Your Daily Read

1. Google's Geospatial Ethnographic Data FAIL

2. The best thing you'll read about the challenges of being a soldier in Afghanistan you'll read this month (H/T Ghosts of Alexander)

Your Daily Read

1. The most remote place on Earth?

2. Michael Oren to be Israel's Ambassador to the US - power, faith, or fantasy?

Your Daily Read

1. They Knew Then - how World War II Germany treated the Holocaust as an open secret.

2. Think Different - Uses of the iPod Touch at war

Your Daily Read

1. A history of chess by mail and telegraph; the first known game of chess by mail was in 1116 between Henry I of England and Louis VI of France!

2. Another victory for incompatibilism; subatomic particles have free will - "if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic—the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe."  

Your Daily Read

1. A carrying capacity model for vampire-human predation

2. John McHugh reports on problems with the ANA 

Your Daily Read

1.  Why Afghanistan isn't the "graveyard of empires" - or at least, not all of them.

2. "Mature wisdom often resembles being too tired" - how Jimmy Carter made one of his best decisions about Chinese relations when awoken in the middle of the night.

Your Daily Read

1. Attn "pomocons": The rise of an unending issues-based partisanship is the death of intellectualism. But maybe that's a good thing? Ambiguous conclusion. 

2. What happens when prepublication copies of controversial papers get spread online; academic criticism's response loop gets sped up, both for good and for ill. 

Your Daily Read

1. A very Agrarian-Studies-esque argument that Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution developed crops that were ideal for the type of farming conducted by confiscatory landlords, but that small farmers don't get nearly the same yields. Calling all Jim Scott fans....

2. Andrew Exum on how CT and COIN policies can be usefully combined. Builds effectively on what CNAS has already written to say some new and interesting things. 

Your Daily Read

1. Taliban parasitism of NSP funds in Afghanistan

2. Center for American Progress weighs in on Afghanistan

3. Lyall and Wilson argue that mechanized armies lack the COIN knowledge acquired by foraging

Your Daily Read

1. John Rawls and Religion

2. The econ major as the "just right" signaling mechanism

Your Daily Read

1. Advanced document reconstruction technology aids human rights prosecutions in Guatemala

2. Game theory for troops in Afghanistan 

Your Daily Read

1. FM 3-24.2, "Tactics in Counterinsurgency."

2. Why "carrots and sticks" is a metaphor that harms public diplomacy