Sachs too frequently lapses into a sort of reductio ad PowerPoint. It seems every catastrophe can be averted if we take fewer than 10 simple steps.  Sachs presents “four compelling reasons why the poorest countries need to speed the demographic transition,” “a list of seven requirements to enable family planning programs to accelerate the decline in fertility” and “six steps to transform” American “security policy into a workable framework for the 21st century.”

Maybe it was the little thrill of seeing a Latinate/geekspeak mash up, or just the fact that, structurally, PowerPoint and absurdum are in parallel, but it made my evening.  Sometimes it’s the little things….

One needn’t spend much time browsing in The Bazaar before you realize: the proverbial cat is out of the bag. He is not the first to report that the knowledge of how to construct a nuclear weapon is no longer particularly hard to come by. (You may not quite be able to download the plans off the Internet, but the basic “gun” model used in the Little Boy (Hiroshima) bomb is fairly easy to construct from the right amount of Uranium 235.) Thus for a long time, the world has relied for its nonproliferative intentions on the difficulty of obtaining sufficient quantities of weapons-grade U235 (loosely defined as uranium whose 235 isotope is present at >90% by mass). Building centrifuges requires far more engineering and machining expertise than does building the actual bomb, and Western nonproliferation efforts (and the IAEA‘s efforts) have thus focused on nipping the process in the materials production bud.

Blame it on the leaky Russians (Langewiesche convinces us that they had little, if anything to do with nuclear proliferation) or the incredibly trusting Dutch, who initially hired A. Q. Kahn and later let him waltz out of the country with the plans for what are still considered state-of-the-art uranium centrifuges (state-of-the-non-classified-art, I should say), or the Pakistan government, which first propped up Kahn and which later bowed to US pressure to arrest him—and then promptly locked him away under house arrest so that no Western intelligence services could ask any further awkward questions relating to the involvement of the Pakistani government itself—but no matter how you slice it, not only has nuclear knowledge proliferated, but therefore so has nuclear technology. The North Koreans, the Iranians and the Libyans now also have the know-how (if not the machines, in the case of newly-reformed Libya) to produce significant quantities of weapons-grade uranium, and of course so do the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Israelis (not officially , the Germans, the French, the British, the Chinese, the Russians and the US. That’s roughly half the world’s population (50.6%, to be precise) whose governments are known have access to nuclear weapons technology. A majority.

Thus I conclude that the nonproliferation agenda is bankrupt. So far as we know, we have kept these weapons out of the hands of non-state actors. But such was not the aim of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty! In order to create effective controls which might curb the transfer of nuclear technologies to non-state actors, we’ll have to start by identifying what didn’t work in the NPT—for starters, the overt inequity between the nations permitted to maintain such weapons (namely the permanent members of the UN Security Council) and those not permitted to do so. The NPT created second-class citizens of half the world. Any surprise the world didn’t abide by the treaty? It’s Versaille all over again: a Phyrric victory of an asymmetric treaty over geopolitical reality.

So much for sleeping tonight.

from the CeaseFire website

Thus Kotlowitz’s article about Slutkin’s epidemiological approach to violence struck a chord. In the epidemiology of disease, there is always an “index case“—the first case on record. In violence, there is a precipitating event. And, just like an epidemic, the intensity of transmission amplifies throughout the population: a particularly vociferous antagonist can result in tens of crimes, never mind an asymmetric number of shootings and homicides. Enter CeaseFire, an organization which seeks to interrupt violence at its first, most critical step: what epidemiologists would cause “index case transmission”—when the first victim becomes motivated aggressor.

And, just as public health deals with the results of infection (i.e., sick people who become patients), so the results of unchecked transmission of the disease of violence are higher crime rates, an ever-increasing rate of youth-involved gun violence within the otherwise fixed homicide rate, and an exploding prison population. As my colleague Pascal Levensohn recently summarized, the prison population of the US might as well be its own nation. They are the victims of a disease just as surely as were the nineteenth century’s leper colonies: shunned by society, the very definition of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Fortunately, organizations like CeaseFire and PAX, about which I wrote previously in “A PAX on Gun Violence”, understand that ostracism of those infected with this disease isn’t the answer. Recognizing that the ounce of gun violence prevention created by these worthy organization is worth far more than its proverbial pound of cure (actually, that was Benjamin Franklin), both PAX and CeaseFire appear to understand that nipping violence in the bud requires intervention before the disease spreads.

Gun violence has become not only the tool of murderers but the tool of intimidators, and thus it is becoming all the more prevalent. One city in which our technology is deployed, for example, suffered 100 murders last year. There were another 300-500 people wounded by gunfire. But in that same city, over that year, we detected more than 3,000 incidents of gunfire. All of this in a city in which it is illegal to fire a weapon outdoors within city limits (unless, of course, one is at a licensed shooting range). It is safe to assume this approximately one-in-ten ratio is not the result of preternaturally poor aim on the part of those shooting the weapons. Nor is it anything to be happy about. As these data indicate, guns are fired illegally just as often for purposes other than to kill someone. So one need not only be concerned about murders and hard-core felons. We also need to worry about the people who fire guns for the sake of intimidation, to “mark territory,” or simply because it’s fun.

The solution to our nation’s gun violence problem does not lie solely in technology such as ShotSpotter. Naturally, as the company’s CEO I am inclined to recommend the technology as a reliable mechanism to reduce gun crime (in fact, ShotSpotter systems have been proven to reduce gunfire and violent crime), but that’s not the point of this posting. The sad reality is that, by the time ShotSpotter finds out about a crime, society as a whole has missed the opportunity to prevent that crime from happening in the first place. Around the office, we can occasionally be heard saying that ShotSpotter can’t help put the bullets back in the gun. Nor can we stop the gun from being fired. But what if somebody could? Therein lies a tremendous opportunity.

The next post in this series: capitalizing on that tremendous opportunity

(click for the full mosaic, 1,300+ books in all!)

Yes, that’s a geeky thing to do. But it highlighted a few things about my changing “digital existence” that I thought were worth reporting:

So Much Data
First and foremost, all of this data (the books, the covers, and even the photo I turned into the mosaic) were available with a few minutes worth of work. Admittedly, I had previously spent hours scanning the ISBN bar codes on my books (conveniently when packing my books in order to move to my new apartment). But think about the amount of data available to me for very little investment: the titles, authors, and graphic images of 1,300 some-odd books, along with their associated meta-data (length, ISBN, etc.). When I was in school (ending in the mid ’90s), gathering and manipulating this sort of data was certainly possible, but doing so was the domain of database experts, programmers, and the like. So I became one of those, mostly because I saw the computer as a tool which would facilitate information manipulation of a nature never previously possible−or indeed imagined.
Trumbull College, My residential college at Yale, for example, had a library boasting some 5,000 works. Its card catalog was positively ancient and poorly maintained. Estimates for the workload involved in cataloging it and keeping it up-to-date were so substantial that the (volunteer) project never got off the ground. A mere fifteen years later, my catalog is not only mostly up-to-date, but it contains all manner of “rich content” that a card catalog could not muster: images of the covers, other books by the same author, publication history, and of course the meta-data: reviews, social/popularity information, and even feedstock for inference and recommendation engines.

Community Creativity
Then there is the accessibility of the inspiration. LibraryThing cleverly suggested the mosaic and linked to David Louis Edelman‘s post in which he created a similar mosaic. Call it community scrapbooking, community arts and crafts, or simply community creativity, but this sort of cross-country “we all trade inspiration” is unusual, to say the least. To be sure, historically artist communes and even local arts and crafts fairs historically provided fodder and inspiration for our individual creativity, but this is a different kind of inspiration: it is both more instantaneous (I got the idea late last night; got a full night’s rest; and woke up and produced the mosaic before breakfast this morning) and more eclectic (David is a computer programmer and Science Fiction author in the Washington, DC area; I am a technology company CEO in Silicon Valley).

But Silos—Still
Unfortunately, it’s not all wine and roses. LibraryThing is the site I’ve always used to catalog my books, but recently Visual Bookshelf has won many converts, mostly because they have embraced the Facebook Platform API and have created a Facebook application. Since some 500 of my friends are on Facebook, and since many of them are avid readers, Visual Bookshelf has already netted me 40 some-odd “reading buddies” (which I define as other people I am friends with on Facebook and who have Visual Bookshelf profiles). An 8% cross-over rate isn’t bad, especially when you consider that Visual Bookshelf is only one of hundreds of Facebook applications. (And, for that matter, it’s one of the least annoying, since it doesn’t spam the hell out of your friends.) Here, for example, is my bookshelf, as displayed on Facebook, and what my friends are reading:

Unfortunately, I cannot synchronize my book activity on Visual Bookshelf with my LibraryThing account. Visual Bookshelf finally implemented a LibraryThing import feature, but it’s unidirectional. Likewise, Facebook makes it nearly impossible to export friend information (going so far as to display email addresses as images to foil screen scrapers and other brute force export tools). So I’m stuck maintaining two databases and importing one to the other, potentially over-writing or losing information each time I do so.

Of course, I’m not the only one who has noticed this problem, and it is but one example of the growing “problem” of social networking data living in proprietary silos. Such well-known Web 2.0 commentators as Om Malik have even gone so far as to propose that social networking features will end up getting built into most desktop and web software, much the same way as the Cut/Copy/Paste mechanism has become a de facto paradigm standard. But that will only work if the core social networking information (who is who and who knows whom) does not remain the proprietary information of, e.g., Facebook. Technologies from the simple XFN to the ambitious OpenSocial are supposed to fix that, but OpenSocial appears almost to have been promulgated by Google to compete with Facebook, and it will be a chilly day in the netherworld before Facebook adopts it. More recently, the DataPortability Working Group has been graced by the participation of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and others (or at least representatives from those companies). But until something concrete develops, we early adopters will continue to enjoy the benefits of So Much Data and Community Creativity, but only if we’re willing to put up with duplicate data, lost data, and the other assorted horrors of manual synchronization.

All told, the information revolution continues in directions we never could have anticipated. Here I am trading notes with friends I haven’t physically seen in over a decade, enjoying better book recommendations from the wisdom of my friends (and the crowds) than I do by poking around my local bookstore, and finding a nice Sunday morning arts and crafts project inspired by a Washington, DC science fiction author whom I’ve never met.

Now if only I didn’t have to keep three copies of it all!

Both novels come from unlikely sources: Michael Crichton, the well-known popular novelist of borderline science fiction thrillers and creator of the long-running ER, and Richard A. Clarke, the now-ostracized Clinton and Bush Administration cyberterrorism expert. Crichton’s Next is actually the second of his technology-gone-wild novels, the immediately prior one being Prey, which failed for all the reasons Next doesn’t: where Prey was really a “shoot ‘em up” movie stuffed into a novel whose plot centered around a company developing autonomous nanotechnology “bots,” Next is a collage of multiple plots–almost devoid of action–gleefully intertwining one bio-engineered protagonist with another. Next holds together better than one might expect it would without Crichton’s signature action and adventure: for all the action sequences in Jurassic Park and Sphere, Crichton is a thoughtful and well educated man (M.D. from Harvard), and Next presents the dangers of human-created interspecies gene mixes (for example, pets which have glow-in-the-dark genes from fireflies inserted in their DNA; parrots who are smarter than most five-year-old humans) clearly and convincingly.

By contrast, Richard Clarke’s Breakpoint is a narrowly-focused thriller in the classic “secret government agency v. the world” genre. Unlike Crichton, Clarke is a bit clunky when he describes his characters: he just doesn’t have Crichton’s twenty years of practice developing a light and almost comic descriptive touch. But he does a superb job of painting our countries vulnerabilities to cyber attack. The book opens with simultaneous attacks on seven of the eleven Internet fiber-optic beachheads on the US East Coast. Not one of them is protected by anything other than a fence. And in today’s just-in-time, zero inventory world, nobody has the inventory to replace the millions of dollars in equipment hidden in these utterly unguarded brick beach shacks scattered along the beaches of remote areas. Or consider the millions of SCADA sensors placed throughout the power grid system, most of which haven’t seen security upgrades in 15 years. These are just the beginnings of our vulnerabilities.

Both books are engaging, distracting, and ultimately frightening. Their intent is to wake us up to a stark reality: in the next fifteen years, bioengineering and network software will both mature as rapidly as computer technology has over the past twenty years. We’re simply not ready for the implications of those evolutions. The RIAA is still fighting its late ’90s battle with Napster–and artists like MC Lars are poking fun at them for still being so far behind. Our society simply isn’t ready for the onslaught of ethical and environmental dilemmas. We’re still focused on the battles of the past (still debating the ethics of abortion while GM crops are planted without a second thought).

Although I seriously doubt that either Crichton or Clarke will ascend to the literary pantheon the way Orwell did after 1984 (he died a year later), these two modern novelists are no less insightful. One would expect this from a man like Clarke, who spent enough years in the White House to know that fiction often carries the day over fact, but it is perhaps a bit surprising coming from Crichton, who is certainly smart, but otherwise doesn’t have a reputation as a serious thinker. Regardless of their credentials, both Crichton’s and Clarke’s books raise issues we have to confront before the technology progresses beyond our ability to cope with its ramifications.

Irshad is perhaps best known for writing the controversial
The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith, a work which has brought her accolades, criticism, and a fatwa. Irshad is no shrinking violet: despite her faith and profound Muslim identity, she has been the target of more criticism than I care to recount, and the fatwa certainly doesn’t make her life any easier. But no amount of criticism and no number of threats will cause her to soften her message: that Islam has forgotten its egalitarian and tolerant roots, and that Modern Islam has a lot to learn from the more open and inclusive societies.

Just under a year ago, Irshad taught a seminar as part of the Socrates Society of the Aspen Institute entitled “Reforming Islam?” and I found myself both refreshed by her willingness to confront those who disagree with her and troubled by the resistance so much of the Muslim world appears to harbor towards her and those who, like Irshad, are willing to question both their own assumptions and those of their fellow Muslims. [Note to the orthographically scrutinous: there is a QUESTION MARK--an interrogation point, an eroteme--in the title of this seminar! Irshad is asking a question (should we reform? who is we? what is reform?), not stating a position.]

The seminar centered on Irshad’s core thesis: that the concept of ijtihad must return to Islamic discourse. Ijtihad, originally a narrow Islamic legal term for making legal decisions based on interpretation of independent legal texts, has a broader meaning relating to independent and interpretation. Irshad has adopted the term and created Project Ijtihad of which she is the Chief Catalyst. Fortunately, she’s not the only one calling for independent thought and interpretation: Muqtedar Kahn’s excellent website has superb material.

This afternoon, as I drove about running errands trying to recover from the weekend’s onslaught of tryptophan, I heard Irshad’s voice on the radio. BBC World Service’s excellent Heart and Soul ran a program called “The Future Of Islam – Or Just ‘Islam Lite’?” As usual, Irshad did her cause proud. More interesting were the other Muslim thought leaders, who agreed with Irshad to one degree or another: Prof. Tariq Ramadan is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University and was the subject of a number of news stories when his US Visa was revoked in 2004 when he was teaching at Notre Dame. And even Saira Khan, runner-up in the UK’s version of The Apprentice.

Irshad has her critics, and many of them could be heard throughout this thoughtful and well-balanced BBC program. One of them makes the excellent point that, even if Irshad is too far “out there” for mainstream Muslims to accept, the very nature of her “extremism” will cause others with more moderate but nevertheless reformist voices to appear less strident and less extreme in comparison. That’s something of a back-handed complement if ever I’ve heard one, but they all miss the point: what Irshad wants, what she strives for, is the very dialogue in which all of her critics are engaging.

So Irshad is Catalyzing precisely the ijtihad and the discourse she so correctly proclaims Islam needs. And, despite their dissent, even her critics have succumbed: they are engaging in intelligent debate and consideration of her ideas. And the ideas of others. And that’s precisely what ijtihad is all about. Mission accomplished.