VAZAMENTO DE ARQUIVOS SECRETOS

Leaks Add to Pressure on White House Over Strategy
By ERIC SCHMITT and HELENE COOPER
Published: July 26, 2010



WASHINGTON — The White House sought to reassert control over the public debate on the Afghanistan war on Monday as political reaction to the disclosure of a six-year archive of classified military documents increased the pressure on President Obama to defend his war strategy.

On Capitol Hill, leading Democratic lawmakers said the documents, with their fine-grain portrayal of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations have previously portrayed, would intensify congressional scrutiny of Mr. Obama’s policy.

“Those policies are at a critical stage, and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent,” Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.

The Senate this week takes up a critical war-financing bill and is expected to hold a hearing on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee military operations in Afghanistan.

While Congressional and administration officials said the disclosure of the documents probably would not jeopardize the financing bill or General Mattis’s expected confirmation, it could complicate how the White House tries to achieves its goals in Afghanistan.

The White House appeared to be focusing most of its ire toward Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.org, the Web site that provided access to some 92,000 secret military reports to The New York Times and two other news organizations, Der Spiegel in Germany and The Guardian in Britain. The documents span the period from January 2004 through December 2009.

White House officials e-mailed select transcripts of an interview Mr. Assange conducted with Der Spiegel, underlining the quote the White House apparently found most offensive. Among them was Mr. Assange’s assertion, “I enjoy crushing bastards.”

Mr. Obama was already facing an uphill battle on the way to a scheduled review of his Afghanistan war strategy in December, and administration officials have been bracing for a political fight as they try to defend the strategy at a time when gains seem limited.

At a news conference in London on Monday, Mr. Assange defended the release of the documents.

“I’d like to see this material taken seriously and investigated, and new policies, if not prosecutions result from it,” he said.

The Times and the two other news organizations agreed not to disclose anything that was likely to put lives at risk or jeopardize military or antiterrorist operations, and The Times redacted the names of Afghan informants and other sensitive information from the documents it published. .WikiLeaks said it withheld posting some 15,000 documents for the same reason. Pakistan strongly denied the suggestions in the leaked United States military records that its military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency.

A senior ISI official, speaking on condition of anonymity under standard practice, sharply condemned the reports as “part of the malicious campaign to malign the spy organization” and said the ISI would “continue to eradicate the menace of terrorism with or without the help of the West.”

Expressing dismay over the reports, the official said the Pakistan military and its spy organization had suffered tremendously while leading the forefront of the war against terror.

“Pakistan is the biggest victim of terrorism,” he said. “Why then are we still targeted?” he asked.

Calling the reports raw, uncorroborated and unverified, the official said: “In the field of intelligence, any piece of data has to be corroborated, analyzed and substantiated by multiple sources. Until then it remains raw data, and it can be anything.”

Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman for President Asif Ali Zardari, dismissed the reports and said that Pakistan remained “a part of a strategic alliance of the United States in the fight against terrorism.”

He added: “Such allegations have been regurgitated in the past. Also, these represent low-level intelligence reports and do not represent a convincing smoking gun. I do not see any convincing evidence.”

Mr. Babar questioned how Pakistan could possibly have the kind of connections to the Taliban that some of the reports suggest, asking if “those who are alleging that Pakistan is playing a double game are also asserting that President Zardari is presiding over an apparatus that is coordinating attacks on the general headquarters, mosques, shrines, schools and killing Pakistani citizens?”

He continued, “There was a time when many people believed that former President Musharraf was running with the hare and hunting with the hound,” suggesting that any such double-dealing lay with the president’s predecessor and nemesis. “We believe that era is over.”

Pakistani television news channels did not report on the content of the documents but carried brief reports that noted the American government’s condemnation of the leak and perhaps a clip of the news conference by Mr. Assange. One editor of a major news channel, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was pressure not to cover the topic.

Most of Pakistan’s news coverage on Monday focused on a suicide bomb aimed at the house of a provincial minister of information.

The web portal of Dawn, the country’s most prestigious daily, carried an Associated Press report in which an ISI official dismissed the reports..

The Express Tribune, a daily newspaper from Karachi, noted that American officials had held long-standing concerns about ISI links to the Taliban, though its report led with the government’s condemnation of the leak.

Popular Pakistani blogs had nothing on the WikiLeaks trove by Monday afternoon.

Bina Shah, a novelist based in Karachi, wrote on Twitter: “Why is nobody in Pakistan discussing the WikiLeaks story? It’s sensational.”

While Pakistani officials protested, a spokesman for the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said Mr. Karzai was not upset by the documents and did not believe the picture they painted was unfair.

The Karzai government offered no pushback to accounts in the reports that describe how the war effort has been hurt by corruption and the questionable loyalty and competence of the Afghan government, police and army. Instead, they focused on other problems outlined in the documents, including civilian deaths caused by the American and NATO militaries and Pakistani complicity with militants.

On Monday, Mr. Karzai said a NATO strike had killed 52 civilians in a remote village in Helmand Province three days earlier.

Speaking after a news conference in Kabul, Mr. Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, was asked whether there was anything in the leaked documents that angered Mr. Karzai or that he thought unfair.

“No, I don’t think so,” Mr. Omar replied.

He described the documents as being mainly “about civilian casualties and efforts to hide civilian casualties, and the role of a certain intelligence agency in Afghanistan,” a reference to the ISI.

“The president’s initial reaction was, ‘Look, this is nothing new,’ ” he said.



Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Kabul, Afghanistan; Adam B. Ellick and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; and Caroline Crampton from London.

Inner/outer directions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Redirected from Inner/Outer labeling

Inner/outer directions are labels that identify the direction of travel on opposing lanes of traffic on certain ring roads and beltways. They can be used to sign individual routes that encircle a city or metropolitan area, where east–west and north–south orientations cannot be applied uniformly. The labels are also used in select double track rail systems that form a loop, indicating the direction of travel of each line.

Variations of the labels include "inner loop"/"outer loop", "inner beltline"/"outer beltline", "inner ring"/"outer ring", "inner rail"/"outer rail", and "inner circle"/"outer circle".

In 2009, Interstate 277 in Charlotte, North Carolina became the first non-contiguous loop route to utilize inner/outer directional signage.

In nations where automobiles drive on the right side of a road, traffic traveling in a clockwise direction around a loop will always be in the "inner" lane(s) (assuming that there is no lane crossing). Likewise, traffic traveling in a counterclockwise direction will always be in the "outer" lane(s). "Inner" and "outer" labels stem from this reasoning, applying the concept of concentric loops to the geographic characteristics of circular road or rail.

How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom presents a striking and thought-provoking new understanding of pleasure, desire, and value. The thought of sex with a virgin is intensely arousing for many men. The average American spends more than four hours a day watching television. Abstract art can sell for millions of dollars. People slow their cars to look at gory accidents, and go to movies that make them cry.

Pleasure is anything but straightforward. Our desires, attractions, and tastes take us beyond the symmetry of a beautiful face, the sugar and fat in food, or the prettiness of a painting. In How Pleasure Works, Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom draws on groundbreaking research to unveil the deeper workings of why we desire what we desire. Refuting the longstanding explanation of pleasure as a simple sensory response, Bloom shows us that pleasure is grounded in our beliefs about the deeper nature or essence of a given thing. This is why we want the real Rolex and not the knockoff, the real Picasso and not the fake, the twin we have fallen in love with and not her identical sister.

In this fascinating and witty account, Bloom draws on child development, philosophy, neuroscience, and behavioral economics in order to address pleasures noble and seamy, highbrow and lowbrow. Along the way, he gives us unprecedented insights into a realm of human psychology that until now has only been partially understood.

The Mass Observation Archive - Kevin Macdonald

http://www.massobs.org.uk/menu_using_the_archive.htm

Origins of Mass Observation, 1937-50s
The Archive results from the work of the social research organisation, Mass Observation. This organisation was founded in 1937 by three young men, who aimed to create an 'anthropology of ourselves'. They recruited a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This original work continued until the early 1950s. Find out more about the original Mass Observation project.

The Archive at the University of Sussex, 1970
In 1970, the Archive came to the University of Sussex and was opened up as a public resource for historical research. The Archive holds all the material generated by Mass Observation between 1937 and 1949, with a few later additions from the 1950s and 1960s.

The Mass Observation Project
The original Mass Observation idea of a national panel was revived from the Archive in 1981. Through the press, televison and radio, new volunteer writers or 'Mass Observation correspondents' were recruited from all over Britain. The project continues under the direction of Dorothy Sheridan.

Find out more about the Mass Observation Project here.

Awards and celebrations, 2006-7
In 2006, the Mass Observation Archive was awarded Designated status by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). Only 38 collections in libraries and archives across England have so far been recognised as having outstanding national and international importance under the Designation Scheme.

In 2007, we celebrated the 70th anniversary of the founding of the original Mass Observation project. You can read about the events
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEQhy0oFE1w&playnext_from=TL&videos=6jXYm4-_gl8&feature=featured

UPA-DC July Event - Workshops to Enhance your Usability Knowledge

July 30, 2010
Six Workshops to Enhance your Usability Knowledge
On Friday, July 30, we’re going to be running a series of workshops. We’ll be offering six sessions of 2.5 hours each. Attend one, two or three of the sessions. Everyone who attends will get a catered lunch, sponsored by Tobii Technology.

http://www.upa-dc-metro.org/http://www.upa-dc-metro.org/

Event Details
.

Venue: Silver Spring Innovation Center, sponsored by Lebsontech LLC.

8070 Georgia Avenue, Suite 113, Silver Spring, MD 20910

Catered lunch sponsored by Tobii Technology.



DOWNLOAD FULL SESSION INFORMATION AND DIRECTIONS (PDF)




9:00 AM - 11:30 Session:

Best practices for eye tracking in user experience research

(Wilkey Wong, Tobii Technology)




11:30 - 12:30 PM:

Free Catered Lunch for all attendees (Sponsored by Tobii Technology)



12:30 PM - 3:00 Sessions:

Getting started conducting user research
OR Love your logs: Easy and cost-

effective user insights

(Carol Smith, Midwest Research, LLC)
(Andrew Stevens, George Mason U.)



3:00 - 5:30 Sessions:

Usability testing with remotely

located users
OR Introduction to accessibility

(Dick Horst & Mark Becker, UserWorks, Inc.)
(Cory Lebson, Lebsontech LLC)

TERREMOTO EM BETHESDA!

Dia desses pensei sobre a possibilidade de terremoto aqui, em Bethesda. Achava quase impossivel!
Hoje, aas 5 da matina, acordei com a cristaleira - um movel pesado- tremendo. Achei que talvez fosse sonho mas aas 6, como nao consegui mais dormir, levantei. Acabei constatando que foi um terremoto mesmo. Muito estranha a sensacao!
Earthquake Preparation Information

At this time, there have not been any aftershocks to this morning’s 3.6 magnitude earthquake reported yet. However, in light of the fact that aftershocks remain a possibility, DC HSEMA wishes to remind citizens of the following protective actions that should be taken if another earthquake is felt:

During an earthquake if you are:

• Indoors:
o Take cover under a desk, table, or bench. If none is available, use an inside wall or doorway.
o Stay away from windows, outside doors, walls, and anything that could shatter or fall on you.
o If you’re sleeping, stay in bed and cover your head with a pillow. If your bed is under a heavy light fixture or you have a large mirror or painting over your headboard, move to the nearest safe place.
o Stay inside until the shaking stops. Most injuries during an earthquake occur when people enter or exit a structure.

• Outdoors:
o Stay there and move away from buildings, streetlights, and overhead utility wires.

• In a Motor Vehicle:
o Stop as quickly as safety permits and stay in the vehicle. Avoid stopping near or under buildings, trees, overpasses, and utility wires.
o Proceed cautiously once the earthquake has stopped, watching for road and bridge damage.