was the subject of a tech analysis piece I wrote for the London Evening Standard this week.

Some slides from yesterday’s thesis presentation. More images after the jump.

Its the mid way point of my thesis project and yesterday was the chance for Digital Fabrication Thesis Studio to present our current explorations and design processes. The panel gave a varied set of comments, it was good to run through the project with non tech based tutors from the urban and theory fields. Some questions were cast on the viability on the use of digital tools implemented, which was expected when one presents anything relatively new in design technology . All in all the critique was quite a confidence booster.

As a personal quest to distill ones communication techniques, i culled a large amount of detail since i figured that majority of the panel (the larger the more true) lose interest in the numbers game early on, therefore providing self explanatory images (or models) became a more powerful way to communicate your ideas rather than information overloading your audience.

Relating new processes with traditional linear strategies in design became a strategy itself to bring forward alternative ideas

Using a projector to blow up close up perspectives also gives one an advantage compared to the usual printed media. (As you can tell, i’m all for using technology to help)

Another aspect to the design were physical models, which were effective in giving the panel a sense of scale and space but also suggestive ideas on fabrication. 30-40 percent of the presentation went into giving a run down on the fabrication process of the models (which one inherently spends alot of time on whatever the architectural issue is, so you might as well display your effort)

also for a self confessed tech nut, it became a conscious effort not to overwhelm your panel with too much tech terminology, although lightly sprinkling some wordy terms like “finite element method linear static stress analysis ” threads the line between impressive and confusing.

All in all , there was positive feedback on moving to the next stage. Its been a long tiring month, but it was worth it. I’m quite excited now and after a short break its time to follow through with one’s ideas.  Execution and finishing is often much harder than the initial idea but always much more fulfilling as an end result.

On to the next stage of thesis work!

One of the most complex features of Twitter for new users to understand is the hashtag, a topic with a hash symbol (”#”) at the start to identify it. Twitter hashtags like #followfriday help spread information on Twitter while also helping to organize it.

The hashtag is a favorite tool of conferences and event organizers, but it’s also a way for Twitter() users to organize themselves: if everyone agrees to append a certain hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in search, and more likely the topic will appear in Twitter’s Trending Topics.

So how do you disseminate and make sense of all this hashtag madness? By going through the art of the hashtag step-by-step, of course. This short guide details how to identify, track, use, and organize hashtags in an efficient and useful way. Just be sure not to flaunt your new hashtag wisdom.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/twitter-hashtags/

One of the most complex features of Twitter for new users to understand is the hashtag, a topic with a hash symbol (”#”) at the start to identify it. Twitter hashtags like #followfriday help spread information on Twitter while also helping to organize it.

The hashtag is a favorite tool of conferences and event organizers, but it’s also a way for Twitter() users to organize themselves: if everyone agrees to append a certain hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in search, and more likely the topic will appear in Twitter’s Trending Topics.

So how do you disseminate and make sense of all this hashtag madness? By going through the art of the hashtag step-by-step, of course. This short guide details how to identify, track, use, and organize hashtags in an efficient and useful way. Just be sure not to flaunt your new hashtag wisdom.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/twitter-hashtags/

Rob Blackstien a.k.a. RotoRob from RotoRob.com joined Tamer and Tom for a healthy fantasy NBA discussion. Laughs and deep NBA insight ensued.

RotoRob
-First repeat guest of the season. Rob first raves about the behind the backboard shot Kobe Bryant pulled versus the Thunder on Sunday.
-Rob says Andrew Bogut can’t get a break. He recommends Ersan Ilyasova as a fill-in choice for Bogut.
-RotoRob on the Houston Rockets, detailing how Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady are injured and Ron Artest was replaced by Trevor Ariza: “The fact that they don’t totally suck is an early-season surprise.”
-Courtney Lee and Chris Douglas-Roberts should be valuable even when Lee returns. The Nets lack the proper amount of depth, so both will get playing time.
-RotoRob: “[Arenas] comes off like a bit of an ass.”

Stack’s Stat
Jason Kidd, who has 10,317 career assists, is 17 away from becoming 2nd all-time. Who is currently 2nd?
Mark Jackson, who has 10,334.

Eye on Isiah
-On getting his first win as a coach at Florida International: “It feels great…every coach starts wondering if you’ll ever win a game. I told the guys, I just want to go home, rub my dog and see the sun.”

Just went to a really interesting lunchtime talk in DIT entitled “research internet tools – benefits and pitfalls”. Interesting discussion on wikipedia, especially since Jimmy (Wikipedia) Wales is in Dublin at the moment. There was a general agreement that wikipedia could be a great place to start and also had many topics (such as Jedward) that academics would never cover. But Wikipedia wouldn’t be something which could be cited in research papers.

What I found interesting is that the universities are coming out in the open now also. So you can find a huge amount of published research online. Various colleges have open access repositories. DIT’s is arrow.dit.ie.

Another example is Open Doar – a directory of open access repositories. So now researchers can find each others research much more easily.

Another big takeaway for me was the advice that we should think outside the Google box when searching. While it’s important commercially to know where things sit in Google, we have to remember that they make their money from advertising rather than through the search engine. Google has an excellent set of tools for analysing search rankings and for buying adwords but there are other search engines out there which are worth googling with.

Here are a few:

http://www.hakia.com/

http://www.chacha.com/

http://clusty.com/

http://www.kartoo.com/

http://www.mahalo.com/

Their approach is more semantic webby than being at the mercy of the keywords you happen to choose. I’m looking forward to using them for my research on Market Research Online Communities (MROC). – Maybe I don’t have the right keywords for that – but I’ll soon find out.

Being rather tired yesterday afternoon, I fell asleep on the couch next to my partner.

I was only asleep for about an hour, but had quite an extensive dream, which I do still remember today (though not all of it in great detail)

The dream follows as below:

I was in the house that we rent, and had gone through to the kitchen to get a drink. Upon returning to the livingroom the house looked completely trashed. Stammering and unable to believe all this happened in around 2 minutes I tried to find out what was going on… Going back into the hall I discovered several people of whom I do not know wondering around, moving furniture and chatting. I asked who the are and what they were doing here, I was certainly in a state of confusion!

In response to the question I was told the landlord was using the house for a charity event for mentally disabled children, which was quite the shock seeing as we knew nothing about it! After milling around looking for the landlord (to no avail, though I was assured he was in the house) I decided to go out into the garden where my boyfriend was having a cigarette. He was sat on a swing chair out there and when I spoke to him he didn’t talk back, though I believe this was because he was looking at something.

I stepped closer and peered down to where his gaze was fixed, and saw a tiny little baby hedgehog! It was cute Then my attention turned to the left where there was a dad hedgehog pushing a pram with another little hedgehog in it. It then turned into a scene that was displayed almost cinema screen style (ie not me standing watching little animals from a human perspective). A badger walked in and the daddy hedgehog squared up and barked at it (I have no idea if hedghogs actually bark btw, but it did) . I thought they were about to fight when suddenly a little chick popped its head up between them and started wobbling its head about. The chick looked more like an animated version you might see on kids tv, not quite like a real one, sort of scraggly and long-necked…

And that is when my partner woke me up!

I hadn’t watched anything containing any of the animals, nor seen any animals during the day, so not entirely sure where it came from!

Okay looked up an online dream dictionary (http://dreammoods.com) to add a bit of psazz to this so here we go:

Hedgehog – To see a hedgehog in your dream, suggests that you are being overly sensitive. You tend to take everything too personally. Alternatively, it refers to losing your soul.

Chicken – To see chickens in your dream, symbolize cowardliness and a lack of willpower. The dream may be a pun on being a chicken or chickening out of some situation. Chickens also represent excessive chatter and gossip. Listen closely to what people may be saying about you or what you are saying about others

Badger – To see a badger in your dream, signifies your persistence and final victory over your opponents. The dream may also be a pun on badgering and aggravating others.

Swing chair – To see a swing set in your dream, indicates memories from childhood. You may feel a need to escape from your current responsibilities and relax

I found myself watching the most recent episode of House. The genius trying to dumb his brain down was an interesting concept. Does intelligence complicate everything?

My household puts a premium in intelligence and achievement. Reading a book or watching a movie wasn’t for entertainment alone. Over a meal, you’ll be discussing the implications, ideas, and message of a particular film or movie. We minced everything into their cores, chewed on them and savored the ideas.

We took pride in our intelligence, insight and innovation. Our egos were slightly inflated. Everything and anything was something that needed to be thought of—analyzed. At some level, we were building our ivory towers. But does genius, does intelligence make us happy? Sometimes the intelligence can get in the way.

I’m lucky I’m not a genius. I’m quite average and I’ve learned to choose which to analyze and which to leave alone. The over analysis in the long run made me paranoid and defensive. It was impeding my understanding of my emotions and relationships.

What’s wrong with being average? Sometimes you just have to know when to relax.

-eM

Okay I’m using this blog as a place to put all my crazy dreams, no not the ‘I want to ba a fairy when I grow up’ type… The ones I get whilst asleep!

I dream everynight, and can remember a lot of it when ?I first wake up though it tends to get harder to remember later in the day!

I dream when I nap, when I sleep properly and never really try to analyse the dreams, but do feel free to give it a go if you want too… I’d love to see what people think they mean.

“Patience pays dividends during periods when you’re losing and cannot pick up a playable hand.  You have to keep throwing them away until you get one you like.”  – Bobby Baldwin, Super System I

Bankroll: $35.42

Hands Played: 17,614

I only 3-tabled yesterday and got off to a quick start but then started getting destroyed by both bad beats and bad cards.  Here’s what it looked like:

I started like gangbusters, up almost 15 BB’s in the first 200 hands, but things went pear-shaped from there.  It’s tough going when you’re off to a strong start and drop almost 50 BB’s in no time.  I keep thinking “if this were a 10/20 game that would be a full grand flushed away.” I think a year ago this is where I would have donked all my money away and start playing completely stupid.  It definitely didn’t feel good, but for me anyways I think I’ve failed enough times to know that firing your chips off into oblivion will only make things worse.  So I just kept to my game plan and kept pushing with strong hands and folding where I didn’t have a play.  Finally my pocket Kings held up, and some draws came in, and I scraped out a very narrow win for the day.

I’m starting to think that the real winning in poker occurs in these losing swings though.  It’s not in fancy plays, and it definitely isn’t in how sneaky you can be playing AA.  It’s how well you can keep it together when everything you’re doing “should” be paying you off, and it doesn’t.  Especially at this level I guess you need the cards to come in.

HAND OF THE DAY

“To conduct solid hand analysis, we must have a precisely defined situation.” – Tony Guerrera, Killer Poker by the Numbers

5 -handed I raise UTG with K Q and get cold called by the Button (21/11/.08)  and Big Blind  (29/0/3.0) both stats after 30 hands.

Flop Comes 2 6 5, giving me a flush draw.  I bet out, the Button calls and Big Blind folds.

Turn card is the beautiful A, completing the nut flush. I CHECK, the Button CHECKS.

River is the 3, I bet and the Button calls with 9 9.

This is what happens when you don’t realize who you’re playing with.  It’s tough to say, but I’m pretty sure I’ve lost more money on spoiled attempt at check raising the nuts than however much I might have made with a successful one. This guy’s aggression factor is less than 1, meaning that even if he hits a card that helps him on the turn, he STILL might not bet out.  The Big Blind had a 3.0 AF, making him a much more likely candidate.  If I were it the Button’s place, I would have definitely re-raised my initial raise, and probably raised the flop just to see where I was at.  By him just calling he’s inviting a third player into the pot, weakening his hand and diminishing his advantage.

POSSIBLE HOLDINGS

He is a pretty tight player, so his range could be AA-22, although he might have 3-bet with KK or AA, something like 78s or 67s giving him some kind of draw.  He probably wouldn’t have stuck around the flop with a hand like QJ, especially if he didn’t have a in his hand.

CONCLUSION/OPTIMAL PLAY

Play it straight forward against tight/passive players.  When you get a hand, bet the hand!

BAD BEAT OF THE DAY

In the Big Blind with 4 6. Flop comes 2 4 4. Turn is an A, river is a 3, and I get CHECK-CALLED by someone holding 2 5 os.

It’s fourth down and a long way to go for a first down. The score is tied, you’re deep in your own territory, and there is still plenty of time remaining in the game. Well coach, I may not be able to tell you the exact right thing to do, but I can sure tell you what not to do.

An important part of a successful game plan is to avoid making the “bad calls”. Sometimes it’s not so easy to know what to do in a difficult situation. But if you are sure what not to do, you have improved your chances for success. Here are a few common strategies that have resulted in bad calls over the years. They be tempting from time to time, but avoid them like you would a fake punt deep in your own territory in a tie game.

“We can do it cheaper.” A frequent assumption that rarely proves to be a successful strategy. If a large company is serious about a market and has accurately allocated its costs, it is difficult for a small business to charge less than its larger competitor. Lower volumes in production and purchasing will generally result in higher unit costs. While overhead expenses may be lower, they will be spread over a smaller range of products.

If you really can do it cheaper, the chances are pretty good that somebody else can also. With low barriers to entry, you will need to be prepared to meet new competition at anytime.

While you might think you can “do it cheaper”, you probably can “do it better”. Small business has consistently been successful in targeting a small market niche and providing superior products and services. Although larger companies have economies of scale, the smaller enterprise remains closer to the customer and can be more responsive to changing needs. “Doing it better” is a strategy that is difficult to compete against.

“We are too busy to take the time to plan.” Planning requires taking time away from today’s problems and investing it in tomorrow’s. The time spent on today’s problems has an immediate payback. Time spent on the challenges that lie ahead has a less immediate and less certain payback. This results in the power of planning rarely being used effectively.

The reason there isn’t enough time to plan today is that the planning that should have been done last month or last year wasn’t. That cycle has to be broken for an organization to get control of its future.

The real shortage of management time and the lack of planning experience makes planning difficult in small and growing businesses. Managers tend to stay busy on those parts of their job that they know best. They tend to avoid those responsibilities with which they are less familiar and which provide feedback that appears less tangible. Because it is infrequently done well, or done at all, effective planning can be a significant competitive advantage to a growing business.

“An investment in a computer system will reduce our accounting expense.” Personnel and cost reductions are frequently sighted as justifications for computerization of manual accounting systems. The savings rarely ever materialize. Computer systems always cost more than anticipated. Usually there is a good reason, you are looking for the system to do more than you had originally planned.

Computers don’t replace people in most businesses. What they can do is to assist your people to do a better job. Computerization of manual systems can be justified to provide more timely, more accurate, and more specific information. Computers are practically a requirement to effectively process information in today’s world. However, they create more expenses than they reduce. They can be justified not by cost savings, but rather by providing information that enables better decision making.

“Real entrepreneurs are doers, not thinkers.” Some entrepreneurs are “intuition driven” and have been extremely successful. They are often quite vocal about their triumphs and receive substantial publicity. However, there are many others who have experienced painful failures because they “leaped before they looked” when starting their first entrepreneurial venture. This group, understandably, is not quite so vocal about their experience.

While the mythology surrounding entrepreneurship encourages the “go for it” gambler image, the facts are quite different. Successful entrepreneurial ventures are the result of careful thinking. Thought and analysis combine to accurately assess an opportunity which then positions the entrepreneur to act. What then separates the entrepreneur from the rest of the pack, is that the entrepreneur moves ahead to action and exploits the opportunity.

While the world might only see the action, it is the thought that preceded the action that enabled the success. The often untold entrepreneurial story involves the failures that were avoided because somebody decided not to act after thoughtful investigation.

Well coach, because it’s your business, don’t make any dumb calls that might cost your team the game.

The work described in this poster was conducted as part of a Master’s thesis project for the UCLA/Getty Conservation Program and presented at the Annual Conference of the Association of North American Graduate Programs in Conservation (ANAGPIC), Buffalo State College, April 24-25, 2009.

The Fowler Museum at UCLA houses a collection of Japanese polychrome wooden masks. A pair of these masks, identified as “honomen” (gift or dedication mask), was attributed to the same maker based on their stylistic similarities. The museum records stated that the masks were dated to the 18-19th century and made in the style found in the Kyūshū region of Japan. However, neither the pairing nor provenance of the masks was supported by any textual or technical evidence.

The poster presented here summarizes the preliminary results from a comparative technical investigation on the Fowler masks, as a part of the research to answer the questions regarding the masks’ provenance and their paired attribution. Analytical techniques such as wood characterization, polarized light microscopy (PLM), x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), x ray diffraction (XRD), gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC-MS) and micro-chemical analysis using environmental scanning electron microscopy (ESEM-EDX) were used to determine the masks’ material composition and methods of manufacture. The analytical results, combined with studies on the masks’ context of use and iconographic origins, provided material evidence that the masks were manufactured in close association with one another, although there was no firm evidence to establish that they were indeed manufactured by the same hand. Furthermore, identifying vitreous pigments on one of the masks pushed the mask’s estimated date of manufacture to 19th-20th century. This finding also added knowledge to a class of pigment not widely used in the Japanese palette until modern times.

Built upon the analytical understanding of the Fowler masks’ material composition and present condition, the research project concluded with a conservation treatment to improve the long-term stability of the polychrome. The most urgent treatment priorities were stabilizing the fragile matte paint surface and locally reinforcing the structural defects on the masks. Due to time constraints, consolidation of the paint was performed only on the red mask. Major structural defects on both masks were reinforced by filling the cavities in the wood with a light-weight and mechanically-reversible fill made of rolled-up Japanese paper, capped with a light-weight putty made from Acryloid B-72 bulked with glass microballoons for a better seal. The fill was then inpainted with Liquitex acrylic emulsion paint to reduce the color contrast between the fill and the wood.

It’s that time of year again. The wonderful week that is Thanksgiving means a number of things to me: great food, drinking with old friends, napping, and most importantly, watching obscene amounts of American football. Most (real) men see this as an excuse to sit around all day in their gym shorts/sweatpants sans underwear, avoid and ignore their better half, and eat copious amounts of leftovers. As amazing and beautiful as this seasonal phenomenon truly is, Iron Bowl ticket holders will have no such luxuries this year. This year’s Iron Bowl falls on a Friday, a day normally reserved for turkey orgy hangovers, bong rips, and general who-gives-a-shitness for men, and the maxing out of daddy/husband’s credit card at all the post-Thanksgiving sales for women. UA/AU students, alumni, and Wal-Mart jersey rednecks alike will have to scamper down posthaste to Auburn in order to make it to the game.

A shortened week for Alabama and a well rested Auburn Tiger team at home, anxious to redeem itself after an embarrassing performance in T-Town last year seem to be favorable externalities for the plainsmen. Add in an energized fan base and a new exciting offensive system, the question must be asked, what will the Tide do differently to counter?

Absolutely Nothing.

Alabama won convincingly last Saturday over a hilariously overmatched UT-Chattanooga, and was able to rest the majority of its starters in a blow-out win. Preparations have been moved up a day, but don’t think Nick Saban didn’t see it coming. During the Tide’s bye week, considerable time was put in practicing for future opponents with a special focus on defending against the spread and the hurry-up. Auburn’s defense is in the bottom rung of the SEC in just about every important statistic, has no notable match up advantage at any position, and well, they’re just plain undisciplined. Offensively the Tigers have made considerable improvements since last year, but even with all the hoopla surrounding Gus Malzahn’s offense, the Tide have still outscored Auburn 182 to 179 in SEC games. The Tide’s defense is ranked number one in the country, allowing just 70.4 rushing yards a game, has given up only 3 touchdowns in the past 6 games, and allowed its opponents only 19 trips to the red zone, tops in the SEC. Bama will simply stick to doing what they do best: run the football to set up the big pass play, play hardnosed, blitzing defense, and most importantly, stay disciplined on both sides of the ball.

As this is a passionate game for everyone involved I see both teams coming out a little nervous, jittery, and with not much to show for in the first quarter. In the second quarter Bama’s running game takes over, Auburn will go 3 and out a number of times, and their D spends the better part of the first half on the field. By the end of the third, I expect Auburn to be completely demoralized on defense, and the Tide simply handing the ball off to Ingram, Richardson and Co. for first down after first down. With that being said, I don’t think we will shut out Auburn again as I expect a little more fight out of the boogs this year. But, when it’s all said and done, I like Alabama to win it 38-13, with Auburn only putting points on the board after the game is well in hand.

To all the Tide fans making it down to Auburn, I tip my three corner hat to you.

Ὀδυσσεύς Bombay

Yesterday, I accidentally opened the Ryanair page and found they were offering £2 one way tickets for journeys in November through to March. The tickets went really quick and by the time I got home there weren’t any left for the routes I was interested in.

I started to dig around to see how come I missed this great offer. Even though I’m subscribed to Ryanair’s newsletter I got no heads-up for it. I checked on their Press Release page but there was nothing on it either.

So it’s not just me. 66 million Ryanair passengers, some of whom are surely subscribed to the newsletter and others who check their PR website regularly didn’t know of the sell-out. Why?

The only reasonable explanation I can offer is that it’s one of Ryanair’s marketing tactics. News spread quicker by word of mouth then via any press releases, newsletters or any other marketing campaigns. Moreover, it’s reaaaaaaaally cheap.

I continued to wonder how this may work. Surely, Michael O’leary isn’t going to make it easy for us to figure out when he’s planning the next sale.

I went through all Ryanair’s special offers press releases and put their dates on a Google Calendar.

So I went ahead and analysed the press release calendar pattern quickly. Here’s what I found:

Ryanair Press Release Analysis

Almost 60% of all Ryanair special offer announcements were made on a Monday or Tuesday, with just over 20% made on a Thursday. They have never made any announcements on a Saturday, Wednesdays and Sundays being the least popular days when nearly 10% of their announcements were made.

The period analysed was between February 2007 and November 2009 as their announcements don’t go any further than the beginning of 2007.

Very interesting is the immense growth of press release popularity in the second half of this year when almost 60% of all special offer announcements were made – 34 out of 58.

The press release pattern seams very erratic. Some of the offers were prompted by bad publicity, e.g. ‘Ryanair gives away 1.1m FREE seats BBCPanorama lies’ (O’leary beautifully manipulated the whole Panorama crew who did publish his interview on their website).

Right, so what are we gonna do with the findings? There are a few tips we could bear in mind:

- don’t wait for the newsletter to announce any big sales

- they’ll come unexpectedly on Monday or Tuesday

- if not check on a Thursday

- you’re safe to go for a pint on a Friday because there will be no announcements on a Saturday

- Sundays should be quiet too, with only a handful of less important announcements made

Finally, judging from the popularity of the offers yesterday if there will be a sale tickets will go within a few hours. So be prepared to buy when the time comes.

I’d love to be able to provide any alternative analyses of this type but unfortunately weren’t able to find any. Looks like Ryanair’s not very popular with academics.

Anyway, hope this helps a little bit. Keep your eyes open and let me know if you spot any trends. And any big sales of course!

In 2001, just after the 9/11 attacks, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh visited Washington, D.C. and pledged cooperation in countering terrorist networks in Yemen. Since then, the US has engaged in various security partnerships and initiatives with the government of Yemen in the hope of cracking down on terrorist cells.  Yet, while the US’s principal priority in Yemen is defeating al-Qaeda networks, many argue that President Saleh’s priorities are not so neatly aligned, forcing Yemen to walk the fine line between its own interests and Western-defined ones.

From Washington’s perspective, Yemen’s domestic instability, ungoverned territory and porous borders make this, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, a potentially dangerous al-Qaeda and extremist foothold.  US security assistance programs have accounted for the bulk of US assistance in recent years, including roughly $98 million for the training and equipping of the Yemeni Armed Forces, known as Section 1206.  This assistance pursues US-defined goals of suppressing terrorist operations and deterring and defeating extremists operating within the borders of Yemen.

From FY 2006–FY 2009, nearly three-fourths, or 71 percent, of all US assistance to Yemen went toward security assistance programs, defined here as programs intended to strengthen non-American military and security forces.[1] Policy-driven economic assistance, aid that funds programs developed with US strategic and foreign policy interests in mind, accounted for 21 percent, while non-security assistance programs totaled 8 percent.

While it looks like the FY 2010 request for Yemen is less than FY 2009, this is not necessarily case.  Section 1206 funds are not included in the FY 2010 request because country allocations for such funding are not known at the beginning of the fiscal year.  Therefore, if Section 1206 funds are excluded, US assistance to Yemen actually increases in FY 2010 by $10.6 million or 26 percent over FY 2009.

The composition of assistance, however, would significantly change in FY 2010.  Unlike previous years, 68 percent of the FY 2010 request would be allocated for non-security assistance, an increase of $26 million or 180 percent over FY 2009.  The FY 2010 request decreases policy-driven economic assistance to zero, which saw a significant plus-up in FY 2009, and the remaining 22 percent would go to security assistance, an increase of $4.8 million or 75 percent.

While these investments have been important, whether or not al-Qaeda and its extremist allies operate in Yemen may ultimately depend on other, more powerful, factors.

Ongoing Conflict in Yemen

The ongoing Houthi rebellion in northern Yemen dominates domestic politics. The Yemeni government (predominantly Sunni) has been engaged in an on-again-off-again conflict with the predominantly Shia Houthi rebels over historical grievances.  It is speculated that Iran has a hand in funding the Houthi rebels, while Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are in support of the Sunni Yemeni government.  The result is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran with Yemen causalities, including many civilians.  Clashes of late have intensified, continuing to threaten President Saleh’s power and influence over the region.

Another security concern is the growing secessionist movement in the southern region of Yemen.  Secessionist sentiments and violent rebellions are on the rise, as many southern Yemenis and their leaders do not feel an equal part of the unified state.  President Saleh walks a fine line, between too strong of a government response and a too weak of one, as north-south divide only worsens with declining economic conditions.

Poverty and the Economy

Yemen is one of the poorest countries in the Arab world, with high unemployment and illiteracy, significant population growth, and roughly 45 percent of the population living below the poverty line.  Yemen’s large youth population (about half of the population is under the age of 15) faces pervasive unemployment and the Yemeni people are in need of viable economic opportunities. Yemen is dependent on external aid but is perhaps in greater need of stable, economic and development partners.  Long-term investment is hard to attract, however, given that experts have been saying for years that Yemen is on the verge of collapse.  Declining oil reserves, water depletion, the global economic crisis and inflation further complicate matters.  The result is that extremists groups use the desperation of many to recruit for their causes, often by means of religiously-inspired promises or just plain compensation.

In the Year 2013…

As President Saleh and the Yemeni government juggle these challenges, looming around the corner is the scheduled presidential election in 2013. President Saleh has led a united Yemen since 1990, and the potential change in leadership is surrounded by a significant number of unknowns. Will President Saleh be eligible for a third term?  If not, who would take his place?  Will the next president support or oppose US-Yemeni cooperation?  How would the next administration handle many of the aforementioned challenges?

Ultimately, it is not in Yemen’s interests to have al Qaeda-inspired terrorist activity within their borders.  The new generation of militants in Yemen is more inclined than their predecessors to attack the Yemeni government, in addition to foreign and Western interests. As the US and Yemen peruse their common goal of reducing the al-Qaeda presence and influence, the outcome of various domestic issues confronting President Saleh may be more deciding in the success or failure of such efforts.

Special thanks to Trice Kabundi for her efforts in this piece.

Information for this piece was taken from these outstanding works:

CRS Report: Yemen: Background and US Relations

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL34170.pdf

Carnegie Endowment: Yemen: Avoiding a Downward Spiral

http://carnegieendowment.org/files/yemen_downward_spiral.pdf

Section 1206 of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2006: A Fact Sheet on Department of Defense Authority to Train andEquip Foreign Military Forces

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22855.pdf

UPDATE: Mandala screenshots (below)

I’ve begun encoding “Robot Dreams”, a short story about a robot named Elvex (LVX-1) whose positronic brain has been uniquely imprinted with fractal patterns, and as a result has learned how to dream.  This text also features Susan Calvin, the mother of robot psychology in the continuity of most of Asimov’s robot stories.  In my encoding of this text, I’ve run into several challenges:

• I’m finding “otherness” more difficult to determine than I’d expected.  This story in particular is challenging, because Elvex has become more “human-like” due to the unique architecture of his brain– a fact that appalls his creator and Susan Calvin.  The more Elvex describes his dreams, appearing increasingly “human”, the more the human characters try to distance themselves from him and emphasize his robotic characteristics.  In this situation, there is a definite tension between “other” and “same”; I can’t ignore that tension by making that attribute “null”, but how can I determine otherness in such an ambivalent circumstance?  …One solution is to look at the source’s motivation.  Is the source saying/doing something to create distance between human and robot, or to draw them closer together?  This raises a new challenge:
• Can a reference then have multiple sources?  Can multiple sources have different motivations, and thus represent different levels on “otherness”?  If the answer is yes, how do I encode this?  …The answer I’ve come up with is to nest my pr_ref tags.  It’s still too early to tell if this is an effective strategy, but I’m trialing it.
• How do I define my type attributes when it seems that the reference is fulfilling more than one of the possible types?  (e.g. in “Robot Dreams”  Susan Calvin interviews Elvex in her characteristically cold, clinical way.  Most of her questions/statements directed at Elvex can be construed both as “interactive”– since she is “interacting” with the robot– and “descriptive”– since she is describing the robot.)  One possible answer is to look at the possibility of multiple sources again.  The other is to identify a hierarchy of types: emotion trumps interaction trumps description, since all references “describe” something, but not all references “describe” an interaction, and not all interactions are emotional.  Without clearly setting this rule out, I think this is a strategy I followed when encoding “Someday”.  When there is a clearly a situation of multiple sources looking at motivation can again be valuable, and using nested tagging seems the natural answer.

I chose “Robot Dreams” because it has several elements that I felt needed to be explored in my analysis of Asimov’s robot stories.  First of all, whereas in “Someday” the two human characters were male children, in “Robot Dreams” the two human characters are female adults.  I wanted to see if gender and age played a factor (note: my tweaked encoding currently doesn’t catalog age as a factor– if it looks like this might be valuable information to mine, I may add it in future iterations).  Secondly it included Susan Calvin.  Although I have not, as yet, developed an element structure to analyze principal human characters, it has always been my intention for Calvin to be my first attempt.  Not only is her name synonymous with Asimov’s robot stories as a recurring character, but she plays a unique role in them as a foil for the various robots she psycho-analyzes; it would be a valuable exercise to compare the relationship references to her with those of the principle robot characters in the same stories.  Is Susan Calvin characterized as more robot (“other”) or more human?  In comparison, are the robot characters more or less human? Does she elicit more of an emotional response from the figures that interact with her?  An examination of reference sources in this analysis is useful too: does she express emotion more or less than the average robot?

Finally, the problem of “otherness” is central to this text.  I feel that the tension between being “too human” and “too different” is one that makes Asimov’s work so universally engaging, and has not been explored to its fullest.  My XML encoding can– hopefully– reveal exactly how that tension is expressed through the relationships in the text.

***

I have completed a first encoding of the principal robot references in “Robot Dreams”.  Here are screenshots of Mandala evaluating “otherness” from the perspective of the three characters: Elvex (principal robot), Susan (principal human), and Linda (secondary human).  Click on the thumbnails below to view the images in full size.

We can consider the problem of maximizing or minimizing a function, as we have been, but insisting that our solution satisfy some constraint.

For instance, we might have a function to maximize, but we’re only concerned with unit-length vectors on . More generally, we’ll be concerned with constraints imposed by setting a function equal to zero. In the example, we might set . If we want to impose more conditions, we can make a vector-valued function with as many components as constraint functions we want to set equal to zero.

Now, we might be able to parameterize the collection of points satisfying . In the example, we could use the usual parameterization of the sphere by latitude and longitude, writing

where I’ve used the physicists’ convention on the variables instead of the common one in multivariable calculus classes. Then we could plug these expressions for , , and into our function , and get a composite function of the variables and , which we can then attack with the tools from the last couple days, being careful about when we can and can’t trust Cauchy’s invariant rule, since the second differential can transform oddly.

Besides even that care that must be taken, it may not even be possible to parameterize the surface, or it may be extremely difficult. At least we do know that such a parameterization will often exist. Indeed, the implicit function theorem tells us that if we have continuously differentiable constraint functions whose zeroes describe a collection of points in an -dimensional space , and the determinant

is nonzero at some point satisfying , then we can “solve” these equations for the first variables as functions of the last . This gives us exactly such a parameterization, and in principle we could use it. But the calculations get amazingly painful.

Instead, we want to think about this problem another way. We want to consider a point is a point satisfying which has a neighborhood so that for all satisfying we have . This does not say that there are no nearby points to where takes on larger values, but it does say that to reach any such point we must leave the region described by .

Now, let’s think about this sort of heuristically. As we look in various directions from , some of them are tangent to the region described by . These are the directions satisfying — where to first order the value of is not changing in the direction of . I say that in none of these directions can change (again, to first order) either. For if it did, either would increase in that direction or not. If it did, then we could find a path in the region where along which was increasing, contradicting our assertion that we’d have to leave the region for this to happen. But if decreased to first order, then it would increase to first order in the opposite direction, and we’d have the same problem. That is, we must have whenever . And so we find that

The kernel of consists of all vectors orthogonal to the gradient vector , and the line it spans is the orthogonal complement to the kernel. Similarly, the kernel of consists of all vectors orthogonal to each of the gradient vectors , and is thus the orthogonal complement to the entire subspace they span. The kernel of is contained in the kernel of , and orthogonal complements are order-reversing, which means that must lie within the span of the . That is, there must be real numbers so that

or, passing back to differentials

So in the presence of constraints we replace the condition by this one. We call the “Lagrange multipliers”, and for every one of these variables we add to the system of equations, we also add the constraint equation , so we should still get an isolated collection of points.

Now, we reached this conclusion by a rather handwavy argument about being able to find increasing directions and so on within the region . This line of reasoning could possibly be firmed up, but we’ll find our proof next time in a slightly different approach.

Bankroll: $34.43

Hands Played : 17,051

Played my first session as Poker Grinder playing 4 tables 6-handed and I jumped ahead about 15 BB’s in half an hour.  Then I hit a bad run of cards and ran into some terrible beats and dropped about 40.  After about an hour and a half and well into the night a few tables started breaking so I played 3 tables short handed.  At one table we were three handed and I found myself in position against some large stacked calling stations which really hepled.  It was great.  I raised with good hands, and folded the rest, and they just called and called until I came back 20 BB’s from that table alone.  Ultimately I dropped 2 BB’s after about 500 hands.  Really happy about saving the session.

HAND OF THE DAY

“To conduct solid hand analysis, we must have a precisely defined situation” – Tony Guerrera, Killer Poker By The Numbers

4 handed, playing against a table of calling stations.  I get K J UTG and raise, Button folds, SB and BB call.

Flop comes:

And now the turn:

I spike top pair on the flop, bet out and SB folds but BB calls.  A kind of scare card hits on the turn, and I get check raised by an otherwise passive station.  It’s clear he’s made a hand, but it’s hard to tell exactly what it is.  He sees 67% of all flops so while it makes sense to give him credit for a monster hand, we can also factor in a lot of inferior holdings as well.

HAND RANGES

Since I have a king and there are two on the board, he isn’t likely to have a king.  He is capable of calling with King-rag though.  This isn’t good news though because that means he can have K T or K 9 os.  He could have A-X giving him the nut flush, but also giving me 10 outs.  He could actually have almost any two suited cards actually, giving me some outs to a better flush. QJ is also possible, giving him the straight but also giving me some outs there.  Pocket 99’s or TT’s wouldn’t be to good.

CALCULATIONS

I’m sure the decision is whether to raise or call, not call or fold.  There was .40 in the pot, plus .30 giving me 7-1 to call which gives me great odds.  If I cap I’m effectively putting his .40 plus the pot’s .40 to my .40, in other words 2-1 odds.  Needless to say if I make my boat I will easily get another on or two BB’s.

Using Poker Stove I first plugged in his exact A8 and I was evaluated at 25% to his 75%, or 3:1.  A call would have been reasonable.  If I plugged in his complete range of hands, including any two suited cards it had me at 36% to his 64%, giving me better than 2:1 odds.  Capping makes sense here.  If I adjust his suited cards to any reasonable suited holdings I actually come out ahead here 60% 40%.  I ultimately did cap the betting, an 8c turned up on the river and he took down the pot.

CONCLUSIONS

Well, tough to say.  I think that when a fishy calling station really wakes up like that, you have to figure either a nut flush, a boat or (less likely) that he flopped a straight.  If I could only pop it to 2 BB’s I’d take that option.  But since it seems that aggression is king in this game, capping would do good things for table image, and if I did hit my boat he would have thought I got lucky.  If the god damn donk was thinking at all.

BAD BEAT OF THE DAY

Raised button with A-Q os and lost to BB with 5 9 runner-runner.

Sanctions and Strategy

November 23, 2009
By George Friedman

The Iranian government has rejected, at least for the moment, a proposal from the P-5+1 to ship the majority of its low-enriched uranium abroad for further enrichment. The group is now considering the next step in the roadmap that it laid out last April. The next step was a new round of sanctions, this time meant to be crippling. The only crippling sanction available is to cut off the supply of gasoline, since Iran imports 35 percent of its refined gasoline products. That would theoretically cripple the Iranian economy and compel the Iranians to comply with U.S. demands over the nuclear issue.

We have written extensively on the ability of sanctions to work in Iran. There is, however, a broader question, which is the general utility of sanctions in international affairs. The Iranian government said last week that sanctions don’t concern it because, historically, sanctions have not succeeded. This partly explains Iranian intransigence: The Iranians don’t feel they have anything to fear from sanctions. The question is whether the Iranian view is correct and why they would believe it — and if they are correct, why the P-5+1 would even consider imposing sanctions.

The Assumptions of Sanctions

We need to begin with a definition of sanctions. In general, sanctions are some sort of penalty imposed on a country designed to cause it sufficient pain to elicit a change in its behavior. Sanctions are intended as an alternative to war and therefore exclude violence. Thus, the entire point of sanctions, as opposed to war, is to compel changes of behavior in countries without resorting to force.

Normal sanctions are economic and come in three basic forms. First, there is seizing or freezing the assets of a country or its citizens located in another country. Second, sanctions can block the shipment of goods (or movement of people) out of the target country. Third, sanctions can block the movement of goods into a country. Minor sanctions are possible, such as placing tariffs on products imported from the target country, but those sorts of acts are focused primarily on rectifying economic imbalances and are not always driven by political interests. Thus, the United States placed tariffs on Chinese tires coming into the United States. The purpose was to get China to change its economic policies. On the other hand, placing sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s or on Sudan today are designed to achieve political and military outcomes.

It is important to consider the underlying assumptions of the decision to impose sanctions. First, there is the assumption that the target country is economically dependent in some way on the country or countries issuing the sanctions. Second, it assumes that the target country has no alternative sources for the economic activity while under sanctions. Third, it assumes that the pain caused will be sufficient to compel change. The first is relatively easy to determine and act on. The next two are far more complex.

Obviously, sanctions are an option of stronger powers toward weaker ones. It assumes that the imposition of sanctions will cause more pain to the target country than it will to the country or countries issuing sanctions, and that the target country cannot or will not use military action to counter economic sanctions. For example, the United States placed sanctions on the sale of grain to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It discovered that while the sanctions were hurting the Soviets, they were hurting American farmers as well. The pain was reciprocal and there was an undertone of danger if the Soviets had chosen to counter the sanctions with military force. An example of that concerned Japan in 1941. The United States halted the shipment of oil and scrap metal to Japan in an attempt to force it to reshape its policies in China and Indochina. The sanctions were crippling, as the Americans expected. However, the Japanese response was not capitulation, but Pearl Harbor.

To understand the difficulties of determining and acting on the assumptions of imposing sanctions, consider Cuba. The United States has imposed extensive economic sanctions on Cuba for years. During the first decades of the sanctions, they were relatively effective, in the sense that third countries tended to comply rather than face possible sanctions themselves from the United States. As time went on, the fear of sanctions declined. A European country might have been inclined to comply with U.S. sanctions in the 1960s or 1970s, for both political reasons and for concern over potential retaliatory sanctions from the United States. However, as the pattern of international economic activity shifted, and the perception of both Cuba and the United States changed within these countries, the political implication to comply with U.S. wishes declined, while the danger of U.S. sanctions diminished. Placing sanctions on the European Union would be mutually disastrous and the United States would not do it over Cuba, or virtually any other issue.

As a result, the sanctions the United States placed on Cuba have dramatically diminished in importance. Cuba can trade with most of the world, and other countries can invest in Cuba if they wish. The flow of American tourists is blocked, but European, Canadian and Latin American tourists who wish to go to Cuba can go. Cuba has profound economic problems, but those problems are only marginally traceable to sanctions. Indeed, the U.S. embargo has provided the Castro regime with a useful domestic explanation for its economic failures.

Limitations

This points to an interesting characteristic of sanctions. One of the potential goals of placing sanctions on a country is to generate unrest and internal opposition , forcing regime change or at least policy change. This rarely happens. Instead, the imposition of sanctions creates a sense of embattlement within the country. Two things follow from this. First, there is frequently a boost in support for the regime that might otherwise not be there. The idea that economic pain takes precedence over patriotism or concern for maintaining national sovereignty is not a theory with a great deal of empirical support. Second, the sanctions allow a regime to legitimize declaring a state of emergency — which is what sanctions intend to create — and then use that state of emergency to increase repression and decrease the opportunity for an opposition to emerge.

Consider an extreme example of sanctions during World War II, when both the Axis and Allies tried to use airpower as a means of imposing massive economic hardship on the population, thereby attempting to generate unrest and opposition to the regime. Obviously, strategic bombing is not sanctions, but it is instructive to consider them in this sense. When we look at the Battle of Britain and the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan, we find that countereconomic warfare did not produce internal opposition that the regime could not handle. Indeed, it could reasonably be argued that it increased support for the regime. It is assumed that economic hardship can generate regime change, yet even in some of the most extreme cases of economic hardship, that didn’t happen.

Imposing an effective sanctions regime on a country is difficult for two reasons. First, economic pain does not translate into political pressure. Second, creating effective economic pain normally requires a coalition. The United States is not in a position to unilaterally impose effective sanctions. In order to do that, it must act in concert with other countries that are prepared not only to announce sanctions but — and this is far more important and difficult — also to enforce them. This means that it must be in the political interest of all countries that deal with the target to impose the sanctions.

It is rarely possible to create such a coalition. Nations’ interests diverge too much. Sometimes they converge, as in South Africa prior to the end of apartheid. South Africa proved that sanctions can work if there is a coalition that does not benefit extensively from economic and political ties with the target country, and where the regime is composed of a minority within a very large sea of hostility. South Africa was a special case. The same attempt at a sanctions regime in Sudan over Darfur has failed because many countries have political or economic interests there.

It is also difficult to police the sanctions. By definition, as the sanctions are imposed, the financial returns for violating them increase. Think of U.S. drug laws as a form of sanctions. They raise the price of drugs in the United States and increase the incentives for smugglers. When a broad sanctions regime was placed on Iraq, vast amounts of money were made from legitimate and illegitimate trading with Iraq. Regardless of what a national government might say (and it may well say one thing and do another) individuals and corporations will find ways around the sanctions. Indeed, Obama’s proposed sanctions on corporations are intended precisely for this reason. As always, the issue is one of intelligence and enforcement. People can be very good at deception for large amounts of money.

The difficulty of creating effective sanctions raises the question of why they are used. The primary answer is that they allow a nation to appear to be acting effectively without enduring significant risks. Invading a country, as the United States found in Iraq, poses substantial risks. The imposition of sanctions on relatively weaker countries without the ability to counter the sanctions is much less risky. The fact that it is also far less effective is compensated for by the lowered risk.

In truth, many sanction regimes are enforced as political gestures, either for domestic political reasons, or to demonstrate serious intent on the international scene. In some cases, sanctions are a way of appearing to act so that military action can be deferred. No one expects the sanctions to change the regime or its policies, but the fact that sanctions are in place can be used as an argument against actions by other nations.

This is very much the case with Iran. No one expects Russia or China (or even many of the European states) to fully comply with a sanctions regime on gasoline. Even if they did, no one expects the flow of gasoline to be decisively cut off. There will be too many people prepared to take the risk of smuggling gasoline to Iran for that to happen. Even if the U.S. blockaded Iranian ports, the Caucasus and Central Asia are far too disorderly and the monetary rewards of smuggling are too great of an incentive to make the gasoline sanctions effective. Additionally, the imposition of sanctions will both rally the population to the regime as well as provide justification for an intense crackdown. The probability of sanctions forcing policy changes or regime change in Iran is slim.

Balancing Acquiescence and War

But sanctions have one virtue: They delay or block military action. So long as sanctions are being considered or being imposed, the argument can be made to those who want military action that it is necessary to give the sanctions time to work. Therefore, in this case, sanctions allow the United States to block any potential military actions by Israel against Iran while appearing domestically to be taking action. Should the United States wish to act, the sanctions route gives the Europeans the option of arguing that military action is premature. Furthermore, if military action took place without Russian approval while Russia was cooperating in a sanctions regime, it would have increased room to maneuver against U.S. interests in the Middle East, portraying the United States as trigger-happy.

The ultimate virtue of sanctions is that they provide a platform between acquiescence and war. The effectiveness of that platform is not nearly as important as the fact that it provides a buffer against charges of inaction and demands for further action. In Sudan, for example, no one expects sanctions to work, but their presence allows business to go on as usual while deflecting demands for more significant action.

The P-5+1 is now shaping its response to Iran. They are not even committed to the idea of sanctions. But they will move to sanctions if it appears that Israel or the United States is prepared to move aggressively. Sanctions satisfy the need to appear to be acting while avoiding the risks of action.

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Book By George Friedman

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century