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Wired has a series of photos from Philip Zimbardo’s presentation at TED 2008:

Zimbardo devised and ran the famous Stanford prison experiment. His new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn to evil, is sitting on my to-read pile. In his TED talk, he argues that there are “seven social processes that grease the [...]

Jules’s remarks that “senior figures in Parliament should certainly be able to understand the basic principles of securitization”.
My understanding is that we’re talking about a process where Mr X packages up a bunch of risks in order to sell them to someone - Mr Y - who knows less about them than Mr X [...]

The Global Strategy Institute at CSIS has published a map of trends and events up to 2012. For those who travel on the London underground the map may look rather familiar.

News that Turkey is to publish a modernised revision of the Hadith - the traditions that govern the practice of Islam - will come as a shock to those Turks who think the government wants to turn their country into a hardline Islamic theocracy. Rather than returning to the past, the AK Party is attempting [...]

Courtesy of The Times. We will be posting more on the UK Government’s CT legislation in the future.

Hilary Clinton’s futile and self-defeating attacks on Barack Obama are obscuring a much more significant phenomenon. At the margins, a robust, effective and alluring (to some) anti-Obama narrative is in gestation. And it’s going to be interesting to watch this migrate into the mainstream with every step Obama takes to the White House.
A good place [...]

This is now nearly a day late, but I can’t resist juxtaposing two stories from Tuesday’s New York Times - stories which oddly enough, the NYT ran entirely separately.  Put them together though, and you may find the magic equation for who will win in November.  Story #1 concerned John McCain’s cheerful admission to journalists [...]

 
From Bruce Schneier, this irresistible reflection of the interesting times in which we live: a Playmobil security checkpoint.  One of the commenters on Bruce’s blog points us towards this helpful reaction to the product on Amazon.com:
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old [...]

Hurrah for the European Parliament.  Not a phrase you hear very often, even from this blog’s resident Europhile (me), but those MEPs get it right now and again.  They can even be quite bold.  A while back I argued on this blog and the ECFR website that the EU needs to get its act together [...]

In late 2006 Manuel Miranda accepted an offer by the Department of State to join their diplomatic mission in Baghdad as a Senior Advisor to the Iraqi Prime Minister’s legal office and the Government of Iraq on legislative process.  In the following year he established the Office of Legislative Statecraft. When he left in 2008 [...]

Ed Crooks, writing on the FT’s energy blog, flags up some new work from Cambridge Energy Research Associates  on how we got to $100 oil - and how much higher prices can go.
On the former, CERA list four key drivers: the “growing shadow of fear over supply reliability”, demand continuing to rise despite high prices, [...]

‘Clueless’. That’s how the financial press is summing up our politicians’ understanding of financial markets.
The ignorance of most politicians about the basics of financial markets was cruelly exposed, say both IFR and Euroweek (two of the City’s leading organs), by the furore in the Houses of Parliament over the fact that Northern Rock had securitized [...]

The world is beginning to resemble a low-budget television comedy:
A Pakistan ISP that was ordered to censor YouTube accidentally managed to take down the video site around the world for several hours Sunday.
The Pakistani government ordered ISPs to censor YouTube to prevent Pakistanis from seeing a trailer to an anti-Islamic film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders. YouTube has since removed the clip for [...]

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
A propos of David’s recent posts on lax security surrounding Barack Obama, American voters can at least take heart from new research from Harvard University, which finds that the effect of assassination attempts in democracies - either successful or not - is negligible.  In autocracies, on [...]

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is situated more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, some 620 miles south of the North Pole deep inside the Arctic circle.
It’s pretty barren.
No trees grow on the archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people. It was selected because of [...]

Having analyzed 335 emerging diseases from 1940 to 2004, scientists have converted the results into maps correlated with human population density, population changes, latitude, rainfall and wildlife biodiversity. The data showed that disease emergences have roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years. Some 60% of the diseases traveled from animals to humans (zoonoses) and the [...]

While everyone still seems to be aghast that Kosovo’s declaration of independence somehow hasn’t resulted in unrestrained Sweetness and Light flooding across the Western Balkans, the general media line that “we are teetering on the edge of a precipice” isn’t entirely sustainable.  Yes, sustained violence by the Kosovo Serbs has made life exceedingly difficult for the [...]

Further to my rant against the legion of poltroons who have made comments on Kosovo on the Guardian website, Martin Kettle has restored my faith that there’s still some room for nuance on the British Left:
Surely British liberals have room for more than one idea in their heads at a time. How can a sense [...]

Yesterday, I blogged on Dallas’s bid to stage another high profile political assassination. Now the Secret Service has tried to explain its decision to let people into an Obama rally without searching them for weapons.
“There were no security lapses at that venue,” said Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington. He added [...]

The New Scientist has an interesting interview with Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy. Rejali identifies a competitive dynamic which, he believes, can drive torture through a law enforcement system:
Usually the top authorizes it and the bottom delivers. Then it’s a slippery slope as torturers quickly become less responsive to centralised authority.
One [...]

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