The Human Terrain System had been sold to the Army as a means of providing cultural knowledge to battlefield commanders. But as I watched the trainees interview residents near the Kansas-Missouri border, it became clear that whatever information they would be providing did not stem from any special knowledge of Iraqi or Afghan culture. Instead of offering cultural expertise, the Human Terrain System was training recruits to parachute into places they’d never been, gather information as quickly as possible, and translate it into something that might be useful to a military commander. One of the few Human Terrain social scientists I met with relevant experience, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology who had done his dissertation fieldwork in Afghanistan, would describe his Human Terrain work as “windshield ethnography.”
As infrastructure deteriorates throughout the region, deadly contagions are a new cause for concern, writes scientist.
Peter Hotez, MD, PhD, is Dean, National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, President, Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and Fellow in Disease and Poverty, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.
Recent conflicts in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East may have sufficiently destabilised national and international public health control measures to a point where several tropical diseases have either emerged and are sickening large populations in the region.
The most dramatic example is currently happening in Syria, where cutaneous leishmaniasis, a disfiguring parasitic skin disease transmitted by sandflies and also known as “Aleppo Evil”, is now affecting tens of thousands of innocent civilians both within the country and among refugees fleeing across the border to Lebanon or Turkey. But this disease is also flourishing in Afghanistan, Algeria, and Iraq where breakdowns in public health have allowed sandflies to breed and transmit disease.
Several mosquito-transmitted virus infections have also become important public health problems in the region. According to recent estimates 6 million cases of dengue fever occurred in Egypt in 2010 – more than 7 percent of that country’s population, while almost 14 million cases occurred that year in Pakistan. Dengue has also emerged in Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen, while in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Rift valley fever has also appeared – the first time this mosquito-transmitted viral infection has been seen outside of Africa. There is concern that such viral infections could affect pilgrims entering Saudi Arabia during the Hajj this coming fall, as could the new MERS coronavirus, or the recently discovered Alkhurma hemorrhagic virus. Both viruses were first discovered in Saudi Arabia.
The hoohah about cloud computing, Big Data, and other “innovations” continues. Who needs Oracle when one has Hadoop? Why license SPSS or some other Fancy Dan analytics system when there are open choice analytics systems a mouse click away? Search? Lots of open source choices.
We have entered the Gilded Age of information and data analysis. Do I have that right?
The marketers and young MBAs chasing venture funding instead of building revenue shout, “Yes, break out the top hats and cigars. We are riding a hockey stick type curve.”
Where are Web sites hosted? The average user has no idea how to harness the right tools to locate where a server is located, but there might be a common solution. Makeuseof.com, gotta love that Web site, wrote the article, “Find Out Where A Web Site’s Server Is Located With FlagFox And Flag For Chrome.” Made for two open source OS, the Flag and FlagFox plugins are rather simple. Whenever you visit a Web site, the URL bar displays its server’s country of origin. Judging by the plugin’s name you can tell it displays the flag.
Pretty neat, huh? It is also pretty useful:
“This little flag isn’t just cool to show off, but it can also serve some interesting purposes, for example it can let you know which country a server is located in (especially when the server location doesn’t match the top-level domain like .co.uk, .de, etc.), help you troubleshoot why a certain connection may be acting slow, or help you identify when you’ve accidentally landed on a phishing Web site. Say you try to visit your bank’s website which usually shows your country’s flag, but suddenly you see a completely different flag. The chances that you’ve landed on a phishing site are very high. The flag shown by the extension also serves as a reminder of where our data goes — you practically visit the world through your browsing habits!”
It does more than show colorful flags too. Clicking on the flag displays technical data about the server: postal code, Web hosting provider, location, IP Address, and ISP. It also has the Web of Trust rating and embed other techy features. That is just for the Firefox version, the Google plug-in has a few more features that are specific to Google.
For the common users, use this tool as a way to prevent identity theft and catch phishing Web sites. Another simple tool to keep your Internet experience safe.
Activism: In a series of articles here at Falkvinge on Infopolicy, I’ll be giving examples of talking back to the most disturbingly false bullshit repeated by pro-copyright-monopoly pundits. The reason for this is that I see tons of this kind of bullshit in discussion threads, and it stands unchallenged, which is dangerous. As I describe in Swarmwise, it is of immense importance for our long-term liberties that false assertions are countered immediately and in numbers whenever they appear.
Today, we’re going to discuss the assertion that “copying is stealing”, that amazingly still lives on. It should be dead and buried at least fifteen years ago, but isn’t. Here are three examples how to counter it. Adapt to your own language and use when discussions threads like this one on Reddit pop up.
Most readers of this list should be familiar with the name, if not the ideas, of the late American strategist Col John R. Boyd (USAF ret). Boyd was my mentor and closest friend, and I am deeply indebted to him for the knowledge he so generously bestowed on me. While no short essay can capture the entirety of Boyd's thinking, attached below is an excellent introduction to what some might call John Boyd's art of war. It is written by my friend and colleague Bill Lind, a leading contributor to the Military Reform Movement in the 1980s. Of particular importance is Bill's concluding point about ‘open systems.' But you need to understand Boyd's work to understand the centrality of this point in strategy and grand strategy.
Lind's essay is very timely, given that Republicans and Democrats alike have driven America into a grand-strategic cul de sac that is weakening our position abroad, while wrecking our democracy at home. IMO, this grand-strategic trap is a self-inflicted wound and is well summarized by Lind. (Boyd's criteria for a sensible grand strategy can be found here.) Hopefully, Lind's essay will tweak your interest in Boyd's important work.
Exiting America's grand strategic mess will not be easy because the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex and its wholly owned subsidiaries in academia, the thinktanks, the pol-mil apparat, and the mass media have a vested interest in continuing down what has become a clearly a self-destructive evolutionary pathway. A parasitical “faction” is now exploiting the interplay of chance and necessity to benefit itself at the expense of the “whole.” Boyd's ideas — particularly those relating to his moral design for grand strategy — offer a way to begin thinking about how to get off this pathway and return to one where the interplay of chance of necessity leads more naturally to salutary growth at home and abroad.
If you are not familiar with Boyd and his ideas, my advice is to start with Robert Coram's superb biography, (about 100,000 sold and still in print). It is by far the best general introduction to the man and his work. Those interested in heavier lifting can dive into James Fallows', Chet Richards,' and Franz Ozinga's analyses of Boyd's strategic thought. For the truly masochistic, a complete compendium of Boyd's briefings slides can be downloaded from this link. But beware, these briefings are long, albeit highlycondensed, idiosyncratic, and a bit didactical. Nevertheless, determined readers will find their study to be infinitely rewarding, because like the writing of Sun Tzu, their essence is one of ever expanding timelessness.
Chuck Spinney
Cannes, France
John Boyd’s Art of War
Why our greatest military theorist only made colonel.
Description:State sponsored history, the version touted in public schools, and preached over the mainstream media is the mythology of the state, and it is as essential to its existence as creation stories are to any religion.
