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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

lchic - 11:51am Mar 18, 2002 EST (#669 of 715)

Decision making/tree, expert systems ... often a decision is common sense .. when a framework is required then :

http://www.eskimo.com/~mighetto/lstree.htm
http://www.fammed.ouhsc.edu/robhamm/cdmcalc.htm
http://www.ethics.ubc.ca/mcdonald/decisions.html

http://www.mindtools.com/media/Diagrams/Ct6_1.gif
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCT_06.htm
http://www.mindtools.com/dectree.html

http://www.univ-valenciennes.fr/ROAD/MCDM/

Keywords: Decision theory, Bayesian networks, Bayesian methods, rationality under bounded resources, decision analysis, influence diagrams, decision-theoretic inference, probabilistic inference, expert systems, explanation.

In: Journal of Approximate Reasoning, Special Issue on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, 2:247-302. Also, Stanford CS Technical Report KSL-88-13.

http://research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/horvitz/DT.HTM

lchic - 11:56am Mar 18, 2002 EST (#670 of 715)

Hunting the boondoggle : http://www.abc.net.au/arts/interact/comp/fanning.jpg

rshow55 - 12:01pm Mar 18, 2002 EST (#671 of 715)

We are special animals -- and capable, often enough, of unbelievable brutality, duplicity, and ugliness.

We'd be safer if we were clearer about that.

Still, just now, I feel like posting some beautiful things from museums and artistic sites, mostly Russian, collected by lunarchic last year.

We need to remember both the ugliness, the danger, and the good -- and do as well as we can, without lies that mislead, brutalize, and endanger us.

Images of Culture :
http://www.artist.omsk.ru/omskgo.jpg http://www.artist.omsk.ru/butterfly.jpg http://www.artist.omsk.ru/treeaple.jpg
http://www.craftscenter.org/mainbot.html http://www.asianart.com/mongolia/intro.html http://www.zeroland.co.nz/art_country.html#mongolia http://www.jagger.com/russia.html http://youth.unesco.or.kr/youth/english/atlas/sub5.asp?code=031 http://www.penrose-press.com/IDD/pub/eeur.html http://www.bazaar.ru/cover_may.jpg http://www.uar.ru/av/images/ris1a.GIF http://www.pran.ru/ http://www.msu.ru/english/images/msu-logo.jpg http://www.ineos.ac.ru/images/ineos_photo1.jpg http://www.hmscossack.freeserve.co.uk/images/COSBDGsm.gif http://www.yerf.com/ruggscot/data/rokhan04.jpg http://www.costumes.org/history/20thcent/1900s/1903ball/plate31.jpg

And while we're considering warfare -- lunarchic cited another kind of warfare (that the US, and countries in complex interaction with the US, might well consider, both defensively and offensively.)

Marketing Brand Warfare: 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand by David F. D'Alessandro and Michele Owens McGraw-Hill, 2001 ~ Stock your arsenal with brand weaponry

Leadership, Strategy & Competition How to Compete Like a Judo Strategist ! Movement, balance, and leverage: Savvy executives use these principles to compete every day. In this excerpt from their new book Judo Strategy: Turning Your Competitors' Strength to Your Advantage, HBS professor David B. Yoffie and research associate Mary Kwak reveal five techniques of the masters.

It isn't wise for a nation state to become identified with lying. That's a source of leverage -- but a motivation for "disinformation disarmament" as well. Lies are unstable.

We are animals. All the ugliness we see is real. MD648 rshow55 3/17/02 6:45pm - - and especially THE UNIVERSALITY OF INCEST by Lloyd DeMause at http://www.psychohistory.com/ (scroll down to article) . The "inherent goodness or mankind" can't be usefully considered, without remembering the animality, ugliness, and deceptiveness, too.

But the potential for beauty is there, and is often realized, as well. If we play some things straight, and don't cling to fiction-boondoggles like "missile defense" -- we can be safer and more comfortable than we are.

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