How long has terrorism been a genuine threat?

Former CIA Director George Tenet discloses in his newly released book how far al-Qaida was willing to go while targeting Americans. The group apparently wanted to outdo 9/11 in a spectacular attack.

The attacks never materialized because they were thwarted or aborted. The proposed attempts though included an attack on Vice President Al Gore with anti-tank missiles while he visited Saudi Arabia. Another proposal was to release cyanide in the New York subway system. And finally, an attempt was made to procure nuclear weapons of mass destruction from Pakistani scientists.

Saudi officials foiled Abdel Rahim al-Nashiri in the anti-tank attack. The Saudis though did not easily pass along this vital intelligence.

Most alarming is the attempt to develop nuclear capability. In the fall of 2001 this was to be detonated in New York. In fact, Tenet charges that a nuclear detonation in a U.S. city is al-Qaida's ultimate goal.

In the fall of 2003 a more spectacular attack than 9/11 was planned in the New York subway system. In June of 2006 the New York Subway Plot was broken by Time Magazine. Chronicled by journalist Ron Suskind's book, The One Percent Doctrine, which describes al-Qaeda's apparently successful development of a portable device that can be used to disperse cyanide gas. The gas kills upon inhalation. In fact, according to Suskind a cyanide gas attack on New York City's subway system was within 45 days of occurring when al-Qaeda's deputy commander, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off the attack. 3,000 people would most likely have died in such an attack.

The attack was called off because it was not seen as spectacular enough. However, the calling off of an attack is no solace. For if 3,000 Americans killed by chemical weapons in the New York subway system were not enough for al-Qaeda, what sort of attack is? The answer, unfortunately, may well be the detonation of a nuclear weapon of some sort.

While we will all be arguing about Tenet's role in intelligence for some time I find it revealing that the reach of terrorism is more extensive and ambitious than many are willing to believe.

Can't Get No?

The IMS Global Learning Consortium (www.imsglobal.org) spots learning technology satisfaction and trends. The report (www.imsglobal.org/ltst/index.cfm) noted the responses from about 200 leaders of internet-supported learning initiatives in North American higher education.

In the CMS (content management systems) category, eCollege (www.ecollege.com), Angel Learning (www.angellearning.com) were rated higher for satisfaction than either market leader Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) or its WebCT property.

Also, the report noted the high marks for Google (www.google.com), Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), and Apple's iPod (www.apple.com), "indicating that non-education-specific technologies are being perceived, by those who incorporate them, as adding value to the educational experience."

Sprawl

**YOUNG INVOLVED PHILADELPHIA READING GROUP**

Robert Bruegmann's ‘Sprawl: A Compact History’
Monday, April 30th, 6:15-8:00 pm
Brew Haha! (212 S. 12th Street - 12th and Locust)


What's so bad about the suburbs? Perhaps the urban hipsters who condemn them as socially- isolating, culturally-homogenous, environmental wastelands are just narrow-minded snobs? Perhaps they are jealous?

Robert Bruegmann argues in Sprawl: A Compact History that the suburbs are part of a healthy, growing metropolis, and represent the ideal living space for most people around the world. His arguments and his book have been the battle-flag of many pro-suburban planners.

A challenge to this controversial argument can be found in the Brookings Institution report, ‘Back to Prosperity,’ which argues that Pennsylvanians should invest in older and urban communities rather than pay the hidden costs of sprawl. It can be found online at www.brookings.edu/es/urban/pa/executivesummary.pdf.

Join other civic-minded young folks to discuss these two points of view, and to hash out the value and cost of the suburbs in the warm embrace of an urban, independent coffee shop.

**Joseph Fox Booksellers, 1724 Sansom Street, will be offering a 10% discount to YIP members on ‘Sprawl.’

Just in case you don’t have time to read the whole book, you should know that our discussion will focus on the introduction, and chapters 1, 10, and 13.

Please RSVP for this event by contacting YIPReading@gmail.com.

Funding and Veto

Is President Bush ready? The Senate passed a war funding bill Thursday that sets a deadline for withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq by next April.

Bush seems to win out in this round given the fact that his opposition does not have enough votes to override his expected veto. The vote was 51-46. Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Gordon Smith of Oregon joined Democrats in supporting the bill. Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats, voted with Republicans opposing it. Two supporters of Bush's Iraq policy: Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina did not vote. [Senator Tim Johnson, D-South Dakota, recovering from a brain hemorrhage, did not vote.]

The bill would be sent to the president's desk Monday or Tuesday.

The 218-208 House vote stops short of the 290 yeas needed to trump Bush. Two Republicans voted for the bill but 13 Democrats voted no.

The Pentagon is on record that it can fund the war through June. The real battle, over funds, will begin in earnest this summer.

As Congressional opposition increased, the U.S. ended involvement in Somalia in 1994. That resulted in no greater security than before.

Will China or India, or "Chindia" eclipse the U.S. on IT?

Gartner analysts weigh the question of America's "unmatched" business environment vs. rapid growth in upstart countries. This seems to be the key question as the Symposium ITxpo 2007 got underway.

Over the past decade, China has become the leaders in high-tech manufacturing and India has performed the same in IT services. The question is, could either of these rapid growth countries, or a combined, "Chindia" overcome the U.S. in these high stake global game.?

The position that the U.S. is maintaining its lead in high-tech innovation belongs to Gartner's Jamie Popkin. He points out that America continues to attract the best students from overseas, most of whom decide to stay. One key is the entrepreneurial environment in the U.S., in his word, "unmatched." U.S. consumers and corporate buyers are the most demanding in the world.

The U.S. survived and then prospered following the tour other recent waves of globalization. Japan for example, took a leadership position in the automotive industry, not too mention the recent note that Toyota has outsold GM for the first three months of 2007. But in the 1970s consumer electronics industries also took off in Japan. South Korea and Taiwan, starting in the 1970s, shifted to leadership in chip manufacturing plants as it did for Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s. China grabbed a large-scale shift of low-cost manufacturing that started in the 1990s. Finally, in India there was a subsequent outsourcing of software development and IT services since 2000.

On the other hand, Sandy Shen, promoted the idea that China will be supreme in a decade. Impressively, China is experiencing a 11% economic growth rate last year while the U.S. only grew 3.4%. Moreover, China increased its R&D by 20% last year which is second only to the U.S.

Entreprenership is alive and well in China in that the number of patent applications filed in China in 2005 is more than the U.S. in the same year. 2 million students graduated with engineering degrees annually in China, although without detailing exactly what skills in involved weakens the case for Chinese strength. They are voting with the feet, to return to China, so they must prefer their native country to the U.S.

Although individual products may not be all that revealing. They are only as good as the last fad, more interestingly, Shen's note that China is developing national technology standards that the country's government is pushing to be adopted internationally is more intriguing.

In the light of a tragedy: electronic messaging systems are an essential tool of public safety

Messaging system companies offer effective electronic messaging systems that are essential tools of public safety on campus.

Mobile Campus Incorporated markets an advertiser-supported campus text-messaging system that is otherwise free to affiliated universities. This is a free service capable of immediately and simultaneously alerting students, university employees, and others via text messages on cell phones.

Netpresenter Incorporated is a XML-based screen-saver and pop-up notification service.

MIR3 provides emergency notification technology.

ClearTXT is a mobile messaging provider to keep students and faculty informed during emergencies.

Graphical MyMaps supports point-and-click construction of interactive Google Maps.

Google delivers a maps mashup tool for non-Techies and I've adapted this development for an educational use. I teach a course entitled World History II, for example, and students can now create an interactive map geared to learning geographical sites of importance for the course. I can check their progress and the sites that they created in a public file available on Google.

Previously these mashup tools were only available to programmers through mashup capabilities that have been available for several years to developers via application programming interfaces (APIs).

However, this handy tool allows those less knowledgable about technology to still benefit from it.

The feature, called My Maps, is designed to let users who don't have formal programming knowledge to create, annotate, and publish online maps on the Google Maps platform. Developers have created over 35,000 Google Maps mashups, marrying the Google mapping platform with external data sources such as where users can find information on apartments for rent, bike routes, hotels, gas station fuel prices, parking garage fares, and so on.

Very helpfully, My Maps has a graphical, drag-and-drop interface that lets users create a map, add placemarks to it, as well as draw lines and shapes. Users can also add notes, photos, audio clips and videos to placemarks.

Users can label "public" the maps they create, but they can also keep maps private by tagging them "unlisted" so they are only available for viewing by people they choose to share them with.

In addition to My Maps, Google is also adding KML files to its Maps search engine. KML stands for Keyhole Markup Language and it's the language used to create data files for both Google Maps and its sister desktop application Google Earth. KML overlays have been created by casual users as well as by large organizations like Discovery Networks, the U.S. National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution and National Geographic.

What is the financial driver here? Kelsey Group expects advertisers to spend $11.1 billion in 2011 to market their goods and services in local search engines, compared with $4.1 billion last year, an average annual growth of 22.3 percent.

On Throwing Down Gauntlets, Iraq

Let's consider a new work:

Can Might Make Rights?: Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions by Jane Stromseth, David Wippman, and Rosa Brooks, on Cambridge University Press.

This book is critical because is it not clear that the world's major power is limiting its capabilities in regards to peacemaking after conflict?

Why is American policy so apparently mired?

Americans seem dazzled by sound bites: ""Bush lied, people died," "Support the troops," "No Blood for Oil."

I don't buy it.

In 1983, Richard J. Barnet wrote an excellent book, "The Alliance: America-Europe-Japan Makers of the Postwar World, in which he hauntingly anticipates the criticisms of American Presidents and policies; yet, the world recovered from the most devastating war ever seen.

Moreover, Japan and Germany were the bitterest of enemies of the U.S., yet they are considered genuine successes. Was it our enlightened supervision that totally changed their governments to democracies reflecting the will of the people and making them good neighbors?

What happened then in Haiti? East Timor? Somalia? Bosnia? Rwanda? Afghanistan? Iraq?

The authors of this volume clearly identify some prerequisites to establish the rule of law in post-intervention societies: security, judicial reform, and a competent, uncorrupted police force. In Iraq, the insurgents dominate news coverage with their car bombs and kidnappings.

"Public order, at least outside of a police state, rests on a societal consensus about the legitimacy of state institutions and confidence in the capacity of such institutions to deliver basic services," according to the authors.

Pity the Iraqi people, who are brutalized in the middle between a foreign power and the elusive insurgents.

The message of this book is that an international force can go in knowing everything it must do, but that this doesn't guarantee success.

Consider one salient point: in many of these countries, the rule of law is "elusive to begin with, and striving for the rule of law requires a constant juggling act on the part of the interveners. It is little wonder that so many past efforts in this area have been so disappointing."

Should Americans conclude that the Iraqi situation was a preordained debacle? I don't think so. The first step in understanding post-war Iraq is to appreciate that even under the best of conditions, post-war settlements are precarious at best.

What I wish the authors would have stressed, and Barnett makes clear in his work, is the crucial aspect of native leaders who step up to the plate on behalf of their own countries.

The earlier post-war successess are just as attributable to they dynamism of Herrs Adenauer and Brandt, and the docility of Hirohito.

If there is a gauntlet to be thrown, it should be thrown down towards Iraqi leaders who to date have not produced anyone of their statesmanship.

Browser Wars

A 5 April 2007 report from Computerworld reports that Windows Vista "more than doubled its market share in March from the prior month, while the share of computers running Mac OS X fell for the first time in nine months, according to statistics released today by market research firm Net Applications."

This no doubt marks the end of Mac's highpoint of penetration for its much heralded new OS.

Vista has had limited success itself but it still improved its standing vis a vis Mac. Although in comparison with the earlier XP release Vista, eclipsed the 17 million licenses for XP it had sold in its first two months of general release. Vista has been around, at least for consumers, for only two months: to businesses for four months. Some analysts predict that most conversions from XP won't be the norm until 2009.

More importantly, research by Net Applications shows Internet Explorer's share continuing to lose ground to Firefox: IE enjoyed a 78.57% share in March, down from 79.09% in February. Firefox gained nearly a whole percentage point, going from 14.18% to 15.10%. Trailing behind all is Opera which ranked 4th with 0.80% while Netscape fell again, to 0.70%.

Pelosian Diplomacy

Graphic source: Atlas Shrugged.
Syrian President Bashar Assad met with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in Damascus although I note that Pelosi did nothing to negotiate the release of the British soldiers held for the past two weeks by Iran. I wonder if this is the new era of Middle Eastern diplomacy promised by Pelosi. To be an adroit force in Middle Eastern politics during the post-Bush era Pelosi will need to demonstrate a more effective application of her policies. For example, a Presidential hopeful, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, proved himself useful in hostage negotiations. In 1984, Jackson successfully secured the release of a Navy pilot held in Syria. Moreover, in 1991, he helped secure the release of 500 "international guests" held in Iraq and in 1999, he worked to convince Yugoslavia to release three U.S. soldiers held there during the Kosovo conflict. Finally, Jackson involved himself in hostage situations in Iraq.