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The problem with this sort of learning, though, is that there's no one to tell you if you're getting it wrong, no one to tell you about the recent Economist article nicely summarizes the problems with Beck's method: If you try to teach yourself history and political science from scratch, you're likely to draw a lot of shallow and inaccurate conclusions, particularly when you're the sort of person who's predisposed to seeing things in terms of white hats and black hats. One role of instructors, particularly at the college level, is to smack down the sweeping generalisations and facile analogies their students tend to make, and try to force them to adopt more rigorous and complicated approaches. But what if you're surrounded by people who reward you handsomely for making sweeping, slanderous generalisations, both because it delivers ratings and because it's ideologically helpful?

This sort of reasoning is sufficient for politics, but in a more academic context it looks an awful lot like question-begging. Despite the props of learning he employs (blackboards, spectacles, pointers, Socratic dialogue), Beck's technique brings him closer to the conspiracy theorist than to the scholar.

by carefully hewing to the performance of the self-made scholar, Beck is able to make his audience feel like they're learning something new, even when they're just being told the same old thing.

The big question with Beck, as it is with a lot of figures in the latter-day conservative moment, is this: what is he? Is he evil? Ignorant? Performance art?

But it's unrealistic to expect them to change their minds; after all, neither liberals nor conservatives change their political beliefs very often. Instead, we just find new ways to justify our ideology, which indicates, I suspect, that our political beliefs are more of a cultural trait than a carefully reasoned view.

Glenn Beck tells a good story; Glenn Beck makes, though he doesn't intend to, impressive art. The world would just be a better place, I tend to think, if he stuck to novels.

it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.

The idea of an AI singularity

if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.

at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down

My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.

We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.

engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems

Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.

without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.

if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.

we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology

We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.

another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.

Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide

Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it

. In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years

Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies

Finally, representative democracy scales up badly

Nor are governments as important as they used to be.

the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.

we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.

The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.

Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.

a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa

In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.

by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.

It’s a normative projection

I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.

And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.

a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar

Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted

Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions

He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.

But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves

Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings

But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks

Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.

The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.

For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.

to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house

The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.

We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.

the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication

funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.

These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.

This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian

the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?

Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.

wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.

One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.

the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.

Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.

Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.

The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.

whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.

at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.

In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.

full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.

Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.

Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.

we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.

In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.

With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.

the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.

However, the threat of war remains a major tool by which North Korea tries to achieve its political ends.

This posturing has allowed North Korea, since the end of the Cold War, to pose enough of a threat to have countries like China, the United States, Japan and South Korea offer incentives at times to avoid a war. But over the years, North Korea has found that its message of impending doom is growing ever less alarming.

In 1993, the mere threat of leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty raised tensions to a near fever pitch, and the intervention of Jimmy Carter gave North Korea the reprieve it was looking for, along with the promise of light-water nuclear reactors and food and economic aid. As the effects wore off, North Korea carried out its first long-range rocket test in 1998, triggering another crisis that led to renewed diplomatic ties with several countries and to the first inter-Korean summit.

A decade later, in 2003, North Korea completed its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, setting in motion the six-party talks that Pyongyang used to manipulate the competing interests of the other parties. As the talks began losing steam, North Korea raised the stakes again, testing its first nuclear device in 2006, just months after an attempted long-range rocket test. Within a year, the six-party talks had produced results from Pyongyang's perspective, and North Korea hosted the second leadership summit with a South Korean president. By 2008, Pyongyang had convinced the United States to drop North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

A year later, in 2009, North Korea saw the need to raise the stakes yet again, so Pyongyang attempted a satellite launch and performed its second nuclear test. Pyongyang also suggested it was no longer bound by the 1953 Armistice Agreement. When the world effectively yawned at this action, North Korea followed with the sinking of the South Korean navy corvette ChonAn and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, along the maritime Northern Limit Line. North Korea also showed a visiting U.S. scholar one of its uranium enrichment facilities, confirming Washington's accusations that Pyongyang was pursuing an alternate nuclear program.

But, as in 2009, the latest missile and nuclear tests have largely been brushed aside, leading to verbal retorts and a new round of sanction talks rather than any significant economic or political concessions to Pyongyang. The threat to revoke the Armistice Agreement is, once again, meant to heighten tensions. North Korea is trying to show it has something to trade away as it seeks economic incentives to return to the status quo.

For North Korea's new leader, there are few options aside from the path of his father if the basic structure of relations cannot be altered. There can be no experiments in economic opening, not even minor adjustments in social policies, so long as the technical state of war remains.

The circuitous route of North Korean diplomacy, and its pattern of issuing threats to seek rewards, may also help explain why North Korea's new leader has chosen Dennis Rodman to transmit his eagerness for talks with the United States. So long as North Korea remains quirky and unpredictable, and so long as Kim Jong Un remains somewhat unreadable, Pyongyang may be able to keep the West guessing -- and perhaps even awaken interest in what Kim could do if North Korea were no longer a pariah.

It is not the overall amount of the reductions that is damaging, necessarily; it is the way in which the cuts will be implemented. The across-the-board cuts required by the sequestration coupled with the limits set by the continuing resolution are constraining budget planners' options in how to absorb the spending reductions and thus are damaging all the military branches, programs, training, deployments and procurement.

Just the threat of continued budget reductions has had an immediate effect on the military's readiness. The Navy decided not to deploy a second carrier to the Persian Gulf, backing down from its standard of two carriers in the region. Instead, the second carrier will serve in a surge capacity for the immediate future. The other branches have extended the deployments of units already in theaters and delayed others from rotating in as replacements since it is relatively less expensive to have units stay in place than move them and their equipment intercontinentally.

Maintenance budgets across the forces have been reduced or suspended in anticipation of cuts. Training of all non-deploying forces who are not critical to the national strategic forces is also being heavily curtailed.

Any given military platform, from a Stryker armored vehicle to an aircraft carrier, requires a lot of money in order to be ready for use at any time at its intended level of performance. These platforms require consistent use to maintain a certain readiness level because machines cannot sit idle for months to years and then operate effectively, if at all, especially if called on for immediate action.

For example, the Navy has said it is considering suspending operations of four of its nine carrier air wings while shutting down four of its carriers in various stages of the operations and maintenance process. This would essentially give the United States one carrier deployed with one on call for years. This will be sufficient if the world remains relatively quiet, but one large emergency or multiple small ones would leave the United States able to project limited force compared to previous levels.

Procurement cycles are very slow and take decades to implement; for instance, the Navy that the United States wants to have in 20 years is being planned now.

The U.S. military has a global presence, and sequestration would have appreciable effects on this in certain areas. Potentially, the hardest hit region will be the Pacific, which has been the focus of the United States' new strategy.

The single biggest capability gap that will develop will be the U.S. military's surge capacity. If the Syria-Iraq-Lebanon corridor were to become more unstable, the United States will not be able to respond with the same force structure it had in the past. The U.S. military can still shift its assets to different regions to attain its strategic goals, but those assets will come from a smaller resource pool, and shifting them will lessen the presence in some other region. The military's ability to use one of its softer political tools -- joint military exercises -- will also be at risk.

Funding cuts are not necessarily abnormal for the United States while winding down into a postwar stance. Historically, the pattern has been a reduction in spending and retrenchment of a large volume of forces from abroad. However, Pentagon planners typically go into a postwar period with the stated goal of not damaging the force through these cuts and reductions. 

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have implemented a loosely coordinated social policy to ensure homogeneity in our workforce. We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit” while not having to examine what that means - and it might mean that we’re all white, mostly male, mostly college-educated, mostly young/unmarried, mostly binge drinkers, mostly from a similar work background. We tend to hire within our employees’ friend and social groups. Because everyone we work with is a great culture fit, which is code for “able to fit in without friction,” we are all friends and have an unhealthy blur between social and work life. Because everyone is a “great culture fit,” we don’t have to acknowledge employee alienation and friction between individuals or groups. The desire to continue being a “culture fit” means it is harder for employees to raise meaningful critique and criticism of the culture itself.

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have a collective post-traumatic stress reaction to previous workplaces that had hostile, unnecessary, unproductive and authoritarian meetings. We tend to avoid projects and initiatives that require strict coordination across the company. We might have difficulty meeting the expectations of enterprise companies and do better selling to startups organized like us. We are heavily invested in being rebels against traditional corporate culture. Because we communicate largely asynchronously and through chat, it is easy to mentally dehumanize teammates and form silos around functional groups with different communications practices or business functions.

What your culture might actually be saying is… Our employees must be treated as spoiled, coddled children that cannot perform their own administrative functions. We have a team of primarily women supporting the eating, drinking, management and social functions of a primarily male workforce whose output is considered more valuable. We struggle to hire women in non-administrative positions and most gender diversity in our company is centralized in social and admin work. Because our office has more amenities than home life, our employees work much longer hours and we are able to extract more value from them for the same paycheck. The environment reinforces the cultural belief that work is a pleasant dream and can help us distract or bribe from deeper issues in the organization.

What your culture might actually be saying is… We have enough venture funding to pay people to work on non-core parts of the business. We are not under that much pressure to make money. The normal work of the business is not sufficiently rewarding so we bribe employees with pet projects. We’re not entirely sure what our business objectives and vision are, so we are trying to discover it by letting employee passions take root. We have a really hard time developing work that takes more than a few people to release. We have lots of unfinished but valuable projects that get left behind due to shifts in focus, lack of concentrated effort, and inability to organize sufficient resources to bring projects to completion.

What your culture might actually be saying is… Management decisions are siloed at the very top layers of management, kept so close to the chest they appear not to exist at all. The lack of visibility into investor demands, financial affairs, HR issues, etc. provides an abstraction layer between employees and real management, which we pretend doesn’t exist. We don’t have an explicit power structure, which makes it easier for the unspoken power dynamics in the company to play out without investigation or criticism.

What your culture might actually be saying is… We fool ourselves into thinking we have a better work/life balance when really people take even less vacation than they would when they had a vacation policy. Social pressure and addiction to work has replaced policy as a regulator of vacation time.

What your culture might actually be saying is… Features are the most important function of our business. We lack processes for surfacing and addressing technical debt. We have systemic infrastructure problems but they are not relevant because we are more focused on short-term adoption than long-term reliability. We prioritize fast visible progress, even if it is trivial, over longer and more meaningful projects. Productivity is measured more by lines of code than the value of that code. Pretty things are more important than useful things.

In the early 1800′s, nine out of ten Americans worked in agriculture—now it’s around 2%. At its peak, about a third of the US population was employed in manufacturing—now it’s less than 10%. How many decades until the figures are similar for the information-processing tasks that typify rich countries’ post-industrial economies?

To see how the internet has disproportionately affected the jobs of people who process information, check out the gray bars dipping below the 0% line on the chart, below. (I’ve adapted this chart to show just the types of employment that lost jobs in the US during the great recession. Every other category continued to add jobs or was nearly flat.)

Here’s another clue about what’s been going on in the past ten years. “Return on capital” measures the return firms get when they spend money on capital goods like robots, factories, software—anything aside from people. (If this were a graph of return on people hired, it would be called “Return on labor”.)

Notice: the only industry where the return on capital is as great as manufacturing is “other industries”—a grab bag which includes all the service and information industries, as well as entertainment, health care and education. In short, you don’t have to be a tech company for investing in technology to be worthwhile.

One thing all our machines have accomplished, and especially the internet, is the ability to reproduce and distribute good work in record time. Barring market distortions like monopolies, the best software, media, business processes and, increasingly, hardware, can be copied and sold seemingly everywhere at once. This benefits “superstars”—the most skilled engineers or content creators. And it benefits the consumer, who can expect a higher average quality of goods.

“Certainly the labor market has never been better for very highly-educated workers in the United States, and when I say never, I mean never,” MIT labor economist David Autor told American Public Media’s Marketplace.

The other winners in this scenario are anyone who owns capital.

Computers are more disruptive than, say, the looms smashed by the Luddites, because they are “general-purpose technologies” noted Peter Linert, an economist at University of Californa-Davis.

In March 2009, Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse robotics and automation company. In partnership with a company called Quiet Logistics, Kiva’s combination of mobile shelving and robots has already automated a warehouse in Andover, Massachusetts.

From 2000 to 2007, in the years leading up to the great recession, GDP and productivity in the US grew faster than at any point since the 1960s, but job creation did not keep pace.

Especially in the past ten years, economists have seen a reversal of what they call “the great compression“—that period from the second world war through the 1970s when, in the US at least, more people were crowded into the ranks of the middle class than ever before.

Indeed, some have argued that as technology aids the gutting of the middle class, it destroys the very market required to sustain it—that we’ll see “less of the type of innovation we associate with Steve Jobs, and more of the type you would find at Goldman Sachs.”

So how do we deal with this trend? The possible solutions to the problems of disruption by thinking machines are beyond the scope of this piece. As I’ve mentioned in other pieces published at Quartz, there are plenty of optimists ready to declare that the rise of the machines will ultimately enable higher standards of living, or at least forms of unemployment as foreign to us as “big data scientist” would be to a scribe of the 17th century.

With those caveats, I do consider waxing unemployment precipitated in part by automation an extremely likely near-term future scenario.

In rough strokes, the story of machines displacing and immiserating skilled workers reiterates the very genesis of capitalist modernity.

In contrast with the Neo-Luddites of today, the nineteenth-century Luddites expressed no desire to terminate civilization but instead fiercely defended their economic interests against capitalist competition that would reduce them dependent wage labor.

Despite the lack of even basic computers – much less artificial intelligence – some radicals in the nineteenth century already proposed that necessary labor could be reduced to a few hours per day.

The later Technocracy movement made automation the core of their analysis, argued it would cause mass unemployment, and promoted a society of equally distributed abundance managed by technical experts.

As concise distillation of the desires described above, the following passage for Oscar Wilde's “The Soul of Man under Socialism” poetically proclaims a techno-utopian position years before the dawn of twentieth century

Even manufacturing still requires vast human labor at the moment. Living and working conditions for many twenty-first-century factory workers aren't meaningfully better than over a hundred years ago. State-socialist attempts at rationally planned industrial development have had dubious material benefits while inflicting intense environmental damage and human suffering.

Our current circumstances suggest automation of at least basic physical tasks will keep advancing; lights-out factories already exist. The prospect of robots replacing humans at the majority of present-day jobs appears genuinely plausible if far from certain.

I favor the latter.

Social relations would become profoundly altered if – consistent with Wilde's utopian vision – each individual had independent access to basic necessities and comforts without having to toil.

When it comes to post-scarcity, the differences between libertarians and anarchists like myself blur.

Barring nanotech genies who grant unlimited wishes, I assess community control of the means of production as my desired arrangement. With proper political mobilization, robotization may allow for prosperous self-sufficient or largely self-sufficient communities.

Although the life of any single worker means little or nothing to them, they cannot annihilate the working class without doing the same to their own privilege. Robots change this. Human obsolescence could spell doom for the masses. If structural dynamics drive behavior, a powerful enough group of elites might simply liquidate the unruly hordes of no-longer-need labors.

I want to give automated utopia an honest try, but I also desire fertile landbases for my primitivist comrades. As personally enamored as I am with the transhumanist path, I encourage and endeavor to practice a revolutionary pluralism that respects meaningful diversity.

The vanguard is already here in Siri and Google Now.  Each of these represents a type of agent that knows a few things about us.  Google Now will tell you, without your asking, the time it takes to get home from work.  Siri and Google Now both will take your voice input and perform actions that would normally be fairly complicated through a series of interfaces.

Not all of us have access to complex and robust voice recognition libraries and a network of camera-equipped cars.  Many of us are, however, in a position to collect or analyze large sets of data.

App collects data, sends output to wearable tech.

Columbia University's Kenneth Waltz, arguably America's pre-eminent realist, says that the opposite of "anarchy" is not stability, but "hierarchy."

Hierarchy eviscerates equality; hierarchy implies that some are frankly "more equal" than others, and it is this formal inequality -- where someone, or some state or group, has more authority and power than others -- that prevents chaos. For it is inequality itself that often creates the conditions for peace.

It is a government that monopolizes the use of violence in a given geographical space, thereby preventing anarchy. To quote Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher, only where it is possible to punish the wicked can right and wrong have any practical meaning, and that requires "some coercive power."

Whereas primacy, as Kang explains, is about preponderance purely through military or economic power, hegemony "involves legitimation and consensus."

When a hegemon does not lead, it is acting irresponsibly.

But that is only because journalists are confused about the terminology, even as they sanctimoniously judge previous historical eras by the strict standards of their own. In fact, for most of human history, periods of relative peace have been the product of hegemony of one sort or another. And for many periods, the reigning hegemonic or imperial power was the most liberal, according to the standards of the age.

There are exceptions, of course, like Hapsburg Spain, with its combination of inquisition and conquest. But the point is that hegemony does not require tyrannical or absolutist rule.

there are few things messier in geopolitics than the demise of an empire.

Therefore, I am saying only in a general sense is order preferable to disorder.

That is, by some rough measure of international consent, it is America that has the responsibility to lead. America formed NATO in Europe, even as its Navy and Air Force exercise preponderant power in the Pacific Basin. And whenever there is a humanitarian catastrophe somewhere in the developing world, it is the United States that has been expected to organize the response.

But that hegemony, in some aspects, seems to be on the wane. That is what makes this juncture in history unique.

When it comes to the Greater Middle East, Americans seem to want protection on the cheap, and Obama is giving them that. 

Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were noted for American leadership and an effective, sometimes ruthless foreign policy.

Nevertheless, in the case of the Middle East, do not conflate chaos with democracy. Democracy itself implies an unequal, hierarchal order, albeit one determined by voters. What we have in the Middle East cannot be democracy because almost nowhere is there a new and sufficiently formalized hierarchy. No, what we have in many places in the Middle East is the weakening of central authority with no new hierarchy to adequately replace it.

Visitor Loyalty: During the reporting time period how often do "people" ("visitors") visit my website?

For example you update your website ten times each month. If you have 100% loyal visitor base then they should be visiting your website ten times each month. Are they? What's your number? Is it going up over time?

Action: 1) Identify a goal for your non-ecommerce website for the # of visits you expect from the traffic to your website in a given time period (say week, month etc). 2) Measure reality using above report. 3) Compare your performance over time to ensure you are making progress, or potentially not as in my case…

Recency: How long has it been since a visitor last visited your website? Sounds confusing? Don't worry it is cool (it even has a psychedelic border! :)……

As would be the case for a jobs site. Or craigslist. Or any website that wants lots lots of repeat visits. Using this simple report you can now see how you are doing when it comes to the distribution of visitors in terms of their propensity to visit your site.

Length of Visit: During the reporting period what is the quality of visit as represented by length of a visitor session in seconds.

But it has always been frustrating to me how hard it is to get away from the average and measure the distribution of the visits to check if the average time on site is 50 seconds because one person visited for one second and the other person for 100 seconds. The average hides so much. Here's a better alternative……

Ain't that better? I think so. So many things jump out at me, but notice that either I lose 'em right away or if some how I can suck them in for one minute then they tend to stay for a long time. Hurray! I have a better idea of how to interact with my visitors.

1) Identify what the distribution is for your website for length of visits. 2) Think of creative ways to engage traffic – what can I do to keep you for sixty seconds because after that you are mine! 3) Should I start charging more for ads on my site – if I have 'em – after 60 seconds? 4) If you are a support website then should you be embarrassed if 20% of your audience was on the site for more than ten minutes!

Depth of Visit: During a given time period what is the distribution of number of pages in each visit to the website.

You are used to seeing average page views per visitors, above is something that is a lot more helpful. I was also able to get this exact metric from my indextools implementation…..

Action: There has been so much said about this already so I'll spare your the pain. You can easily imagine how wonderful and fantastic this data is as you go about analyzing experience of your customers (and so much more powerful, a million times more, than average page views per visitor!).

Socialize them to your key stake holders and decision makers to make the realize what is really happening on your website.

Absolutely positively work with your leadership to create goals and then measure against goals over time

Segment the data! For Visitor Loyalty or Length of Visit what are the most important acquisition sources? What are the keywords that drive valuable segments of traffic to the website?

As I'll explain below, regardless of how you feel about your job right now, adopting the craftsman mindset can be the foundation on which you build a compelling career.

Basic economic theory tells us that if you want something that's both rare and valuable, you need something rare and valuable to offer in return—this is Supply and Demand 101.

They start by painstakingly developing rare and valuable skills—which we can call career capital. They then leverage this capital to gain rare and valuable traits in their career. These traits lead to a feeling of passion about their working life.

The reality I'm proposing is less glamorous. It argues that passion takes time and hard work—harder work than most people naturally invest in their jobs. It's also less certain in the sense that you cannot predict in advance the details of the compelling career you're cultivating. But it compensates with clarity.

The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver's expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan. 

Conservatives should be familiar with its contours. For years, they've been arguing that liberal control of media and academia confers one advantage: Folks on the right can't help but be familiar with the thinking of liberals, whereas leftists can operate entirely within a liberal cocoon. This analysis was offered to explain why liberal ideas were growing weaker and would be defeated.

It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh's show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you're a rank-and-file conservative, you're probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn't accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thing; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear.

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.  

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously? 

How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don't Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn't grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man's record nor repudiate it. The most damaging Romney gaffe of the campaign, where he talked about how the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are a lost cause for Republicans? Either he was unaware that many of those people are Republican voters, or was pandering to GOP donors who are misinformed. Either way, bad information within the conservative movement was to blame.

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood's convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama's America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

Large organic farms are typically monoculture fields just like large conventional farms, though more crop rotation is required. Industrial organic poultry and beef farms also look oddly similar to conventional industrial feedlots, even if the animals are eating organic feed. In fact, both organic and conventional industrial farms are often owned by the same mega-corporations, and share the same bottom line of profit. There’s no reason to suspect that these industrial organic foods would be markedly more nutritious than conventionally grown foods.

Interestingly, despite the wide range in the quality of foods that qualify as organic, the Stanford study did find some significant differences. Organic produce contained significantly more phenols, the cancer fighting chemicals found in red wine, green tea, chocolate and many fruits and vegetables. However, this finding was glossed over in favor of the non-significant differences found between vitamin C, betacarotene and vitamin E levels in organic versus conventional foods.

Soil quality and weather (the raw ingredients) are by far the biggest factors in the nutrient levels of produce, with freshness and storage methods being next in line.

The Stanford study confirms organic agriculture has substantially fewer pesticide contaminations, but for some reason this finding was also glossed over since the conventional produce levels “didn’t exceed maximum allowed limits.” Logically, however, if limiting pesticide exposure is important to you (as it should be) organic produce is the better option.

The animal studies were even more encouraging. Small but significant improvements in fatty acid profiles were found for organic milk and chickens, which contained more healthy omega-3 fatty acids. More importantly, antibiotic resistant bacteria, the kind that are becoming more common (and deadly) in our own hospitals, were 33% more likely to be found on conventional meat products than on organic meat.

That reasoning power may be effective when attacking rival truth claims, but it does not perform well in establishing it's own claims concerning matters of fact.

On the contrary, she often responded with intense hostility to criticism. Typical in this respect was her response to Sidney Hook's review of To the New Intellectual. Instead of responding to Hook's criticisms point by point, Rand insisted that Hook should be publicly condemned. Because Leonard Peikoff and Barabara Branden were students of Hook, they were were given a pass; but everyone else, including even Rand's friend John Hospers, were expected to take part in the public condemnation.

she had very little conception of the manners and morals of professional academicians: they can get along well and even be friends, while disagreeing strongly with one another on rather fundamental issues.

But for Ayn this was a betrayal. It almost cost us our friendship. In the end she attributed my attitude to the misfortune of having been brainwashed by the academic establishment, at least with regard to their code of etiquette.

What Rand failed to appreciate is that the "code of ettiquette" that Hospers writes about is the glue which holds together communities of truth-seeking intellectuals. If everyone began publicly condemning those they disagreed with, that community would break down and all that remain would be a loose assemblages of ideological factions crying anathema against each other.

the single most important thing you can do to improve the battery life on your Nexus 5 is to lower the brightness.

However, those who are interested in a better automatic brightness management than offered by default on the Nexus 5 should check out Lux, a third-party app that is well-reviewed by users and professional reviewers.

Nexus 5 Battery Tips: How to turn off "Scanning Always Available" in the Nexus 5 (or any Android 4.4 KitKat device) settings menu.  Thomas Halleck / International Business Times

Unless you are using your Nexus 5 to drive to somewhere unfamiliar, or are using Waze in the car to avoid traffic, there is no need to keep GPS turned on. It draws a lot of power and offers little for the Nexus 5 experience.

Unless you are in range of a Wi-Fi signal that you will use, make sure that Wi-Fi is turned off on your smartphone.

Google included a feature in Android 4.3 that allowed apps and Google Play services to determine a user’s location using Wi-Fi, even when the phone’s Wi-Fi is turned off.

Animated wallpapers drain battery a lot more than a still image, so if you are looking for the greatest power performance on the Nexus 5, the Rocky Mountains are a better choice than live wallpapers like Sun Beam.

Make sure you have the most up-to-date software, including any Nexus 5 firmware, as well as all of your apps through Google Play. Apps that include battery-draining bugs or are poorly optimized will drain your battery unnecessarily.

Most important to note was the division of Europe. Each country crafted its own response -- or lack of response -- to the Syrian crisis. The most interesting position was taken by Germany, which was unwilling to participate and until quite late unwilling to endorse participation.

Nothing has ruptured in Europe, but then Europe as a concept has always been fluid. The European Union is a free trade zone that excludes some European countries. It is a monetary union that excludes some members of the free trade zone. It has a parliament but leaves defense and foreign policy prerogatives to sovereign nation-states. It has not become more organized since 1945; in some fundamental ways, it has become less organized.

no individual European nation has the ability by itself to conduct an air attack on Syria. As Libya showed, France and Italy could not execute a sustained air campaign. They needed the United States.

Amid profound differences and distrust, U.S. and Soviet leaders managed to avoid the worst. Given their track record, Europe's leaders might have plunged the world further into disaster.

First, Europe was all over the place. Then the coalition that coaxed the Americans in fell apart, leaving the United States virtually alone. When Obama went back to his original position, they decided that he had been outfoxed by the Russians. Had he attacked, he would have been dismissed as another cowboy.

The American view of Europe is a combination of indifference and bafflement. Europe has not mattered all that much to the United States since the end of the Cold War.

all of Europe became Scandinavia. It was quite prosperous, a pleasure to visit, but not the place in which history was being made.

When Americans can be bothered to think of Europe, they think of it as a continent with strong opinions of what others should do but with little inclination to do something itself.

The American perception of Europe is that it is unhelpful and irritating but ultimately weak and therefore harmless.

For example, a friend pointed out that he spoke four languages but Americans seem unable to learn one. I pointed out that if he took a weekend trip he would need to speak four languages. Citizens of the United States don't need to learn four languages to drive 3,000 miles.

The United States is a unified country with unified economic, foreign and defense policies. Europe never fully came together; in fact, for the past five years it has been disintegrating.

Europe's past is magnificent, and its magnificence can be seen on the streets of any European capital. Its past haunts and frightens it. Its future is not defined, but its present is characterized by a denial and a distance from its past. U.S. history is much shallower. Americans build shopping malls on top of hallowed battlefields and tear down buildings after 20 years. The United States is a country of amnesia. It is obsessed with its future, and Europe is paralyzed by its past. 

Where once we made wars together, we now take vacations. It is hard to build a Syria policy on that framework, let alone a North Atlantic strategy.