Quote of the week Jules Evans-

Last week actually, but still top of the charts:

DER SPIEGEL: Mr President, former Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder
called you a ‘pure democrat’. Do you consider yourself such?

VLADIMIR PUTIN: (laughs) Am I a ‘pure democrat’? Of course I am,
absolutely. But do you know what the problem is? Not even a problem but
a real tragedy? The problem is that I’m all alone, the only one of my
kind in the whole wide world. Just look at what’s happening in North
America, it’s simply awful: torture, homeless people, Guantanamo, people
detained without trial and investigation. Just look at what’s happening
in Europe: harsh treatment of demonstrators, rubber bullets and tear gas
used first in one capital then in another, demonstrators killed on the
streets. That’s not even to mention the post-Soviet area. Only the guys
in Ukraine still gave hope, but they’ve completely discredited
themselves now and things are moving towards total tyranny there;
complete violation of the Constitution and the law and so on. There is
no one to talk to since Mahatma Gandhi died.

Quickfire business creation… David Steven-

Guy Kawasaki on his Web 2.0 start-up, Truemors:

1. 0. I wrote 0 business plans for it. The plan is simple: Get a site launched in a few months, see if people like it, and sell ads and sponsorships (or not).
2. 0. I pitched 0 venture capitalists to fund it. Life is simple when you can launch a company with a credit-card level debt.
3. 7.5. 7.5 weeks went by from the time I registered the domain truemors.com to the site going live. Life is also good because of open source and Word Press.
4. $4,500. The total software development cost was $4,500. The guys at Electric Pulp did the work. Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.
5. $4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something.
6. $399. I paid LogoWorks $399 to design the logo. Of course, this was before HP bought the company. Not sure what it would charge now.
7. $1,115.05. I spent $1,115.05 registering domains. I could have used GoDaddy and done it a lot cheaper, but I was too stupid and lazy.
8. 55. I registered 55 domains (for example, truemors.net, .de, .biz, truemours, etc, etc). I had no idea that one had to buy so many domains to truly “surround” the one you use.
9. $12,107.09. In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors. During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.

Bunkered David Steven-

Over at Wired, Sharon Weinberger (a one-time public diplomacy temp in the US Embassy in Doha) reflects on the ever-growing walls around American embassies:

Unlike the hulking security monstrosities that constitute the modern U.S. diplomatic presence abroad, the U.S. embassy in Doha is housed in a reasonably attractive building… But its notable feature, according to the Regional Security Officer, was “good setback.”

Setback refers to the amount of space between the outer perimeter and the main embassy building. The more the setback, the better protected the embassy is from a bomb on the street, or the more time security forces have to respond to an incident at the gate. For example, several U.S. embassies in Africa had very, very bad setback, as became evident from a briefing after the 1998 East Africa bombings. When asked what the concerns were prior to the bombing, a State Department official answered with one word: Setback. Much of the subsequent construction and security upgrades to U.S. embassies have concentrated on increasing setback…

American embassies are increasingly cut off from those very countries in which the U.S. is supposed to be fostering better relations, and worse, create caricatures of the detached diplomat more interested in tennis than work.

Game Theory David Steven-

Adolescents who spend more time playing online strategy games than concentrating on their studies may be making better choices for the future than their parents believe.

Historian Niall Ferguson has been running scenarios about what might have been through Muzzy Lane’s Making History game with the help of his 13 year old son. And according to Clive Thompson, writing in Wired, the experience has forced him to rethink some of his favourite theories completely.

Now Ferguson, best known for Virtual History, a 1997 book based on asking ‘what if’ about historical events ranging from World War 2 to the English Civil War, is working with Muzzy Lane to design a new game. Due out in 2008 it will model modern, real-world conflicts, and allow players to tweak strategies and approaches to these problems.

According to Thompson:

“Ferguson discovered something that fans of war-strategy and civilization-building “god” games have realized for years: Games are a superb vehicle for thinking deeply about complex systems. After you’ve spent months pondering the intricacies of the weapons markets in Eve Online, or the mysteries of troop placement in Company of Heroes, you develop a Mandlebrotian appreciation of chaos dynamics — how a single change can take a stable situation and sent it spiraling all to hell, or vice versa”.

Modelling epidemics. David Steven-

A talk by Joshua Epstein and Donald Burke on how agent-based modelling can help us “take advantage of the social structure to eliminate [an] epidemic…

The EU’s clueless central Asia policy Jules Evans-

Last week, the Kremlin signed a deal with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan that apparently stymies the mooted Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline, which the EU was hoping would free up some Turkmen gas from the bear hug of the Kremlin. Instead, it looks like for the time being, all Turkmen gas will be exported via Gazprom.

There was a brief window of opportunity for the EU to try and woo the new president of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, after president Turkmenbashi died suddenly earlier this year.

But did the EU ever really have any hope of winning over the new president? The Kremlin would have had top politicians on the plane immediately to Ashgabat, with promises of major new investments and major personal financial incentives for all concerned. The EU would have sent some minor bureaucrat several months later, to discuss the possibility of a wide-ranging partnership including strengthening the country’s judiciary and possibly supporting some sort of theatrical festival.

more »

Phone economics David Steven-

A neat study reveals the economic benefits of mobile phones in developing countries:

“As phone coverage [in Kerala] spread between 1997 and 2000, fishermen started to buy phones and use them to call coastal markets while still at sea. (The area of coverage reaches 20-25km off the coast.) Instead of selling their fish at beach auctions, the fishermen would call around to find the best price… [As a result], no fish were wasted and the variation in prices fell dramatically. By the end of the study coverage was available in all three regions. Waste had been eliminated and the “law of one price”—the idea that in an efficient market identical goods should cost the same—had come into effect, in the form of a single rate for sardines along the coast.

This more efficient market benefited everyone. Fishermen’s profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months.”

Why not an auction? David Steven-

All week, season ticket holders at Liverpool Football Club have been up in arms at a denial of their “right” to a ticket for next week’s European Champions’ League Final. Yesterday, meanwhile, Prince sold out tickets for seven London gigs in twenty minutes (and crashed his booking system to boot).

For most events, ticket prices are fixed (at least until touts/scalpers get hold of them) and supply limited. Demand has to be restrained by rationing – ballots (skewed by points for loyalty) for football; chance (and the willingness to hammer away at F5) for music.

But all this begs questions that should (and probably do) bother economists. Why are ticket prices kept so far below what people are prepared to pay? Why do event promoters (irrationally) allow so much revenue to leak away to touts? Why aren’t auctions, or other market mechanisms, used to equalise supply and demand? more »

UN not joined up but still being asked to do difficult things Elizabeth Sellwood-

Noah Pollak’s National Review article, posted on Michael Totten’s blog today, reminds me of our internal debates during the Lebanon war last summer (when I was working for the UN) about peacekeeping options for south Lebanon.

Pollak’s article, subtitled “The UN organisation is ineffective as it is unaccountable” is a standard piece of UN-bashing. Pollak argues that unlike the Israeli government, which is being thrashed by the Winograd Commission and its fallout, the UN has “quite remarkably escaped any opprobrium for its own important contribution to the outbreak of war last summer”.

Pollak recalls that since 1978, when UNIFIL was established, “a concatenation of nearly identical UNIFIL-related resolutions has been issued by the Security Council, always with one thing in common: Events on the ground are never permitted to affect UNIFIL’s mandate. Through a combination of diplomatic foolishness and bureaucratic inertia, UNIFIL has remained impervious to any evaluation of its actual utility in bringing peace and security to southern Lebanon.” Pollak recounts a “long history of terrorist provocation in southern Lebanon”, from the PLO to Hezbollah, throughout which “the world’s diplomatic corps has maintained the self-congratulatory fantasy that more extensions of UNIFIL’s mandate will help the region”. more »

UN not joined up on biofuels Alex Evans-

 A gaggle of UN agencies have just published a report on biofuels, says the Guardian this morning (see also previous Global Dashboard posts on biofuels). Although the report presents a mixed picture of upsides and downsides, it’s clear about the food security risks:

Expanded production [of biofuel crops] adds uncertainty. It could also increase the volatility of food prices with negative food security implications… The benefits to farmers are not assured, and may come with increased costs. [Growing biofuel crops] can be especially harmful to farmers who do not own their own land, and to the rural and urban poor who are net buyers of food, as they could suffer from even greater pressure on already limited financial resources. At their worst, biofuel programmes can also result in a concentration of ownership that could drive the world’s poorest farmers off their land and into deeper poverty.

Absolutely. Slightly confusing, then, to see UNEP head Achim Steiner saying the opposite, according to the FT last month:

The UN’s top environment official has backed a European Union plan to require the blending of plant-based biofuels into road fuels despite fears by environmentalists that this could lead to increased deforestation in south-east Asia and Brazil. Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Prog­ramme, said on Thursday that biofuels were needed to reduce global dependence on fossil fuels.

more »

Fixing the Foreign Office Alex Evans-

When Gordon Brown takes over as PM, there will be no shortage of clouds on the international horizon. Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan will vie for his attention, of course. But he will also need to push for a breakthrough on the slow burning drivers of instability.

Climate change, resource depletion, fragile states, global economic imbalances, infectious diseases: it’s easy to write a shopping list of the risks for which the world has little insurance. One day, a number of these threats will combine in a ‘perfect storm’. The modern world’s vulnerability to shocks will then be cruelly exposed.

Protecting its citizens from risk is core business for any government. Brown has already signalled that he wants to lead a renewed effort to tackle the major sources of global uncertainty. To succeed it will be critical for him to know he can rely on Britain’s foreign policy apparatus.

There’s just one problem. He can’t.

We’ve just published a paper on this, formatted as a note to Gordon Brown, plus a shorter article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.

Pentagon troop survey: torture widely condoned Alex Evans-

 A new survey undertaken by the US Defense Department’s Mental Health Advisory Team, which interviewed over 1,700 soldiers and marines deployed in Iraq between August and October last year, has some alarming findings. According to the Washington Post,

More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents, the Pentagon disclosed yesterday. Four in 10 said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier.

In addition, about two-thirds of Marines and half the Army troops surveyed said they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian or for destroying civilian property unnecessarily. “Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect,” the Army report stated.

About 10 percent of the 1,767 troops in the official survey — conducted in Iraq last fall — reported that they had mistreated civilians in Iraq, such as kicking them or needlessly damaging their possessions.

Open source spying Alex Evans-

The NY Times magazine published a piece last December [free log-on required] describing how web 2.0 applications are revolutionising information sharing in the US intelligence community. It’s a must-read. Here’s a taster:

In the fall of 2005, [two evangelists for better use of open source information in the intelligence community] joined forces with C.I.A. wiki experts to build a prototype of something called Intellipedia, a wiki that any intelligence employee with classified clearance could read and contribute to. To kick-start the content, C.I.A. analysts seeded it with hundreds of articles from nonclassified documents like the C.I.A. World Fact Book. In April, they sent out e-mail to other analysts inviting them to contribute, and sat back to see what happened.

By this fall, more than 3,600 members of the intelligence services had contributed a total of 28,000 pages… The usefulness of Intellipedia proved itself just a couple of months ago, when a small two-seater plane crashed into a Manhattan building. An analyst created a page within 20 minutes, and over the next two hours it was edited 80 times by employees of nine different spy agencies, as news trickled out. Together, they rapidly concluded the crash was not a terrorist attack.

On which note, here’s an excerpt from an email being forwarded all over the place:

The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is pleased to invite you to the “DNI Open Source Conference 2007: Expanding the Horizons” to be held in Washington, DC, on Monday, 16 July and Tuesday, 17 July, 2007. The conference is free and open to the public.

Here be anthropomorphic dragons… David Steven-

Map of online communities and related points of interest…

Essential Middle East blogging Alex Evans-

 If you haven’t already made the acquaitance of Michael Totten, then you should. Totten is an itinerant blogger who seems to wander around the Middle East on a semi-permanent basis, chatting to people and making YouTube videos. He’s financed in this fascinating endeavour by a small army of readers who donate through PayPal.

The results of his travels are often gripping, as in a recent post when he’s interviewing the police chief in Kirkuk in his office just as a suspect is brought in for questioning (a friend riding on a motorbike that the suspect was driving decided to start shooting into a crowd of people). Totten reaches for his video camera and starts taping on the spot…

P.S. Charlie Edwards, who runs Demos’s security program, has a story about a friend who was responsible for policing in Basra shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Early on in his tour, the Coalition Provisional Authority contracted out police training to private contractors, of whom he was one. In order to prove that they were being effective, they were told to define a range of Key Performance Indicators.

The British agonized over the complexities of policing and attempted to come up with a rough guide as to how they were doing. Meanwhile American contractors responded immediately: the police station should still have

all the chairs it was issued with; all the tables, all the guns, and all the padlocks; and no bullet holes in the external walls.

Which, when you stop to think about it, are actually pretty robust as indicators go…