Search engines are building more extensive personal profiles to help customers be more effective online. However, this is drawing more concern about how this data can be used in the future, and how expose and individual will be. Will search engines enhance the profile with outside data?  If so who owns the data? Will the user have any control?  

“Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s “cookies”, the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit.”

Source: Financial Times

William Lind comments on John Robb’s ideas in Brave New War:

“Finally, Robb correctly finds the antidote to 4GW not in Soviet-style state structures such as the Department of Homeland Security but in de-centralization. What Robb calls “dynamic decentralized resilience” means that, in concrete terms, security is again to be found close to home. Local police departments, local sources of energy such as roof top solar arrays – I would add local farms that use sustainable agricultural practices – are the key to dealing with system perturbations. To the extent we depend on large, globalist, centralized networks, we are insecure.

Source: D-N-I.net

Tom Barnett also reviews Brave New War, but despite his comments to the contrary (see doppleganger observation) his desire to focus on his “optimistic builder/white hat and John’s more the pessimistic breaker/black hat” is somewhat unfortunate.

He comments “my synthesis tends to be additive (politics and markets are all about adaptation and compromise, so every new thing helps), while John’s is more destructively revolutionary, like Marx (the brittle old order must die and be replaced by a new, technocratically-tinged order that’s vastly different in form and function).” I do not read Robb in this totally negative way. More appropriate adjectives are adaptive and resilient. Is Robb’s distrust of political structures absolute as Barnett seems to indicate? As represented by Barnett there seems to be a much wider gap between the two sets of ideas, where in truth there is probably much more agreement to be found within the worlds of structural hierarchy and open source.

Source: Thomasbarnett.com

William Buckley writes about the factors that impact the cost of higher education:

“1) More Americans, especially in the two decades after the war, decided to attend college, making for great rises in demand. 2) Choice colleges are hotly competed for, giving them a relative immunity to market pressures. 3) Ever since the fifties, teachers have been demanding a living wage. 4) College perquisites increased; academic offerings for students with exotic interests are understandable, but some college administrators think themselves delinquent if they do not offer a course in jujitsu. ”

What can be done:

“Mr. Hutchins, when he became president of the University of Chicago, declared that there would be no college-football team. A more modest step — and more palatable to the alumni — might be the one suggested by the conservative candidate for the Dartmouth board of trustees: Cut the size of the college administration and devote the resources to teaching.”

Source: National Review Online, May 5, 2007