The only thing scarier than Godzilla? A scared Walter White (Bryan Cranston). This preview is most exciting trailer in a while And, to pass the time, see The Lego Movie as Everything Is AWESOME!
The only thing scarier than Godzilla? A scared Walter White (Bryan Cranston). This preview is most exciting trailer in a while And, to pass the time, see The Lego Movie as Everything Is AWESOME!
This sixth activity comes after students are to have listened to a lecture (slides) about trust and exploitation (see also this post). I asked the students to make more or less the same decision...
It’s been a big and extremely depressing week for the rights of sexual minorities. Despite some minor victories in Texas and Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s veto, anti-gay bills remain on the agenda...
This duck is a bit under water these days. We've reached the mid-semester pre-spring break moment of high activity and low energy (warm weather and SXSW beckon). In the meantime, I've flagged a few...
In what I suspect is the least auspicious debut ever made by a Duck guest blogger, six months after being welcomed by the Duck team, I'm finally posting. It turns out that starting a new job, prepping a new course, learning how to shovel snow, and attempting to finish a book manuscript all at once is not particularly conducive to being a good guest blogger. I'd like to thank the Duck team for their patience, and for their completely unwarranted confidence in still welcoming me to blog here. And I promise to do better from here on out. As Charli noted, my area of interest is in questions at...
*Post written with my coauthor Ryan Maness. We are currently rounding the corner and almost ready to submit the final version of our Cyber Conflict book. This post represents ongoing research as we fill out unanswered questions in our text. My coauthor and I have dissected the contemporary nature of cyber conflict in many ways, from cataloging all actual cyber incidents and disputes between states, to examining cyber espionage, and finally, examining the impact of cyber incidents on the conflict-cooperation nexus of states. What we have not done until now is examine the nature of what we...
Post by Steven Ward and Paul Musgrave The Obama administration’s plans to shrink the U.S. military attracted intense media attention yesterday. The plan is being described as a maneuver to shift the United States’s defense posture away from protracted occupations, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, and toward a more conventional deterrence role. It’s easy to exaggerate the scale of the changes to the military budget. In particular, the soundbite that the post-cut U.S. Army will be the smallest since before the Second World War is seriously misleading. According to the Historical...
Dan Levine sent on this great write up of the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) problems with social media. A few highlights: “In 2010, a soldier in the artillery corps posted this status: “Cleaning up Katana and home on Thursday.” Katana is a village in the West Bank. The status revealed the time of the planned raid and the unit involved. The other soldiers in the unit, also apparently glued to their screens, saw the update and, feeling imperiled, let the authorities know.” “Later that year the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate sent out a bulletin to soldiers featuring photos of drones...
Will this morning's links betray my grumpiness? I hope not but today's meme that the US and the West are in danger of losing Ukraine drives me a bit crazy. It wasn't in my pocket... was it in yours? Anyhow, the big news out of Washington, DC is about the big defense cuts proposed by SecDef Hagel. Lots of choices being made, including controversial ones like eliminating the A-10s for a plane that is still mostly air (the F-35) and so on. How much of this will actually happen? No idea. But it has produced some interesting thoughts including Lt. General H.R. McMaster on the fallacies of...
This fifth activity comes after students are to have listened to lectures about coordination (slides) and collaboration (slides) problems. I led off with a coordination problem that might not have been too difficult to overcome even if I didn't allow them to confer, but was trivially solved given that I did. (If you're wondering, I allowed that precisely because it would allow me to draw a contrast between coordination problems and collaboration problems. Though the former are not trivial, I don't think, they're certainly easier to overcome.) Then came the tricky part. The dominant strategy...
Good morning Ducks, here are your links from South Asia... (I am not even going to pretend I know what's going on in the Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, or Venezuela. I'll stick to what I sort of know...). Vasundhara Sirnate at The Hindu writes passionately in defence of the offensive. While Indian liberals will (rightfully) continue to be upset at Penguin India's capitulation to the so called "offended" feelings of a small and obscure group of Hindu fanatics, the liberals fail to realize that the increasing pressure to censor and protect the sentiments of various religious communities is actually...
Why are we late with Friday Nerd Blogging? Because we were too busy celebrating all that is awesome: