Open Source Homeland

New book from University of Chicago Press:

United States Army: The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
When the U.S. military invaded Iraq, it lacked a common understanding of the problems inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns. It had neither studied them, nor developed doctrine and tactics to deal with them. It is fair to say that in 2003, most Army officers knew more about the U.S. Civil War than they did about counterinsurgency.

The U.S. Army / Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual was written to fill that void. The result of unprecedented collaboration among top U.S. military experts, scholars, and practitioners in the field, the manual espouses an approach to combat that emphasizes constant adaptation and learning, the importance of decentralized decision-making, the need to understand local politics and customs, and the key role of intelligence in winning the support of the population. The manual also emphasizes the paradoxical and often counterintuitive nature of counterinsurgency operations: sometimes the more you protect your forces, the less secure you are; sometimes the more force you use, the less effective it is; sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.

The people over at  reCAPTCHA? have a brilliant  idea. They seek to solve two problems at once:

• How to authenticate people who sign in to websites
• How to digitize millions of pages of books

The first problem is already solved with, among other things, CAPTCHA— those hard-to-read nonsense words we’ve all come across. The second problem can be solved with the first solutions— why not use real words, taken from real books, and round-trip those word back into the digitized books so they’re available in digital form? It takes the Mechanical Turk concept even farther.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, thats not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Milt Rosenberg has Stephen Flynn, author of The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation

From Booklist

Homeland Security expert Flynn examines the vulnerability of the U.S. to disaster–natural and man-made–and what the nation must do to fortify its security. By exploring several well-documented and frightening scenarios, Flynn exposes our weaknesses and the consequences of our failure to adequately plan for disaster. Among the scenarios he explores: an avian flu outbreak in New York; destruction of a chemical plant in New Jersey; a San Francisco earthquake that compromises levees and leads to massive flooding. Flynn points to threats from our blithe disregard for the dangers all around us, including chemical plants and oil refineries operating in close proximity to crowded communities. We can’t plan for every disaster, but the nation can be better prepared, Flynn maintains, and he offers advice on how corporations and the government can reduce the risk of disaster. Among his suggestions: making sure energy management and public-health systems have enough resources and building more power-transmission lines to keep lights on when temperatures rise. Flynn’s book reads like a thriller but has the added punch of reality. Vanessa Bush

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