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The New York Times: Disunion
Non-member price: $55.66
Publisher's Summary
A major new collection of modern commentary - from scholars, historians, and Civil War buffs - on the significant events of the Civil War, culled from The New York Times' popular Disunion online journal.
Since its debut on November 6, 2010, Disunion, The New York Times' acclaimed journal about the Civil War, has published hundreds of original articles and won multiple awards, including "Best History Website" from the New Media Institute and the History News Network. Following the chronology of the secession crisis and the Civil War, the contributors to Disunion, who include modern scholars, journalists, historians, and Civil War buffs, offer ongoing daily commentary and assessment of the Civil War as it unfolded.
Now, for the first time, this fascinating and historically significant commentary has been gathered together and organized in one volume. In The New York Times: Disunion, historian Ted Widmer has selected more than 100 articles that cover events beginning with Lincoln's presidential victory through the Emancipation Proclamation. Topics include everything from Walt Whitman's wartime diary to the bloody guerrilla campaigns in Missouri and Kansas. Esteemed contributors include William Freehling, Adam Goodheart, and Edward Ayers, among others.
The book also compiles new essays that have not been published on the Disunion site, by contributors and well-known historians such as David Blight, Gary Gallagher, and Drew Gilpin Faust. Topics include the perspective of African-American slaves and freed men on the war, the secession crisis in the Upper South, the war in the West (that is, past the Appalachians), the war in Texas, the international context, and Civil War-era cartography.
What listeners say about The New York Times: Disunion
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
- BVerité
- 17-03-2015
Excellent audiobook! Love this format!
Enthralling collection of essays about the US Civil War. Lots of little known facts, and fresh look at all aspects of the controversy.
Incredibly entertaining. Expertly narrated!
Definitely don't pass this one up!
5 people found this helpful
- Cary
- 26-04-2016
Disunion Review
Excellent written account of many historic issues not covered in many Civil War books I have read to date. Dates and time lines are given which helped keep me in proper perspective.
These were issues taken from actual writings, newspaper articles, diaries, letters and some historians.
Of particular interest were excerpts from participants' memoirs and actual Civil War Reunions that were held after the War and some of the comments made by those who participated. I thought Pickett's comments at a Gettysburg Reunion was a classic.
I would recommend this book for everyone looking for Civil War facts you won't just find everywhere.
2 people found this helpful
- kenneth
- 11-03-2015
loved it
had a hard time hearing the female narrator but otherwise great it was very entertaining
1 person found this helpful
- Carter Merkle
- 21-01-2014
The Details of History
Would you listen to The New York Times: Disunion again? Why?
To review and retain more of the details about the events leading up to the Civil War.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The book is a collection of historical essays. I don't know that I could pick a favorite character.
Which scene was your favorite?
As this is a collection of short stories and essays, I don't have a favorite scene.
Any additional comments?
The New York Times has brought dozens of the critical details about the Civil War through different authors and in so doing has brought a clearer understanding about the events, ideas and the various causes to the war. Some are better told than others, but what strikes me is that each reader will probably like different parts depending on personal preferences about what kinds of trivia interest him or her the most.
1 person found this helpful
- John
- 04-09-2015
One of the Civil War books you MUST read
A collection of over 100 short essays on very specific topics. ...excellent! a must !
2 people found this helpful
- Elanety
- 09-08-2019
Great Listen!!
Loved the historical content; the personal insight from the family's & survivors. Overall narration was fantastic and I most certainly would recommend!


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Battle RoyaleBy Susan Marks
Digital Rights Management and the Bottom Line
Sony had a problem. The hit British rock band, Oasis, wanted to create buzz for its latest CD, Heathen Chemistry, by promoting certain songs before the CD was to hit store shelves last month. Trouble was, the band's record company, Big Brother Recordings Ltd., an arm of Sony Music Entertainment Inc., knew that giving fans advance access to music tracks would be tantamount to profit suicide. The songs would surely find their way online and onto various peer-to-peer networks, letting millions of people download them. Not only would that cool anticipation for the new album; actual sales also would suffer.
Then came an ideaand an important new test of thinking in the post-Napster world of digital commerce. On June 23, nearly two million Britons opened their Sunday edition of the London Times and found a free CD containing three not-yet-released song clips from the band's new album.
But this was no ordinary promotional CD: Using new digital content controls, Sony had encoded it with instructions that, in effect, banned people from playing the three clips for more than just a few times on their home PCs. Fans also were unable to copy the music file and post it to file-sharing networksthereby making it harder to steal. Oasis fans who wanted to hear more had to link to the band's Web site and preorder the new album from U.K.-based retailer HMVor wait until it was released. The idea: Use software code not to ban, but to create buzz for new products without getting burned in the process.
Did it work for Oasis? Preorders of the album exceeded company expectations by 30,000 during the week following the Sunday Times' promotion, and Oasis' record company gained data from 50,000 fans who registered onlinenew information that could be used to sell more CDs in the future. HMV was able to raise the number of visitors to its retail Web site, and even the Sunday Times was able to score a win in the deal: Circulation that day was 300,000its second-highest Sunday circulation ever.
Guarding Data
Guarding Data
With theft of intellectual property estimated in the billions last year, Sony appears to have found a way to hinder cyberthieves by arming its music with digital content controls that regulate use. Says Scott Burnett, marketing director of IBM's Digital Media, which helped Sony on the project, "Digital content controls can be used to create super-distribution rights and tie them not just to music but to any type of information, allowing it to be sharedbut only under certain conditions. The opportunities for businesses of all types are enormous."
Sony is not alone in contemplating the possibilities. Law firms, financial services companies and publishers are also getting into the actto thwart theft, yesbut also to rethink marketing strategy and expand the use of online collaboration to create products with less worry over leaks. Indeed, what had been seen as a movement to halt pro-Napster forces dead in their tracks has evolved into a new way to sell across a variety of industries. From media and communications powerhouse Sony to animal health researcher Vetstream Ltd., some companies are no longer so afraid to see the Net as a viable distribution channel, and are willing to experiment with a slew of expensive new software and strategies aimed at fighting theft, ensuring privacy, encouraging collaborationand creating new business models.
It's no wonder interest in digital content controls is growing. In a September 2002 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 138 companies said they lost between $53 billion and $59 billion in 2001 from theft of their intellectual property and proprietary information. The most commonly cited areas of theft? Research, customer lists and financial data. And the greatest impact of such thefts were increased legal fees, loss of revenue and loss of competitive advantage. Further, while three fourths of those surveyed said their company's intellectual property was vital to their success, only 45 percent said management was concerned about information loss and was taking the necessary precautions. Some companies, though, are starting to see some results.
Congressional Quarterly Inc., for example, says that the number of people who subscribe to its CQ Daily Monitor rose by 7 percent last year, thanks to the use of new digital content controls. Meanwhile, software game maker Electronic Arts says in-house controls on digital content, which limit distribution of original artwork beyond company walls, convinced EA executives to boost its use of online collaboration among far-flung employees to produce computer games. This has speeded time to marketby weeks for some products, says CIO Marc West.
Not Just for Music
Not Just for Music
Companies outside the entertainment industry, meanwhile, are testing digital content controls to see if they can generate new customer leads. Houston-based financial services firm Simmons & Company International, for example, is tracking who is getting its buy/sell recommendations over the Web for free. Explains IT vice president Lenny Schad: "We can follow the path of our reports online to get an idea of potential customers."
Joshua Duhl, a senior consultant with technology researcher IDC, predicts a rise of nearly 60 percent in sales of digital content control software over the next four years, to almost $1 billion by 2006. Driving those numbers, Duhl says, is the recent and aggressive push by heavy-hitters like IBM and Microsoft Corp. to create, test and market the new technologies.
And momentum is growing in other ways. In February, IBM opened what it calls its Digital Media Factory to develop new digital content controls for diverse types of companies, from hospitals in need of ways to transmit sensitive data online in compliance with new federal privacy rules, to airline makers wanting to transmit jetliner safety data from field inspectors to headquarters without leaks to rivals. "Napster and the MP3 revolution lit a fire under the entertainment industry, but it also woke up other types of businesses to the consequences of failing to keep control of some information," says IBM's Burnett. "Executives are starting to think about how they're going to allow for distribution of digital content within their worlds. What should we do as our content and capabilities move increasingly to the Net or to a digital platform? Content controls will enable us to create whole new business models." Jeffrey Hunker, dean of the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University, agrees, adding: "The whole issue of digital data controls is one of a handful of the most important issues that will shape the nature of IT as a foundation for our economy and society."
To be sure, many people still don't believe that sharing files over the Web constitutes piracy or that there should be restrictions on what is distributed there. You can give a friend a CD; why shouldn't you be able to share it online? But companies that aren't experimenting with new control technologies could be hurting themselves, says Mike McGuire, emerging technologies and platforms analyst with Gartner Inc. "If it's on your network, and it's your property or someone else's, you're going to be dealing with digital content controls, either now or later," he says.
Electronic Logbooks
Electronic Logbooks
Stripped to their essence, digital content controls comprise a variety of technology encryption schemes with built-in e-business cash registers or logbooks that show or govern who's using whatand when, and for how long. Content is encoded, and those who own the content give users a key that requires them to do somethingpay a fee, perhaps, or provide an e-mail address. Digital content controls deliver the protection, but it's up to the content owners to set the conditions. For example, vendor ContentGuard Inc., in which Microsoft has invested heavily, uses a "multiple key" approach. Anyone who receives bootleg content would have to crack into it all over againin effect, preventing hackers from distributing what they've just won from hacking. Digital controls vendor Authentica Inc., on the other hand, lets a content owner like Simmons encode its data so that it essentially self-destructs if forwarded, or if terms of use are violated. The controls also allow for some flexibility: Simmons can leak some databut keep the rest, a decision that took a lot of discussion to reach, Schad says.
At Simmons, company executives originally just wanted to cut publishing costs, but worried that research reports would fall into the wrong hands if Simmons were to distribute them more cheaply online. "You send stuff off to a client, but then, gee, he might be turning around and e-mailing it to his brother-in-law who works for your rival, who then forwards it on to God only knows who," Schad says. "We wanted to be able to control and specify who gets our information. We wanted to say they couldn't forward stuff or, in some cases, even print it out. We wanted to take control of our information."
At first, Simmons considered using digital content controls to prohibit all content from being forwarded. But after much discussion, the company decided that a few leaks might not be so bad. "We didn't want to put the handcuffs on so tight that the customers felt like, you know, our company has turned into Big Brother and people wouldn't want to do business with us anymore," Schad says. Indeed, "we wanted to see where this information was ending up, as a way to find out if there's other business out there that we should be tapping into." The company has been testing the technology for months, and later this month it plans to go live with a new e-mail system that tracks reports sent to clients. Schad expects to generate at least several hundred sales leads from the experiment.
Meanwhile, Schad says, Simmons has achieved its original objective, cutting publishing costs in half, or by about $150,000 so far this year. Next year, he says, it will be more. "We're a small company, and the economic conditions of the last year have hit most investment banking firms hard, so you're trying to go after whatever kind of cost-cutting you can," he says.
Digital content controls can also help speed response times to inquiries and requests for permissions, cutting by days, if not weeks, the time it takes a company to produce a new film, book or piece of music. Chan Preston, the managing director of the digital content management practice at KPMG Consulting Inc., says Net-distribution methods run head-on into paper-based processes that most organizations still follow to locate a piece of content's rights of use and ownership.
Preston says large companies might have literally millions of digital assets, each with their own set of usage rights and permissions filed in paper records. At Simon & Schuster Inc., for example, CIO Anne Mander has created a Digital Asset Library to centralize materials such as book jackets, author photos and sales sheetsdata previously stored on zip drives or in someone's file drawerinto a single database. Mander says it's eliminated the need for dozens of employees whose jobs were to simply find this information and copy it each time one of S&S's executives requested it. "Much of this information would be scattered all over the company," Mander says. "Now it's in one central place, and we're getting faster now at producing books as a result."
Battle Royale
Battle Royale
Yet for all of its potential, digital content controls are still in their infancyand they're controversial. Privacy and civil liberties activists, for example, say digital content controls might end up chilling the free exchange of ideas over the Web while at the same time subjecting customers to technologies that would track their movements online, beyond those tied directly to how they use a piece of content. "As a nation, we haven't yet come to any sort of reconciliation about what an effective model is," says Carnegie Mellon's Hunker.
But the chief reason digital content controls aren't more widespread yet is the lack of technology standards governing their use and design. "In some systems, it's hard to exchange content [encoded with controls] from one system to another," says Charles Tobermann, vice president of digital media technologies for Vivendi Universal Net, the Internet arm of Paris-based Vivendi Universal.
Standards Ahead
One central standard, though, may not be far off. For more than a year, a variety of organizations with names like IPR Systems and OASISnot the rock band, but a consortium of companies seeking standardshave been floating proposals. In recent months, the standards battle has boiled down to a fight between the giantsMicrosoft on one side and IBM and streaming media technology developer RealNetworks Inc. and its partners on the other. IBM's digital control technologies, for examplewhat the rock band Oasis and Sony used to create buzz for the group's new CDis designed on open source software code, making it compatible with diverse systems at a variety of companies. Meanwhile, ContentGuard, a company spun out of Xerox Corp. in 2000 and backed by Microsoft, is focused primarily on promoting its chosen standard, Extensible Rights Markup Language, or XrML, a set of rules that codifies the ways proprietary software can exchange information using digital content controls. For the first time in May, the Rights Language Technical Committee of the OASIS group met with major content owners to push for consensus.
While it's all getting sorted out, KPMG's Preston suggests that companies might want to decide early on whether they can profit from some form of digital controls. At some companies, Preston says, CIOs have formed cross-department teams to determine which company data is proprietary and which might generate revenue, such as copyrights, patents and trademarks as well as e-versions of contracts, leases, research and even back-of-the-napkin drawings for new designs. Chances are, it's all stored in any number of databases somewhere. "Many companies are holding digital assets they don't even realize are assets," says Emily Freeman, a vice president at AIG eBusiness Risk Solutions, a New York-based insurance company.
Yet to many in the digital content control movement, the most promising short-term revenue-producing use of the technologies today is in marketing. IBM's Burnett says IBM is seeing more demand for the technology as a way to create online buzz for products in advance of sales.
Down the road? Content metering, say analysts, that uses digital content controls to charge people for how long they use content, creating new business models for online video rental shops, for example, or online book rentals. Also on the horizon are wireless applications. In July, IBM announced it would collaborate with Nokia to put content controls onto a variety of wireless devices for both business and consumer applications. Says Carnegie Mellon's Hunker: "I think the biggest thing Napster did was teach us the limits of our imaginations. A lot of companies felt defeated, and shied away from the Web. That's starting to change now." Adds Simmons' Schad: "When it comes to online piracy now, the gloves are coming off." His new motto? "Don't get madget even."
Susan J. Marks is a Denver-based freelance writer. Additional reporting was done by Debra D'Agostino, CIO Insight's copy chief.
Digital Armor
Digital Armor
A wide range of new technology is being developed to prevent online piracy of ideas and creative work, from music to business research. Some embed usage rights into the information being distributed, restricting how it can be used, what can be seen and how often. Other controls use software codes to notify content owners each time his or her work changes hands or is used in a new way. Some even force data to self-destruct if used in violation of agreements governing use. Here are some of the most common:
Uses an algorithm to create a secure container around a piece of content and allows the content owner to determine how that content will be used. Those usage terms, sometimes known as Digital Rights Management agreements, are then enforced by software.
advantage | Always-on encryption keeps content away from third parties while in user hands and prevents data from being modified.
disadvantage | Integration with other software may be hard. Also, terms-of-use enforcement could turn off some users.
Software that binds content users to specific ownership and licensing rules dictating how digital data can be used, enabling intellectual property owners to collect royalties and identify violators.
advantage | Gives content owners more control over who sees and uses their information.
disadvantage | It's not foolproof; some password and license-sharing still goes on.
Software that allows owners of content to insert a digital "stamp" or unique identifier into their data, which acts as a copyright statement and travels with it throughout its use. The original file is stored, and the watermarked file is distributed for use.
advantage | Provides a simple way to prove ownership of content; deters some infringement and unauthorized use.
disadvantage | Some watermarks can be hacked and erased from the file. Insertion requires complex and sophisticated programming.
Software and services that process financial transactions such as debiting and crediting accounts, provide financial verification and authentication, and manage royalties.
advantage | Ensures more secure financial transactions.
disadvantage | Lack of standards may hamper widespread interoperability and systems integration.
Software and services for tracking and reporting who has what content, how it has been used, when it was used, and for what purpose. Includes audit trails, logs and usage reports, and digital fingerprinting.
advantage | Allows for content metering based on time and detailed usage conditions. Also enables automatic product feedback.
disadvantage | Employees, strategic partners and customers may resent limits on viewing certain content and technologies that closely track human behaviors.
SOURCES: IDC; CIO Insight
Fighting Back
Fighting Back
Businesses are using new content controls not only to curb theft but also to save money, boost productivity and plump up the bottom line. Here's how:
company | Congressional Quarterly Inc.
challenge | Washington, D.C.-based publisher of government news and analysis sought to stop unauthorized sharing of its subscription-only CQ Daily Monitor.
solution | Web-based delivery with user-access controls has enabled CQ to increase subscriptions by 7 percent and reduce unauthorized copying by 5 percent to 10 percent.
company | Electronic Arts, Inc.
challenge | The $1.7 billion game software developer was reluctant to do more in-house collaboration online thanks to employee piracy concerns.
solution | Software that wraps game designs in an encryption envelope helps EA boost online collaboration, speeding time to market.
company | Simmons & Co. International
challenge | This small financial services firm sought to cut publication costs by moving to more distribution via the Web, but worried about security.
solution | Tracking software lets Simmons know who is using its productsenabling it to determine unauthorized use and identify potential new customers in order to boost revenues. Side benefit: a reduction of $150,000 this year in paper publication costs, now that execs feel more comfortable increasing digital distribution of corporate research.
company | Vetstream, Ltd.
challenge | The U.K.-based animal medical research firm needed an inexpensive way to boost revenues, chiefly by targeting distribution of its subscription-only reports to the more than 17,000 veterinarians in the U.S.
solution | Software that provides access only to licensed users has enabled the company to sell online subscriptions, which Vetstream hopes will boost revenues five-fold.
company | Simon & Schuster
challenge | Book jacket, author photos and sales data for each book were scattered all over the company in paper files and on zip drives.
solution | A new "digital asset library" centralizes data and stipulates terms of use, enabling easy access and faster book production. Fewer employees are now needed to retrieve data on demand.
company | Off Wall Street Consulting Group
challenge | This publisher of buy/sell recommendations for professional money managers had trouble controlling access to its $50,000-per-year-and-up, subscription-only reports. Faxed delivery led to frequent copying by analysts and data leaks that would affect share prices.
solution | Encrypted Inter-net delivery and post-delivery controls like automatic watermarking cut leaks and resulted in a 20 percent hike in subscriptions in 2001.
Web Sites
Internet Digital Rights Management, an independent research group formed to track issues and technologies being developed to control content distribution over the Internet
"Make New Code Not War," by Lawrence Lessig, June 2002, CIO Insight
"Trends in Proprietary Information Loss" Survey Report, Sept. 2002, PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and ASIS Foundation
Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology
By Bill Rosenbatt, Bill Trippe and Stephen Mooney
John Wiley & Sons, 2001

subset: commoncrawl


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The Atlantic in Focus series just had a photo article on the dangerous levels of pollution in Beijing.
Alan Taylor's article titled, "China's Toxic Sky" shows startling photos of smog with levels so bad — at one point measured 40 times recommended safety levels.
Read more: here.
Here is one Beijing […]


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Some seriously pretty tans and browns today.. aren't they lovely?
1. Baby Deer Print from The Animal Print Shop (via)
2. Brass Vase Miniature from Artilleriet (via Mrs. French)
3. 2014 Weekly Planner from Actspressions (via)
4. Wild Mushroom Candy from Andie's Specialty Sweets (via My Little Fabric)
5. Linnea's Lights Candle from Terrain (via)
6. Spicy Roasted Cashews from Fed & Fit (via Bomisch)


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In 1993, MIT cryptography researchers Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali shared in the first Gödel Prize for theoretical computer science for their work on interactive proofs — a type of mathematical game in which a player attempts to extract reliable information from an unreliable interlocutor.
In their groundbreaking 1985 paper on the topic, Goldwasser, Micali and the University of Toronto's Charles Rackoff '72, SM '72, PhD '74 proposed a particular kind of interactive proof, called a zero-knowledge proof, in which a player can establish that he or she knows some secret information without actually revealing it. Today, zero-knowledge proofs are used to secure transactions between financial institutions, and several startups have been founded to commercialize them.
At the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Theory of Computing in May, Micali, the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, and graduate student Pablo Azar will present a new type of mathematical game that they're calling a rational proof; it varies interactive proofs by giving them an economic component. Like interactive proofs, rational proofs may have implications for cryptography, but they could also suggest new ways to structure incentives in contracts.
"What this work is about is asymmetry of information," Micali adds. "In computer science, we think that valuable information is the output of a long computation, a computation I cannot do myself." But economists, Micali says, model knowledge as a probability distribution that accurately describes a state of nature. "It was very clear to me that both things had to converge," he says.
A classical interactive proof involves two players, sometimes designated Arthur and Merlin. Arthur has a complex problem he needs to solve, but his computational resources are limited; Merlin, on the other hand, has unlimited computational resources but is not trustworthy. An interactive proof is a procedure whereby Arthur asks Merlin a series of questions. At the end, even though Arthur can't solve his problem himself, he can tell whether the solution Merlin has given him is valid.
In a rational proof, Merlin is still untrustworthy, but he's a rational actor in the economic sense: When faced with a decision, he will always choose the option that maximizes his economic reward. "In the classical interactive proof, if you cheat, you get caught," Azar explains. "In this model, if you cheat, you get less money."
Complexity connection
Research on both interactive proofs and rational proofs falls under the rubric of computational-complexity theory, which classifies computational problems according to how hard they are to solve. The two best-known complexity classes are P and NP. Roughly speaking, P is a set of relatively easy problems, while NP contains some problems that, as far as anyone can tell, are very, very hard.
Problems in NP include the factoring of large numbers, the selection of an optimal route for a traveling salesman, and so-called satisfiability problems, in which one must find conditions that satisfy sets of logical restrictions. For instance, is it possible to contrive an attendance list for a party that satisfies the logical expression (Alice OR Bob AND Carol) AND (David AND Ernie AND NOT Alice)? (Yes: Bob, Carol, David and Ernie go to the party, but Alice doesn't.) In fact, the vast majority of the hard problems in NP can be recast as satisfiability problems.
To get a sense of how rational proofs work, consider the question of how many solutions a satisfiability problem has — an even harder problem than finding a single solution. Suppose that the satisfiability problem is a more complicated version of the party-list problem, one involving 20 invitees. With 20 invitees, there are 1,048,576 possibilities for the final composition of the party. How many of those satisfy the logical expression? Arthur doesn't have nearly enough time to test them all.
But what if Arthur instead auctions off a ticket in a lottery? He'll write down one perfectly random list of party attendees — Alice yes, Bob no, Carol yes and so on — and if it satisfies the expression, he'll give the ticketholder $1,048,576. How much will Merlin bid for the ticket?
Suppose that Merlin knows that there are exactly 300 solutions to the satisfiability problem. The chances that Arthur's party list is one of them are thus 300 in 1,048,576. According to standard econometric analysis, a 300-in-1,048,576 shot at $1,048,576 is worth exactly $300. So if Merlin is a rational actor, he'll bid $300 for the ticket. From that information, Arthur can deduce the number of solutions.
First-round knockout
The details are more complicated than that, and of course, with very few exceptions, no one in the real world wants to be on the hook for a million dollars in order to learn the answer to a math problem. But the upshot of the researchers' paper is that with rational proofs, they can establish in one round of questioning — "What do you bid?" — what might require millions of rounds using classical interactive proofs. "Interaction, in practice, is costly," Azar says. "It's costly to send messages over a network. Reducing the interaction from a million rounds to one provides a significant savings in time."
"I think it's yet another case where we think we understand what's a proof, and there is a twist, and we get some unexpected results," says Moni Naor, the Judith Kleeman Professorial Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. "We've seen it in the past with interactive proofs, which turned out to be pretty powerful, much more powerful than you normally think of proofs that you write down and verify as being." With rational proofs, Naor says, "we have yet another twist, where, if you assign some game-theoretical rationality to the prover, then the proof is yet another thing that we didn't think of in the past."
Naor cautions that the work is "just at the beginning," and that it's hard to say when it will yield practical results, and what they might be. But "clearly, it's worth looking into," he says. "In general, the merging of the research in complexity, cryptography and game theory is a promising one."
Micali agrees. "I think of this as a good basis for further explorations," he says. "Right now, we've developed it for problems that are very, very hard. But how about problems that are very, very simple?" Rational-proof systems that describe simple interactions could have an application in crowdsourcing, a technique whereby computational tasks that are easy for humans but hard for computers are farmed out over the Internet to armies of volunteers who receive small financial rewards for each task they complete. Micali imagines that they might even be used to characterize biological systems, in which individual organisms — or even cells — can be thought of as producers and consumers.


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EWTN Radio Teams Up With iHeartRadio
The digital radio service makes streaming radio available through the Internet, mobile devices and tablets.
The EWTN Global Catholic Radio Network is now available through iHeartRadio, the Clear Channel media company's digital radio service that makes streaming radio available through the Internet, mobile devices and tablets.
EWTN's president and CEO, Michael Warsaw, said the Catholic network is "pleased" to partner with iHeartRadio in order to "proclaim the Gospel message to an ever-expanding global audience."
"Our foundress, Mother Angelica, took the Lord's command to carry his message to the ends of the earth seriously. Our partnership with iHeartRadio enables us to carry on that legacy using the latest in digital technology," Warsaw said Nov. 8.
iHeartRadio gives users instant access to more than 1,000 broadcast and digital-only radio stations from 150 cities. It allows user-created custom stations for favorite artists and songs. The iHeartRadio mobile apps have been downloaded more than 125 million times, while iHeartRadio's free service has more than 115 million listening hours each month.
App users can find the EWTN station by searching the "Live Stations" section for "EWTN Radio." The app is available for mobile phones, the Kindle Fire, the Xbox 360 game system and Google TV.
"By adding EWTN, the leading Catholic media network, to the iHeartRadio platform, we continue to enhance iHeartRadio's offerings for users," said Brian LaKamp, president of digital for Clear Channel Media and Entertainment, Nov. 8.
"We want to be everywhere our listeners are, with a variety of programming options, and this agreement offers iHeartRadio users an even more interesting and diverse listening experience."
EWTN Global Catholic Network is available in 200 million-plus television households in more than 140 countries and territories. Its AM and FM radio networks have a U.S. affiliate base exceeding 200 stations and a worldwide shortwave radio station. The network already streams radio through its website.
Clear Channel Media and Entertainment serves 150 cities, with 850 radio stations. It has 239 million monthly listeners in the U.S.


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Posted: Apr 25, 2012
Head coach Jeff Franquet sits down with CCSUBlueDevils.com to discuss the Class of 2012 on the April 25th, edition of the Central Connecticut Softball Show. The show also previews the Blue Devils (25-17, 7-7 NEC) trip to Northeast Conference foes St. Francis (PA) and Robert Morris.
The Blue Devils are currently tied for fifth place in the NEC heading into this weekends action.


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DescriptionUse your Yo-yo to clear the balls! Make it through the levels, where trains of many-coloured balls flow around you in every direction.
- Aim with your mouse, and Josie will automatically rotate.
- Use your yo-yo to remove balls. When three or more balls come together, they burst.
- Fill the meter by bursting bubbles, and try to use as few shots as possible!


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New plant food: Good for indoor peas
DRAWING BY DEBORAH DERR McCLINTOCK
Q. Pick from the following the best nutrient-cocktail for your houseplants: a) beer b) milk c) soda pop d) urine. V. Sackville-West
A. d. Forget the drinks. They'd just add carbon and feed the soil microbes, multiplying their numbers and stealing nutrients, says William D. Bowman, environmental, population and organismic biologist at the University of Colorado.
Urine, on the other hand, will stimulate microbial activity that frees up nitrogen, often in short supply for plant growth. But don't deliver it straight. It will need to be diluted with water, unless you are very well hydrated.
Q. The ancient fear of being taken for dead and then buried alive has given way today to the nightmare of being kept alive indefinitely in a comatose state. But aren't there still circumstances where modern electrocardiography and electroencephalography erroneously fail to detect life? E.A. Poe
A. There are cases of severe exposure to cold or overdose of barbiturates or other drugs in which the usual sure indicators may fail, says Jan Bondeson in A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities. A French medical journal told of three suicide attempts where barbiturate overdoses led to erroneous death diagnoses. In one, the victim had "actually recovered while laid out in his coffin."
A man in Belgium was diagnosed as both heart and brain dead after severe exposure to cold; later he revived after being in a comatose state with a low heart rate.
Newspaper accounts also tell of people waking up on an autopsy table following overdoses of drugs while outdoors in the cold. Bondeson himself once observed a woman in the hospital in a comatose state with extremely low body temperature. An alcoholic, she had celebrated New Year's Eve with bottles of vodka while out on her balcony in freezing cold, and fell asleep.
"She was well nigh dead when brought in, her body temperature far below that considered, at the time, consistent with human life," he says. The policemen who brought her in considered her dead. Yet the electrocardiogram did reveal a heart rate, and gradual warming of her blood via a heart-lung machine saved her life. Her marked obesity, isolating her inner organs, probably saved her.
"When I told her she had cheated the Grim Reaper, hoping to wean her from the bottle and save her, she declared that she had indeed learned a lesson– 'Never again would she drink heavily– while seated outside in sub-zero temperatures'!"
Q. For math freaks: 1. Write the number 1 using all 10 digits once each (and any operational symbols). Sample using 3 digits: (3 + 2)/5 = 1. I. Newton
2. Write 1000 using only 8s (and the symbols).
3. Write 10 using only 9s (and the symbols).
2. (8888 - 888)/8 = 1000
3. 9 + 99/99 = 10 (These are not the only correct answers.)
Q. Life's a Great Cosmic Crap Shoot. Can you recap the astronomical odds we all had to beat in getting here? C. Darwin
A. Start with the 10,000,000,001 protons created in the early universe for every 10,000,000,000 antiprotons, says physicist Lawrence M. Krauss in The Physics of Star Trek. If it weren't for this one extra proton per 10 billion, matter and antimatter would have annihilated each other– end of tale. Post-Big Bang, there had to be just enough stuff to allow matter to clump together, but not so much that it would all fall back together from gravity a Big Crunch.
Now hang the stars in place, and give some of them planets, and the star in question (our sun) had to burn at least the 3.5 billion years it took to get life rolling here. Earth needed to be big enough to hold an atmosphere, with a history of sufficient volcanism to produce ample surface water, and with a moon massive enough or close enough to produce tidal pools to harbor life, but not disruptive daily tidal waves.
All of these had to happen, plus countless more. We are a test case. The fact that we exist proves life is possible. Knowing that life can originate here, the likelihood of it occurring elsewhere is vastly increased.
Send Strange questions to brothers Bill and Rich at email@example.com.


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Clicking this ad helps ensure we keep these resources free & updated
Designed to make it easy to test your avatar & header image designs across multiple sizes. Just modify the shared .psb files and sketch symbols and see updates applied across all files/sizes.
We've updated the designs to reflect the mid-2017 design update rolled out by Twitter. These changes include:
– Rounded avatars
– Rounded buttons
– Updated navigation
– Proportionally scaling cover images
– New icons and button styles
License: These files have been produced with the intention of helping fellow designers. We therefore request you do not repost them as your own downloadable resources, do not host the files in any other location, or attempt to sell these assets for personal gain. Share the love and spread the word.
The Twitter.com UI is responsive and so the exact proportions of the interface at different screen widths varies, so we have selected 3 common widths covering desktop, tablet and mobile. The twitter profile avatar dimensions are 500 x 500 px, which get resized into various smaller sizes for application throughout the UI . This higher resolution must allow for retina versions to be used in apps and is only seen by the user directly when they click on your profile image form your piffle page. The files have been well organised and labelled to help you when modifying it for you needs. These files have been made using the most recent versions of Adobe Photoshop CC and Sketch. If you have an older some features of the file may not work as expected. The UI in all the files have been remade from scratch using vector shapes, allowing the entire file to be scaled to any resolution. Wherever possible we have used shared .psb assets and symbols that can be replaced in one location and propagate everywhere across the separate files for each size; change once, applied everywhere.
We try to keep these files as up to date as possible. We'll always endeavour to update them quickly if changes affect the assets you need to create in order populate a profile.
This new page is a slightly more dynamic that previous twitter profiles. The size of the cover image is responsive flexing with the browser width, so we picked a width that represents the header photo asset at 100%. Any images you create and export will be at the required size for uploading. The size represented in the Twitter GUI shows how the image will appear at 1500px wide, which in a browser will crop the top & bottom. The source asset you are looking to upload will be 1500x500px – the size we have created the smart object in the PSD and Sketch file.
At this narrower width the header photo shrinks considerably a – so take this into consideration when designing your twitter profile header photo. Twitter's responsive desktop site only scale as far down as 950px (despite the header navigator continuing to adapt its form below this width). Accessing twitter.com in a browser on a mobile device invokes a separate mobile website. The assets you create will look quite different here, but we would recommend designing your header photo to best suit the desktop and mobile widths, as these are by far the most common use cases.
The most common use of twitter on mobile is via the native apps. The same assets are still used on every platform, but past desktop this is the second most common view of the assets you create, so we suggest making them scale down well to this size. This is where the header photo becomes a little problematic when trying to display finer details as it been made so small, and UI has also been overlaid. We therefore recommend not adding small text into your header photo (avoid using text altogether unless large & short) as it it will likely be illegible at this size.
This is what these files are for – testing your designs an ensuring they work across all sizes.
We love to make and share. There's always been great resources available online, here's our opportunity for us to share with you and to give back to the community.
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ESA's newest press release was published today reporting loud and clear that ATV Johannes Kepler is ready for launch to the International Space Station on Tuesday, 15 February, at 22:08 GMT (23:08 CET) from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The unmanned vessel will deliver essential supplies and reboost the Station during its mission lasting three-and-a-half months.
ESA TV has aired today an excellent background video highlighting the cargo loading activities (we'll have a detailed report & photos from Kourou in the blog within tomorrow). Watch the video below (very nice job by our colleague Martin Ransom) and read the rest of the press release after the jump.
[flv:cargo_tv_01-27-11_flv.flv 600 352]
Video credit: ESA 2011 – Access high-resolution version via ESA TV
French-language version (WMV) here
The launch will be covered live from Kourou for broadcasters and on the Web, and celebrated at a launch event in Bremen, Germany.
Europe's second ATV
Johannes Kepler is the first operational ATV, following the highly successful Jules Verne qualification flight in 2008. With a total mass of over 20 tonnes, it is the heaviest payload ever launched by Europe.
ATV is a highly sophisticated spacecraft, combining an autonomous free-flying platform, a manoeuvrable space vehicle and – when docked – a space station module.
To achieve an automated docking under the very tight safety constraints imposed by human spaceflight rules, ATV carries high-precision navigation systems, highly redundant flight software and a fully autonomous collision-avoidance system with its own independent power supplies, control and thrusters.
About 10 m high with a diameter of 4.5 m, ATV includes a 45-cubic m pressurised module and a Russian docking system, similar to those used on the Soyuz manned ferries and the Progress resupply ships.
With its solar wings deployed, ATV spans 22 m. Almost three times larger than Russia's Progress, it can also deliver about three times the cargo load.
Propellant and cargo for the ISS
On this first operational mission, ATV-2 is carrying over 7 tonnes of payload, including 4534 kg of propellant for International Space Station (ISS) reboost and attitude control.
Once docked to the ISS, this propellant will be used by ATV's own thrusters to raise the Station's orbit periodically in order to compensate for the natural decay caused by atmospheric drag.
It may also be used to move the ISS out of the way of potentially dangerous space debris that comes too close to the manned space complex.
ATV's payload includes almost 1600 kg of dry cargo, 850 kg of propellant for Russia's Zvezda module and 100 kg of oxygen.
Before leaving the ISS, in June, Johannes Kepler will be filled with waste bags and unwanted hardware by the crew. It will then be deorbited over the Southern Pacific Ocean and perform a controlled reentry to burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.
Exceptionally, no drinking water will be delivered because there is already plenty aboard the ISS. The water tanks will, though, be filled with liquid waste from the Station before departure.
ATV Johannes Kepler is named after the famous German astronomer and mathematician who lived in the 16th and 17th centuries. He first depicted the movement of planetary bodies in elliptical orbits, thus paving the way for Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation.
It is the second in a series of five spaceships developed as Europe's contribution to the operational costs of the ISS. Astrium Space Transportation is prime industrial contractor, leading a team of more than 30 contractors in 10 European countries.
Covering the launch
ESA TV is providing extensive coverage of the ATV mission. Several stories featuring the latest images and interviews from Kourou will be released on ESA TV's FTP server and via satellite on the Europe by Satellite (EbS) service. Already available are two Video News Releases covering the ATV-2 mission, with shots of the launch campaign in Kourou, and interviews in English, German, French and Swedish. The launch will be transmitted live from Kourou in cooperation with Arianespace. Later in the month, the docking with the ISS will also be available live via satellite. All details will be found on ESA TV's site: television.esa.int.
The latest high-resolution images can be found by registering on ESA's Photo Library for Professionals: www.esa-photolibrary.com
Questions on images for media can be directed to email@example.com
For media: Attending the launch event in Bremen
In cooperation with EADS Astrium and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), a media event for the launch will take place in Bremen, Germany. The briefing will begin at 17:00 and include visits to the ATV-3 and ATV-4 cleanrooms.
Media wanting to attend the event must register via mail to: email@example.com
More information about the event can be obtained by contacting EADS Astrium Communication, Ms Caroline Strothmann at +49 4215 394301.
For further information, please contact:
ESA Media Relations Office
Communication Department
Tel: + 33 1 53 69 72 99
Fax: + 33 1 53 69 76 90
Email: email@example.com


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A collection of scholarly works about individual liberty and free markets. A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.
Captain John Clarke was one of the officers of the New Model Army who met in general council at Putney in October 1647 to debate the constitutional settlement. Cromwell argued that the franchise should be strictly limited to men of property. He was challenged by Rainborough, Sexby, and Clarke who were representatives of the radical Leveller movement within the army. Clarke argued for a much broader franchise in elections based upon his notion of natural law and individual property rights
… the grand question of all is, whether or no it be the property of every individual person in the kingdom to have a vote in election[s]; and the ground [on which it is claimed] is the Law of Nature, which, for my part, I think to be that law which is the ground of all constitutions. Yet really properties are the foundation of constitutions, [and not constitutions of property]. For if so be there were no constitutions, yet the Law of Nature does give a principle [for every man] to have a property of what he has, or may have, which is not another man's. This [natural right to] property is the ground of meum and tuum. Now there may be inconveniencies on both hands, but not so great freedom [on either as is supposed—not] the greater freedom, as I conceive, that all may have whatsoever [they have a mind to]. And if it come to pass that there be a difference, and that the one [claimant] doth oppose the other, then nothing can decide it but the sword, which is the wrath of God.
About this Quotation:
The Putney Debates of October 1647 are one of those few revolutionary moments when the direction a nation might go in is being determined. Here is the vigorous discussion with the New Model Army over what kind of constitution they want the New Britain to have. Cromwell and others want to severely restrict the vote to the "better part" of property owners. He is courageously challenged by Captain John Clarke who states that constitutions are based on the natural right of property which all men have, and all men at least have a property in themselves and this entitles them to vote in any election.


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1. Top Chef/Project Runway (Bravo, 2006-present/Bravo & Lifetime, 2004-present)
After America's Next Top Model showed that there was an audience for a TV show about the fashion industry, Project Runway proved that ANTM fans weren't just looking at the pretty girls, but also the clothes. The basic Project Runway formula—sleep-deprived, half-drunk professionals competing in impossible challenges and displaying remarkable creativity—has remained durable even when the designers aren't the most talented. Yet in terms of quality competition and heated drama, Project Runway has been outpaced by the similar Top Chef, which replaces struggling fashion designers with promising young cooks. Maybe it's that the judging of fashion seems so capricious, while food is more pass/fail (either it tastes good or it doesn't), or maybe it's that Top Chef has become so prestigious in the culinary community that the contestant pool has become phenomenal. But for people who tune into reality competitions to watch gifted folks show their skills, Top Chef is now the genre standard.
2. Survivor/The Amazing Race (CBS, 2000-present/2001-present)
When the American version of Survivor debuted on CBS in the summer of 2000, it seemed more likely to be a catastrophe than a phenomenon. What possible long-term entertainment value could there be in watching a bunch of wannabe TV stars slowly starve to death on a remote beach? But from the moment the shamelessly devious Richard Hatch strolled naked across the sand (or more significantly, the moment he introduced the concept of the voting "alliance"), it was clear that with the right cast of characters and the right set of challenges, Survivor could be addictive—almost like a soap opera crossed with a game show crossed with a psychological experiment. Meanwhile, for those who prefer crazy stunts and intense competition to raw voyeurism, The Amazing Race has been serving as Survivor's classy cousin since 2001. Though Race has been rightly criticized for breezing through other cultures, and for gameplay that artificially bunches up the contestants, the relentlessness of any given episode (and the stress on the players) makes The Amazing Race edge-of-the-seat TV, and has won every Outstanding Reality-Competition Program Emmy ever awarded.
3. American Idol/So You Think You Can Dance (Fox, 2002-present/2005-present)
Every season, American Idol tests the patience of even its most devoted fans, exhausting us with the vanity of the judges, the undue cruelty to the untalented, and the tedium of hearing the same overplayed pop songs covered in the same beauty-pageant-ready way. And yet every season, a few genuinely talented singers emerge—often people who might not have otherwise gotten a second look in the industry—and a few times a season, one of those singers delivers the kind of stirring, high-wire performance that makes live TV such a thrill. American Idol remains one of the few communal "Did you see that last night?" shows remaining in a fragmented TV landscape. Quality-wise, though, American Idol could stand to learn a few things from its sister show So You Think You Can Dance. While roughly 75 percent of AI's performances—and 95 percent of the judges' comments—are dull, predictable and amateurish, SYTYCD has been consistently showcasing amazing young dancers performing in a variety of difficult, highly specialized styles. Nearly every week on the show, the dancers do something astonishing, and the judges educate the viewers about it without becoming unduly condescending, mean, or inscrutable. American Idol built the model for these kinds of shows, but So You Think You Can Dance has been perfecting it.
4. Airline/Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (A&E, 2004-05; Travel, 2005-present)
Being stuck in an airport? Hellish. Watching people stuck at an airport? Oddly compelling. Whether it's because anyone can identify with the frustration of dealing with intractable airline employees, or because anyone can identify with the difficulty of placating angry customers, during its two-year run, Airline made familiar conflicts into gripping television. On the flipside, Anthony Bourdain's travel/food show No Reservations has been dedicated to showing audiences people, places, and consumables that are largely unfamiliar, at least to the common American couch-dweller. Anchored by the irascible host's love of street food and the seedy side of history—as well as his disdain for touristy kitsch and corporate franchises—No Reservations has redefined two genres of docu-television simultaneously, bringing an offbeat magazine writer's sensibility to a medium usually dominated by bland, chirpy broadcast-journalism students.
5. I Bet You/televised poker (MOJO HD, 2007-08/every channel ever, all decade long)
In 2003, a Knoxville accountant named Chris Moneymaker parlayed a World Series Of Poker buy-in (won in an Internet tournament) into one of the most significant victories in the history of the game. His remarkable run at the WSOP—replayed incessantly on the ESPN family of networks—spurred a boom in online poker players and a flood of amateurs into major televised tournaments. It also spurred a glut of poker shows, and made household names out of dozens of previously obscure weirdoes, degenerates, and social misfits. It's because of the success of televised poker (for a few years, anyway) that card-playing buddies Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Antonio "The Magician" Esfandiari were able to land a deal for one of the damnedest, most delightful reality series of all time, the quasi-game-show I Bet You. In each half-hour episode, Laak and Esfandiari roam the streets of Las Vegas (or their other haunts), making ridiculous wagers and ragging on each other. Two seasons' worth of this glorious nothingness aired on MOJO HD before the channel went under. A third season is reportedly in the can. C'mon, cable programmers! Don't let the declining interest in poker keep you from putting I Bet You back on the air.
Runners-up: Cash Cab, The Deadliest Catch, Good Eats, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (the UK version), Man V. Food, Mythbusters


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Markets don't follow math, but are rather more influenced by belief. That, in essence, is why bubbles develop and why trying to call a top is futile.
But, argues portfolio manager John Hussman in his current shareholder letter, the math eventually adds up over complete market cycles — even if market history appears to be "defied over portions of those cycles."
The Hussman Funds principal describes the psychology of the current market as faith in quantitative easing — a view that QE makes stocks go up even though there is no "mechanistic relationship to stock prices except to make low-risk assets psychologically uncomfortable to hold," Hussman writes.
Neither theory nor evidence establishes such a relationship, and he cites aggressive Fed easing during the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 market declines as counterexamples.
"Like the nearly religious belief in the technology bubble, the dot-com boom, the housing bubble, and countless other bubbles across history, people are going to believe what they believe here until reality catches up in the most unpleasant way," Hussman writes.
But while market psychology supports a rising market, market history has been suggesting a severe correction for two years straight, meaning the ultimate crash should be harsh.
Hussman goes over some familiar ground (to those who have followed his previous warnings) in asserting this case, but also adds a novel mathematical approach as well.
The portfolio manager, who formerly taught economics and international finance at the University of Michigan, calls today's market "the most hostile, overvalued, overbought, overbullish" he can identify, finding just six comparable points in market history, all of which ended badly.
One of those comparisons is August 1929, whose halcyon market was followed by the 85% decline of the Great Depression. Three other comparable periods were followed by corrections exceeding 50% (November 1972, March 2000 and May 2007); one was followed by a 30% drop (August 1987); and one (January 2011) by a decline of just under 20% but he attributes the limited response to central bank intervention.
The factors our present period shares with these historical reference points include an overvalued market, as seen by a Shiller P/E greater than 18 (the current multiple is 25 — a level seen last in the late 1990s bubble and the three weeks prior to the 1929 peak); an overbought market, as seen by stock prices more than 50% above their 4-year lows; an overbullish market as seen by an index of advisory sentiment that is more than 52% bullish and less than 28% bearish; and rising yields, with 10-year Treasuries yielding higher than six months earlier.
As a result of this market math, Hussman expects that "normal historical regularities will exert themselves with a vengeance" and warns that at these levels even buy-and-hold strategies are mostly inappropriate.
"At a 2% dividend yield on the S&P 500, equities are effectively instruments with 50-year duration. That means that even stock holdings amounting to 10% of assets exhaust a 5-year duration," Hussman writes.
The former finance professor adds a novel mathematical argument to his arsenal of warnings, this one based on a log-periodic pattern he calls "almost creepy" in the consistency with which successive market troughs come closer and closer in time to the ultimate blowoffs.
"At this point, the only way to extend the singularity beyond the present date is to envision a nearly vertical pre-crash blowoff," he writes, adding that an "accelerating volatility at micro-intervals" that he is also currently seeing "is closely related to log-periodicity."
The stock market's rising heights are a source of both cheer and angst these days, even the subject of a front-page story in Monday's Wall Street Journal, which notes that Mom-and-Pop investors have finally joined the rally, after sitting out the early years of the rebound.
While stocks are up 24% this year, following four consecutive years of gain, the arrival of Main Street investors to the rally is seen by many as a sign of a market top.
Even still, market bulls abound. Charles Schwab & Co. chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders told a large gathering of investors Sunday evening that "the market is quite cheap."
Check out Nouriel Roubini Warns of Bubbles in the Economic Broth on ThinkAdvisor.