design, futures markets, and insurance.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Although there is room for improvement, history suggests that humans need disasters to occur before waking up to novel security threats, whether they are disasters of national security, disease, starvation, poverty, or</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">environmental change. This does not bode well for the future. Even when a threat poses a clear and present danger, such as global climate change, political actors do almost nothing to adapt to the threat until it is too late. As a recent New Scientist editorial recognized (New Scientist 2006): “The world will one day act with urgency to curb greenhouse gases: the likely violence of the atmosphere’s reaction to our emissions makes that inevitable. Climate change awaits its 9/11.”</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Hypothesis and Predictions</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />HYPOTHESIS Adaptation to novel security threats tends to occur after major disasters.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />PREDICTIONS Disasters tend to precede major changes in security policy.</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br />Disasters tend to be unexpected (confirming a failure to foresee it). Disasters tend to be unprepared for (confirming a failure to plan for it).</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"><br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">We thank Rafe Sagarin and Terence Taylor for their ideas, advice, criticism, and invitation to join the Working Group on Ecological and Evolu- tionary Models for Homeland Security Strategy; and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for hosting us. Dominic Johnson is indebted to the Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellowship, the Interna- tional Institute at UCLA, and the Society of Fellows and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Elizabeth Madin would like to thank the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Steve Gaines. 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New York: Simon and</span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Schuster.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-33551977798228770272009-11-12T22:19:00.000-06:002009-11-13T20:25:51.533-06:00AMES Scientist Develops Cell Phone Chemical Sensor (NASA)<span style="font-family: times new roman;">Jing Li, a physical scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., along with other researchers working under the Cell-All program in the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, developed a proof of concept of new technology that would bring compact, low-cost, low-power, high-speed nanosensor-based chemical sensing capabilities to cell phones.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;">The device Li developed is about the size of a postage stamp and is designed to be plugged in to an iPhone to collect, process and transmit sensor data. The new device is able to detect and identify low concentrations of airborne ammonia, chlorine gas and methane. The device senses chemicals in the air using a "sample jet" and a multiple-channel silicon-based sensing chip, which consists of 16 nanosensors, and sends detection data to another phone or a computer via telephone communication network or Wi-Fi.<br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"><br />The latest-generation of the chemical detector board, about the size of a postage stamp, sensing chip facing down.</span><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"><a href="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/images/content/399277main_cell_phone_sensor3_full.jpg" title="chemical detector board"><img alt="chemical detector board" title="chemical detector board" src="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/images/content/399278main1_cell_phone_sensor3_226.jpg" align="Bottom" border="0" width="226" height="170" /></a></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"><br />The latest-generation of the chemical detector board, about the size of a postage stamp, sensing chip facing up.</span><br /></div><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"><a href="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/images/content/399279main_cell_phone_sensor4_full.jpg" title="iPhone with chemical detecting sensor"><img alt="iPhone with chemical detecting sensor" title="iPhone with chemical detecting sensor" src="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/images/content/399280main1_cell_phone_sensor4_226.jpg" align="Bottom" border="0" width="226" height="170" /></a></span><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"></span><span style="font-family: times new roman;" class="img_comments_right"><br />The chemical sensing prototype plugged into an iPhone 30-pin dock connector with the display-side up.</span><br /> <!-- Credits starts --><!-- Credits ends --><!-- Body ends --><!--Related Content Starts Here --><!--Related Content Ends Here -->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6928327.post-26397463463373204992009-11-12T13:30:00.000-06:002009-11-12T15:32:52.218-06:00The Afghanistan Conundrum: How to Proceed When Both Sides Are Right? by Douglas Farah<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl W. Ikenberry has reportedly raised serious concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan because of the unreliability of the Karzai government.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Others in the Pentagon and Obama administration feel strongly that nothing can be won on the ground until there are enough troops to do the job properly, if the mission is defined as remaking Afghanistan. They also argue (rightly, I believe) that if Afghanistan were again controlled by the Taliban, al Qaeda would have a safe haven of operation that we would rue, and a public relations and psychological victory that would help revive their cause.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The problem is that both sides are right. I am not an Afghanistan expert, but I have spent years in war zones where the government is viewed as corrupt and illegitimate (including the drug wars in Colombia, and the 1980s conflicts in El Salvador, Nicaragua and then, West Africa). Without state legitimacy there is no way one can create conditions on the ground for that government to take ownership of any sort of popularly supported programs.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The Karzai government, with its top-down corruption, disdain for action and embrace of massive fraud in an electoral process, appear to embody the worst of all the elements that drive people to take up guns in the first place.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Yet without the necessary resources, the war is lost and the most brutal option available -- hardliners who feel they have achieved the right to govern through military victory -- takes root. The Taliban in their earlier incarnation showed this. Either outcome leaves the U.S. vital interests damaged and the Afghanistan people thrown to the predatory wolves of either side.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">The only real option (and it seems to be something Obama personally is asking about and thinking about) is to bypass the central government. A tribal/regional focus, as was initially done in Iraq, is the only way to stand up a fighting force against the Taliban while having a shot a helping to nurture local political and economic progress that brings some sense of legitimacy to the tribal leadership.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Once the security is established, one can move on the education fronts, economic fronts and all the other myriad issues that must be addressed. The draw back is that many of these tribal and sub-tribal groups are extremely conservative and do not share a vision of anything like a society in which women are equals, the education of girls is valued, and the rule of law (rather than the rule of the leader) is valued.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Such a path will also reinforce the tendencies in the nation toward separation and division, rather than create movement toward a unified country under a central government. But until that government is willing to give people something worth fighting for, their legitimacy won't be recognized anyway. The central government, to most in Afghanistan, is an alien and predatory force that has no positive relationship to their lives, and may have many negatives.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Clearly there are no good or easy answers. It seems to me that the local option is by the most viable in the short term. In the longer term, clearly issues of nationhood must be addressed. But Afghanistan won't get there with this government. It is too rotten, too corrupted and too illegitimate to bring anyone into the fold. Bypassing it to work with local leaders, with all the risks, is a better option.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00506714149072946748noreply@blogger.com0