[ via Viridian Pope Emperor Bruce Sterling ] The RAND Corporation has a new volume out on that “asymmetric warfare” thing that all the kids are crazy for. You can download chapters as PDF files. Chapter Seven covers the “Battle of Seattle” — and warrants reading. It’s not anti-anti-WTO. And it’s interesting to see all [...]
The Centers for Disease Control have put together a page of info on anthrax.
@#!$! We don’t need a new Win32 worm. But we got one anyway.
Ah, a link having nothing to do with terrorists, or war. How about an introduction to The Semantic Web?
[ via Aaronland ] Robert Wright, in Slate, begs to differ with the “kill them all, G_D will know his own” line coming from the dogs on the Right. I found it amusing, in a sad way, that at the same time William Safire denounced Clinton’s post-African embassy cruise missile strike, he supports the same [...]
Now I have a better idea of what OpenCola is doing. Swarmcast is a cool concept.
[ via Lydia Morehouse ] BookCrossing encourages ‘read and release’. You register a book at the site, and record its tracking number in the book. Then you let it loose in the wild by dropping it off in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, or in the seat back pocket on a airliner. You [...]
Here’s a mathematical exposition on Benford’s Law, which describes the distribution of digits in non-random data.
The sidebar to a New York Times article on how Benford’s Law is used to detect fraud has a clear explaination of why it describes the frequency distribution of digits in non-random data.
Benford’s Law, which describes the frequency of digits in non-random data, is more than just an interesting emergent property of the natural word. Accountants and tax collectors now use it to look for fraud.
The zipf distribution, where log(frequency) = log(rank), used describe the size distribution of firms, and the popularity of web sites is related to Benford’s law, which describes the frequency distribution of digits in non-random data (prices, for example.) Interesting stuff.
Earnest putdown department: [ via Virulent Memes ] “Christianity Meme is a new organization of people who wish to expose Christianity for what it really is–a mind virus that controls human behavior to facilitate its own survival. We consider disseminating this information as an act of philanthropy. This site is maintained by volunteers as part [...]
[ via Red Rock Eater ] Back in the day, Oliver Williamson pointed out the importance of reputation in one-to-one markets. The University of Michigan sponsors a research site on online reputation systems. Unfortunately, their search engine’s not working.
Winner-take-all problems are a recent discovery in economic theory which explains phenomena such as the size distribution of firms, the salaries of athletes, and has been applied to the popularity and success of sites on the Web in this paper. [ link to pdf ]
[ via Peter Me ] Oh boy, this is a neat toy. Herd the dots together and then crack the whip.