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Jeff Walzer

Jeff Walzer's Public Library

24 Nov 09

Afghan Militias Battle Taliban With Aid of U.S. - NYTimes.com

  • The Americans also say they will tie them directly to the Afghan government.

    These checks aim to avoid repeating mistakes of the past — either creating more Afghan warlords, who have defied the government’s authority for years, or arming Islamic militants, some of whom came back to haunt the United States.

  • The Americans say they will keep the groups small and will limit the scope of their activities to protecting villages and manning checkpoints.
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Obama's Afghanistan strategy should team our soldiers with their militias. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

  • Second, these teams of U.S. soldiers are small. As Gant puts it, the approach requires a lot of time—many months to gain a foothold, years to make the bonds stick—but not a lot of manpower.
  • A tribe-centered strategy may appeal to Obama in several ways. First, it keeps the Afghan people, not American occupiers, at the center of the operation. The U.S. soldiers live alongside the tribes, build trust, train them, supply them, gather intelligence from them, and fight with them. We are supporting players, not the lead.
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12 Nov 09

Why not pay for what works? | ZDNet Healthcare | ZDNet.com

  • They point to a RAND Corp. study saying that “one-third or more of all procedures performed in the United States are of questionable benefit.”
  • The way to enforce it is through comparative effectiveness. Analyze data from millions of patients, develop best practices, and move physicians toward the most cost-effective solution.
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11 Nov 09

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  • Here's how Starnes described the idea behind carb cycling:
    "By fluctuating macronutrients on a daily basis, we can ensure
    that performance and muscle building can be optimized on the days
    when it's most important, while burning fat on the other
    days."
  • If you never vary your daily calories or macros,
    you end up overfeeding yourself on the days you're either
    resting or training light, and perhaps eating too little on the
    days you train the hardest.
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  • Carbohydrate allows you to continue training hard. It also controls
    the body's insulin levels - and insulin is a very anabolic and
    anti-catabolic hormone. Proper insulin management / manipulation is
    a HUGE factor in losing fat while maintaining (and even gaining)
    muscle.
  • Don't be afraid of carbs - just be afraid of mismanaging
    them. A good general rule is to keep carbs in your first meal
    or two of the day, and also in the peri-workout
    window.
  • 6 more annotations...
10 Nov 09

Schneier on Security: Is Antivirus Dead?

  • Often it's impossible to do both A and B -- there's no time to do both, it's too expensive to do both, or whatever -- and you have to choose. In that case, you look at A and B and you make you best choice. But it's almost always more secure to do both.
  • Yes, antivirus programs have been getting less effective as new viruses are more frequent and existing viruses mutate faster. Yes, antivirus companies are forever playing catch-up, trying to create signatures for new viruses. Yes, signature-based antivirus software won't protect you when a virus is new, before the signature is added to the detection program. Antivirus is by no means a panacea.
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04 Nov 09

Phys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss? - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

  • It is well known physiologically that, while high-intensity exercise demands mostly carbohydrate calories (since carbohydrates can quickly reach the bloodstream and, from there, laboring muscles), low-intensity exercise prompts the body to burn at least some stored fat. All of the subjects ate three meals a day.
  • “The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”
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19 Oct 09

Up the Cosmic Distance Ladder § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

  • Consider this: We live in a universe so large that light itself (and nothing goes faster) takes years to travel between stars, eons to travel between galaxies. All we see in the sky are essentially old photos of celestial objects as they were when their light first left to travel to Earth. When we look across space, we also look back in time.
  • the closer an object is to the two observation points, the greater that object’s parallax. Using the principle of triangulation, an observer can calculate the distance to an object using the object’s observed parallax and the known distance between the two observation points.
12 Oct 09

Being pushed around by empty space: The Casimir Effect « Gravity and Levity

  • What makes everything so confusing is that apparently the quantum field is always “boiling”.  It is filled with a certain dense energy, one which allows particles to spontaneously pop in and out of existence.  In fact, our most detailed and accurate description of forces is that they involve the transfer of energy across the quantum field via short-lived excitations which can be called “particles” or “virtual particles”.
  • Currently, we have to say that we don’t even understand the zero-body problem!  We can’t say for sure anymore what “empty space” is like, so apparently we have been making negative progress over the past 300 years.
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06 Oct 09

Discover Interview: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics | Cosmology | DISCOVER Magazine

  • Quantum mechanics is an incredible theory that explains all sorts of things that couldn’t be explained before, starting with the stability of atoms. But when you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics [in the macro world], you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. The greatest weirdness here is that it doesn’t make sense. If you follow the rules, you come up with something that just isn’t right.
  • It doesn’t make any sense, and there is a simple reason. You see, the mathematics of quantum mechanics has two parts to it. One is the evolution of a quantum system, which is described extremely precisely and accurately by the Schrödinger equation. That equation tells you this: If you know what the state of the system is now, you can calculate what it will be doing 10 minutes from now. However, there is the second part of quantum mechanics—the thing that happens when you want to make a measurement. Instead of getting a single answer, you use the equation to work out the probabilities of certain outcomes. The results don’t say, “This is what the world is doing.” Instead, they just describe the probability of its doing any one thing. The equation should describe the world in a completely deterministic way, but it doesn’t.
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Discover Interview: Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics | Cosmology | DISCOVER Magazine

  • Roger Penrose could easily be excused for having a big ego. A theorist whose name will be forever linked with such giants as Hawking and Einstein, Penrose has made fundamental contributions to physics, mathematics, and geometry. He reinterpreted general relativity to prove that black holes can form from dying stars. He invented twistor theory—a novel way to look at the structure of space-time—and so led us to a deeper understanding of the nature of gravity. He discovered a remarkable family of geometric forms that came to be known as Penrose tiles. He even moonlighted as a brain researcher, coming up with a provocative theory that consciousness arises from quantum-mechanical processes. And he wrote a series of incredibly readable, best-selling science books to boot.
  • To get to the bottom of it all, he insists, physicists must force themselves to grapple with the greatest riddle of them all: the relationship between the rules that govern fundamental particles and the rules that govern the big things—like us—that those particles make up.

Where Defense in Depth Falls Short - CSO Online - Security and Risk

  • A firewall typically acts as the last line of defense on the enterprise perimeter but has to protect against a great many varieties of threats, while a server-room door has to “only” be concerned with physical access.
  • Another flaw in the Defense in Depth design is its inherent difficulty to implement vis-à-vis the three basic tenets of security: confidentiality, integrity and availability.   Why?   Because most forms of defense create increasing confidentiality, but make integrity more difficult to implement and manage.  Any increase in defense, of course, makes the concept of availability that much harder to provide to the users.
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05 Oct 09

Air Force Predator Drone Pilots: A New Kind of 'Top Gun' - TIME

  • The change reflects a shift in Air Force thinking. Instead of carefully polishing and husbanding the service's costly F-22 fighters and their pilots for future wars, the Air Force increasingly is rolling up its sleeves and helping fight today's conflicts
  • While their most important mission is to provide ground troops with real-time video for hours on end, the Predator crews can also fire missiles when high-value targets are
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24 Sep 09

Erasing Dark Energy § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM

  • But what was most disturbing to cosmologists was that the discovery required adding a term to Einstein’s equations of general relativity. These equations were derived from pure mathematics and had already beautifully predicted the expansion of the universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929. To many, even those who accepted its usefulness in explaining the data, dark energy was an inelegant addition. Over the last decade, some researchers have been working to describe what dark energy might be, but others have gone back to see if the equations of general relativity can be tweaked to avoid having to use such a troublesome piece of math.
  • The concept of dark energy—which is simply that a phenomenal amount of energy exists in the vacuum of space—emerged from a discrepancy between how far away supernovae were supposed to be and how bright they appeared.
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21 Sep 09

Security Just Got A Lot More Complicated - Microsoft Blog - InformationWeek

  • If an attacker can corrupt the tools that create programs, they can get the innocent programmers of the world to provide distribution of malicious code. This is especially devastating because those programs may be digitally signed.
  • Induc itself seems to be a proof-of-concept piece of code. It doesn't have a malicious payload, it simply tries to spread itself far and wide. In that sense, the industry is lucky to have gotten this wake-up call in a way that didn't involve an ugly disaster. So let's wake up and think about the implications of Induc.

Malware Defensive Techniques Will Evolve as Security Arms Race Continues

  • Right now, for example, there
    are malicious programs capable of recognizing when they are being run in a virtual environment. By exploiting bugs in
    commonly used virtualization software, malware could potentially infect
    researchers as they begin their poking and prodding
  • “In
    the past, malware would talk as fast and loud as it could over the network to
    get its traffic connection,” Quist said. “Lately, many samples have been using
    trickier techniques to hide themselves. The most devious is to not talk unless
    necessary. I was dealing with one sample recently that did exactly this. You
    would see no communication except for when the user was actively using the
    system. At that point, it would call home and do its communication. Any sort of
    network forensic analysis was made extremely difficult until the root cause of
    the traffic was analyzed.”
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18 Sep 09

The well-deserved success of Mint.com, and what other Web businesses can learn from it. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine

17 Sep 09

Content Doesn’t Matter Without the Package - Publishing 2.0

  • The challenge for media companies is not to figure out what to do with their content — content in and of itself doesn’t matter. It never has.


    It’s all about the package.


    Newspaper articles don’t matter without a newspaper. Magazine articles don’t matter without a magazine. TV shows don’t matter without a broadcast or cable channel.

  • It’s because on the web they are no longer in the business of packaging content, and that’s what the newspaper business, like every other media business, has always been about. Instead, media companies put their content on the web and let search and other aggregators package it.
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15 Sep 09

What Google Understands About the Future of News and Publishing That Publishers Do Not - Publishing 2.0

  • Fast Flip is, more accurately, an attempt to create a new UI for news — a better way to consume publishers’ content than publishers provide on their own sites.
  • The publishing business has always been about packaging content. Newspapers. Magazines. Newsletters
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14 Sep 09

Robert Reich's Blog: The Final Sprint for Health Care Has Now Begun, and Where the White House is Placing Its Bets

  • On one side are America's biggest private insurers and Big Pharma. They're drooling over the prospect of tens of millions more Americans buying insurance and drugs because the pending legislation will require them to, or require employers to cover them.
  • But the big insurers hate the idea of a public option because it will squeeze their profits. A true public option will force private insurers to compete in markets where there's now very little competition, and also have the bargaining power to force drug companies to offer lower prices. Big Pharma also wants to prevent Medicare and Medicaid from having the power to negotiate lower prices, for the same reason. Private insurers and Big Pharma would rather fudge the question of where the savings will come from or how all this will be paid for. They certainly don't want to pay for wider coverage with a surtax on the rich, because, hey, their executives and shareholders are mainly rich.
  • 3 more annotations...
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