dan collier

A bizarre, unsolicited email from Gen. Petraeus’ spokesman – Glenn Greenwald, an author and blogger for Salon.com, received the linked email from Colonel Steven Boylan, the US Army spokesman for General David Petraeus in Iraq. It was sent in response to an article about the growing politicization of the Army in Iraq. It is striking that while the Marines are pressing to be redeployed outside of Iraq and all types of retired brass is urging withdrawl, the US Army command in Iraq is in lock-step with President Bush. Not just total agreement, but the same debatable talking points and semantic nonsense.

What is really interesting about General Petraeus’ spokesman’s email is that he follows it up by denying he sent it. Of course, it is simple to track the route email takes from sender to recipient. It is possible to fake email routing information, but I think it absolutely defies credulity that the US Army central communications offices in Iraq has such lax security that it is possible that this email is fake. I’ve studied network security and implemented security measures for communication protocols, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol used for sending email. Fake emails are easily prevented at this point in time.

Based on the evidence available, there are three possibilities:

1) The US Army computer network in Iraq has been compromised from the outside. The Army’s network security is virtually non-existent and at any moment someone may fake, or spoof, an email to FoxNews from Gen. Petraeus stating “In ten minutes, we start bombing Iran. I love the smell of napalm in the morning! Love, DP”.

2) The Army computer network was compromised from within Central Command offices. The Army and/or the spokesman failed to take the basic security precautions necessary to prevent unauthorized communications attributable to the highest ranking commander in Iraq. While it is an obvious or blatant lapse of security, this is more believable then the first possibility. Either the actual sender will be easily found or FoxNews can still expect the good news (for ratings).

3) Col. Steven Boylan, the personal spokesman for Gen. Petraeus, is a moron and lying.

I know which one I suspect. But whichever one it turns out to be, this incident seems to explain perfectly why the US is losing in Iraq. That is: wishful thinking (#1), poor planning (#2), and dishonesty (#3).

TED conferences have been very good for a long time. A recent upgrade to their site makes it to the best educational video site on the internet. There was an article in the NY Times about it recently.

TED conference talks are about 20 minutes long and given by well-regarded speakers in their field. The videos are now grouped by theme, which provides a great general overview of the site. All the talks are good, below are some of the best I’ve watched so far.

Jennifer Lin was a 14 year old piano prodigy when she filmed this piece in 2004. It includes her playing classic compositions, boogie, improvisation, and discussing composing.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies love at Rutgers University. She outlines her answers to questions like why we love, why we cheat, and the reality of gender differences. She discusses the neurochemical cause and effect of love, and she issues a warning about increases in anti-depressent use and apathy.

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz discusses the theory from his widely discussed book of the same title. To summarize, he suggests that ever greater number of choices is detrimental for general happiness at the levels present in rampant consumer cultures such as the US. It is striking how many more choices are available in an average US store compared to an average European grocery market or department store. But I’m not sure how much that effects my overall happiness. My take away point from the talk:

The secret to happiness is low expectations.

The TED site has a sleek design and incredible content with tasteful low-key advertising. It enables key functionality, including making it possible to download the video to watch offline or as a podcast. I like the future of internet video more everyday.

Kind of following up the previous post about pretty graphs, it is being reported that Google is buying the technology behind Trendalyzer. My brother first sent me their link last year with a sentence about it being the best website ever.

Gapminder is the organization behind the tool. Their Human Development Trends, 2005 presentation for the UNDP is a great example of a compelling online presentation. I’d like to hear the lecture that went with it.

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On a different topic, I enjoyed Tyler Cowen’s post about our next President. He picks Guiliani, and his reasoning seems sound.

Many Eyes is a site by the Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research. They are hosting visualizations of user submitted data and allowing the online community to comment. I read about it first on another cool site, Read/Write Web.

There are many different topics and datasets. Certainly some seem more reliable than others. The Proto-/Indo-European Language Tree visualization seems to imply less relation between Danish and Swedish than British English and New World English. I think they should recheck their calculations. Snoop Dogg and Queen Elizabeth are not speaking the same language, citizens of Göteberg and Køpenhavn pretty much are.

Lots to look at there, here are a few I liked:

• Graph of Spoken Languages
• Who pays the most for advertizing and who’s expanding advertising fastest
• A Reason to Avoid Alaska

On a Mac, I had to use Safari to get the site to work.

For more graphing smiles: graphs of the not so obvious

Newsvine.org – This is an interesting idea and a good site site to browse.

This is why ideas like above are so interesting:
In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google

The money quote:

“You don’t need to be No. 1 to be worth
billions of dollars,” said Allen Morgan,
a partner at Mayfield Fund, a venture capital
firm…

Tagged:

My personal favorite from Wired News 2006 Foot-in-Mouth Awards:

“Let’s face it. We’re not changing the world. We’re building a product that helps people buy more crap — and watch porn.”

– Bill Watkin, Seagate CEO
As quoted by Fortune magazine