Remarkable Persons at Bibliodessy

BY HELEN KENNEDY
New York Daily News
Posted on Fri, Mar. 25, 2005

TAMPA, Fla. – (KRT) – As Terri Schiavo weakens and legal options peter out, tension here is intensifying.

Some pro-life activists are making ugly threats, making up “Wanted” posters for lawmakers and handing out the home addresses of judges who rejected legal appeals to keep Schiavo alive.

“I am afraid,” said state Sen. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami, who has received numerous death threats by phone and mail because she voted against a measure to reinsert Schiavo’s feeding tube. “We’re talking about the sanctity of life, and (they’re) threatening my life.”

The nine Republican lawmakers who voted against the measure showed up on anonymous “Wanted” posters that appeared in the state capitol in Tallahassee. State Sen. Nancy Argenziano said one of the “un-Christian” voice mails she’s received wished stomach cancer on her.

Guards have been posted outside the politicians’ offices.

Police won’t discuss their security measures, but Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer, who has consistently upheld Schiavo’s requests to end his wife’s life, are under around-the-clock protection and staying out of sight. Both have been the targets of a flood of fury, branding them corrupt and abusive murderers who are flouting God.

“Various law enforcement agencies are aware of the emotions in this case and have taken appropriate actions,” said Wayne Shelor, spokesman for the police in Clearwater, Fla., where Michael Schiavo lives.

Popular right-wing Web sites have had to post prominent warnings against threats of violence on their discussion boards after calls for the armed “liberation” of Terri Schiavo from her hospice and comments suggesting that if her husband were taken out of the picture, guardianship would revert to her parents, who want to keep her alive.

People on Schiavo’s street in Clearwater have received anonymous postcards saying: “Your neighbor Michael Schiavo is trying to murder his wife.”

Gov. Jeb Bush was alarmed enough to call for calm.

“There have been some reports that people are making threatening declarations if this process doesn’t go their way,” he said. “I urge all who want to help Terri Schiavo to honor her by remaining calm and acting peacefully, even though we are all very distressed by what’s happening.”

“Even though we may disagree with the courts,” he added, “there is no justification for violent acts.”

—

(New York Daily News correspondent Richard Sisk contributed to this report.)

© 2005, New York Daily News.
Visit the Daily News online at http://www.nydailynews.com
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
© 2005 KRT Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

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Dec. 15, 2004 Issue of CIO Magazine | Essential Technology
More Than Human
Transhumanism—the practice of enhancing people through technology—sounds like science fiction. But when it arrives (and it will), it will create unique problems for CIOs.

BY FRED HAPGOOD

THINKING AHEAD | This fall, the editors of a leading public policy magazine, Foreign Policy, asked eight prominent intellectuals to identify the single idea they felt was currently posing the greatest threat to humanity. Most of the suggestions were merely old demons: various economic myths, the idea that you can fight “a war on evil,” Americaphobia and so on. Only Francis Fukuyama, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, came up with a new candidate: transhumanism.

Transhumanism might be described as the technology of advanced individual enhancement. While it includes physical modifications (diamondoid teeth, self-styling hair, autocleaning ears, nanotube bones, lipid metabolizers, polymer muscles), most of the interest in the technology focuses on the integration of brains and computers—especially brains and networks. Sample transhumanist apps could include cell phone implants (which would allow virtual telepathy), memory backups and augmenters, thought recorders, reflex accelerators, collaborative consciousness (whiteboarding in the brain), and a very long list of thought-controlled actuators. Ultimately, the technology could extend to the uploading and downloading of entire minds in and out of host bodies, providing a self-consciousness that, theoretically, would have no definitive nor necessary end. That is, immortality, of a sort.

While some of these abilities are clearly quite far off, others are already attracting researchers (see “Brain Gain”), and none are known (at the moment at least) to be impossible to achieve. Fukuyama obviously felt the technology was close enough at hand to write a book about it, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, the thrust of which is that society should give the whole idea a miss. His main concern was that transhumanism would place an impossible burden on the idea of equal rights, since it would multiply the number of ways of being human well past our powers of tolerance. (If we have all this trouble with something simple like skin color, just wait until some people have wings, augmented memory and reflex accelerators.)

Ignorance Is No Option
Still, it’s not clear that boycotting neurotech will be a realistic option. When the people around you—competitors, colleagues, partners—can run Google searches in their brains during conversations; or read documents upside down on a desk 30 feet away; or remember exactly who said what, when and where; or coordinate meeting tactics telepathically; or work forever without sleep; or control every device on a production line with thought alone, your only probable alternative is to join them or retire. No corporation could ignore the competitive potential of a neurotech-enhanced workforce for long.

Right now, the only people thinking about transhumanism are futurists, ethicists (such as Fukuyama) and researchers. However, if and when we do advance into this technology, several management issues will also need attention.

No corporation could ignore the competitive potential of a neurotech-enhanced workforce for long.
Consider, for instance, the case of upgrade management.

From a purely capitalist point of view, one virtue of transhumanism is that it incorporates both body and mind into the continuous upgrade cycle that characterizes contemporary consumption patterns. Once a given modification—such as a cortical display—is successfully invented, newer and better ones will crop up on the market every year, boasting lower power requirements, higher resolution, hyperspectral sensitivity, longer mean time between failures, richer recording, sharing and backup features, and so on. Multiply by all the devices embraced by the transhumanist agenda, and it’s clear that every year even the most financially secure users will be forced to winnow a small number of choices from an enormous range of possibilities.

Another concern could be digital rights management.

When brains can interact with hard disks, remembering will become the equivalent of copying. Presumably, intellectual property producers will react with the usual mix of policies, some generous, some not. Some producers will want you to pay every time you remember something; others will allow you to keep content in consciousness for as long as you like but levy an extra charge for moving it into long-term memory; still others will want to erase their content entirely as rights expire, essentially inducing a contractually limited form of amnesia. While any one of these illustrations might be wrong in detail, there will almost certainly be a whole range of intellectual property issues and complications that will need to be managed.

It looks as though the transhumanist era is going to be a Golden Age for CIOs and their skill sets.
In other words, it looks as though the transhumanist era is going to be a Golden Age for CIOs and their skill sets. Even in the case of problems for which CIOs do not have immediate solutions, they will probably be the right people to think about the answers. Take, for example, the extremely vexing problem of neurosecurity.

A brain running on a network will obviously be an extremely attractive target for everyone from outright criminals to bored hackers to spammers. Why worry about actually earning a promotion when you can just write a worm that will configure your superior’s brain so that the very thought of you triggers his or her pleasure centers? Why bother with phishing when you can direct your victims to transfer their assets straight to your bank account? Why tolerate the presence of infidels when they can be converted to the one true faith with the push of a button?

Who Do You Trust? Not You
Peter Cassidy, secretary-general of The Anti-Phishing Working Group, is one of the few analysts thinking about neurosecurity. He says that a key problem is that the brain appears to consider itself a trusted environment. When brain region A gets a file request from region B, it typically hands over the data automatically, without asking for ID or imposing more than the most minimal plausibility check. It is true that with age and experience our brains do gradually build up a short blacklist of forbidden instructions, often involving particular commands originating from the hypothalamus or adrenal glands (for example, “bet the house on red,” or “pick a fight with that bunch of sailors”), but in general, learning is slow and the results patchy. Such laxity will be inadequate in an age when brainjacking has become a perfectly plausible form of sabotage.

Cassidy points out that one of the core problems in neurosecurity is defining trusted agents. All security depends on the concept of two trusted parties (a trusted identity and a computer) and a trust applicant. The neurosecurity conundrum is that it mixes all these identities in the same brain. It forces you to face the questions of when, whether and how to trust yourself. Still, CIOs (and CSOs) are familiar with the essence of even this issue, which is much like analyzing the problem of defending an enterprise against an employee who has gone bad.

One possible approach to neurosecurity might be to implant a public-key infrastructure in our brains so that every neural region can sign and authenticate requests and replies from any other region. A second might be maintaining a master list of approved mental activities and blocking any mental operations not on that list. (Concerns about whether the list itself was corrupted might be addressed by refreshing the list constantly from implanted and presumably unhackable ROM chips.) It might also be necessary to outsource significant portions of our neural processing to highly secure computing sites. In theory, such measures might improve on the neurosecurity system imposed on us by evolution, making us less vulnerable to catchy tunes and empty political slogans.

New Security Horizons
Lance James, CSO of Secure Science, a security services company, is writing a book (working title: Eye Own You) on the security aspects of neuronetworking. In it, he observes that engineering research on this topic is going to be harder than conventional security research, which of course has not completely cleared its own agenda. Conventional networking allows researchers to launch experimental attacks on simulated networks that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Simulated minds are nowhere on the horizon, which means that neurosecurity engineers are going to have to work on real brains. This is likely to be awkward, as volunteers will be few. And the fact that neurotech will almost certainly be wireless (The Matrix notwithstanding, people are not going to walk around with open brain sockets) will just add to the security headaches.

However, James continues, the news is not all bad. A large fraction of today’s computer network security problems can be attributed to the uniformity of our hardware and software. Hackers do their damage by learning how to exploit these “monocultures.” If every user built and programmed his computer himself, security would be dramatically easier. Brains are not only self-programming but self-organizing, which almost certainly means that every adult brain is radically different from every other. In the terms of the trade, James says, “Brains might share the same kernel, though even that is a guess, but they probably run different services and have different programming calls.” This diversity might be a problem for neurotech vendors hoping for the economies of mass production, but it gives CIOs and CSOs lots of room to breathe.

“We and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway.”

—PHILIP K. DICK, “THE ANDROID AND THE HUMAN,” 1972
Second, all these problems are not going to be dropped in our lap at once. The first neurocomputational products will probably be thought-controlled actuators. Though such devices might show up in quite a range of environments—embracing apps from wheelchairs to body extenders to computer games to controlling industrial machinery—they can be made relatively safe by keeping the data traffic one-way, pushing control signals out through the electrodes while shunting feedback through the physical senses, which are relatively secure. The machinery itself might have a network connection (and therefore be subject to attack), but not the brains of its operators.

Security issues will become more pressing when the second generation of neurotech products arrives: cortical implants allowing sensors and data stores to “print” directly to consciousness. (Much of the research under way today on such implants can be characterized as figuring out how to write a consciousness driver—such as a driver for a printer or a graphic card—only for awareness.)

Fortunately, the first generation of these devices will probably be electronic eyes that return sight to the blind, a function that does not require Internet connectivity. From there, however, it is just a step (conceptually, although the engineering itself is another question) to a device that accepts any feed at all, from infrared cameras to television programming. Once at that point, the demand for some sort of connectivity will become intense. Who wouldn’t want to be able to read their e-mail (or watch The Sopranos) while pretending to listen to a boring presentation?

CIOs have been urging users to take security seriously for decades, to not use “PASSWORD” for their passwords, to be careful where they find their wireless access points and to use firewalls. By and large, they have been studiously ignored. Perhaps the advent of neuronetworking will encourage people finally to take these cautionary procedures seriously.

But probably not.

end

Fred Hapgood (fhapgood@pobox.com) is a freelance writer based in Boston.

Brain Gain

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRIAN RASZKA

All content copyright CXO Media Inc., 1994-2001. All rights are reserved. No material may be reproduced electronically or in print without written permission from CXO Media, 492 Old Connecticut Path, Framingham, MA 01701.

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The New York Times
January 3, 2005
COMMUNICATIONS

Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

As the horror of the South Asian tsunami spread and people gathered online to discuss the disaster on sites known as Web logs, or blogs, those of a political bent naturally turned the discussion to their favorite topics.

To some in the blogosphere, it simply had to be the government’s fault.

On Democratic Underground, a blog for open discussion and an online gathering place for people who hate the Bush administration (www.democraticunderground.com), a participant asked, “Since we know that the atmosphere has become contaminated by all the atomic testing, space stuff, electronic stuff, earth pollutants, etc., is it logical to wonder if: Perhaps the ‘bones’ of our earth where this earthquake spawned have also been affected?”

The cause of the earthquake and resulting killer wave, the writer said, could be the war in Iraq. “You know, we’ve exploded many millions of tons of ordnance upon this poor planet,” the writer said. “All that ‘shock and awe’ stuff we’ve just dumped onto the Asian part of this earth – could we have fractured something? Perhaps the earth was just reacting to something that man has done to injure it. The earth is organic, you know. It can be hurt.”

The ridicule began immediately. Online insults, referred to colloquially as flames, rose high on other sites.

“What would life be without D.U.?” asked an editor at Wizbang, a politically conservative blog (www.wizbangblog.com), using the initials of Democratic Underground.

“Get out the tin foil hats,” a contributor to the blog wrote.

The interplay between the sites, left and right, is typical of the rumbles in cyberspace between rivals at different ends of the political spectrum. In many ways, Web logs shone after the tsunami struck: bloggers in the regions posted compelling descriptions of the devastation, sometimes by text messages sent from their cellphones as they roamed the countryside looking for friends and family members. And blogs were quick to create links to charities so that people could help online.

But the blogosphere’s tendency toward crackpot theorizing and political smack down could not be suppressed for long.

“It’s so much of what they feed on, so much of what they are,” said James Surowiecki, the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds.”

Blogs have gone from obscurity to ubiquity in a blink. Bloggers were selected as “People of the Year” by ABC News, and Merriam-Webster declared “blog” its “word of the year.” According to a study released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than eight million Americans have started blogs, and 27 percent of Internet users surveyed said they read blogs – a 58 percent jump since last February – and 12 percent of Internet users have posted comments to blogs. Still, 62 percent of Americans say they are not sure what the term “blog” means.

Odd blog postings are not just for commoners. Norodom Sihanouk, the former king of Cambodia, posted a message in French to his Web site, www.norodomsihanouk.info, saying that an astrologer had warned him that an “ultra-catastrophic cataclysm” would strike the region, but Cambodia would be undamaged if the proper rituals were observed. King Sihanouk said that the thousands of dollars he spent on the ceremonies protected his nation from the disaster, and that he would donate $15,000 to disaster relief.

Mr. Surowiecki pointed out that there is nothing new about ill-informed rumor-mongering or other forms of oddness. “There were always cranks,” he said. “Rumors have always been fundamental about the way people talk, or think, about politics or complicated issues.” Instead of a corner bar or a Barcalounger, however, the location for today’s speech is an online medium with a potential audience of millions.

But there is another, more important difference, Mr. Surowiecki and others say. Internet discourse can be self-correcting, with near-instant feedback from readers.

What was lost in the sniping over the Democratic Underground posting was the fact that the follow-up comments were a sober discussion of what actually causes earthquakes. The first response to the posting asked, “Earthquakes have been happening since the beginning of time … How would you explain them?”

Further comments explained the movement of tectonic plates and provided links to sites explaining earthquakes and tsunamis from the United States Geological Survey and other authoritative sources.

“Not to make fun, as I’m sure it’s not a unique misconception … but the reality is simple plate tectonics,” one participant wrote. “The entire Pacific Ocean is slowly but surely closing in on itself. What happened is that the floor of the Indian Ocean slid over part of the Pacific Ocean, releasing massive tension in the Earth’s crust.

“That’s it. No mystic injury to the Gaia spirit or anything.”

Online discussion can evolve toward truth, said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University and a blogger. One result is a process that can be more reliable than many new media, where corrections are often late and small, if they appear at all.

Dr. Shirky said the key to reasonable discussion was to get beyond flames and the “echo chamber” effect of like-minded people simply reinforcing the opinions of one another and to let the self-correcting mechanisms do their job in a civil way. “You hope the echo chamber effect and the fact-checking effect will balance out into a better and more nuanced set of narratives, and a more rigorously checked set of facts,” he said. But in such a sharply contentious world, “The risk is it will largely divide itself into competing narratives where what even constitutes a fact is different in different camps.”

To Xeni Jardin, an editor of BoingBoing.net, the “self-healing” quality of debate is one of the most important results of the electronic medium. “When information that is provably untrue surfaces on the Net or surfaces in discussion groups, people want to be right – they want to know the truth,” she said.

In her own blog, she said, “Sometimes people spend really a long time researching background information on an item that we post” and correct the record through comments. In the tsunami discussion on Democratic Underground, some participants continued to post farfetched theories about what caused the earthquake based on pseudoscience and conspiracy, and on Wizbang, the vituperation continued unabated, spreading even to many victims of the disaster.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

The Art of the Fan
By CHOIRE SICHA
Published: January 2, 2005

Fan Web sites, from Adam-Brody.com to Absolutely Zooey Deschanel (fan-sites.org/zooey/), share certain traits: gushy tributes, copyright-infringing use of paparazzi shots, a whiff of stalker enthusiasm. A new site, cremasterfanatic.com, is unusual for the subject it obsesses over – the Conceptual Art star Matthew Barney – but otherwise it hews to the norm. It borrows pictures of Mr. Barney with his wife, the pop singer Bjork. It summarizes each of his five “Cremaster” films. It even posts tribute poetry:

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Pearl filled baths
The pigeons flap
His cremaster relaxes

But Cremaster Fanatic is a fake. Or to put it more kindly, it’s a parallel work of art. “I’m pretending to be a fan,” said its creator, the New York artist Eric Doeringer, who wrote that haiku himself (as “David Kramer,” one of many pseudonyms deployed on the site).

Mr. Doeringer, 30, an admissions counselor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, was reached by phone in Miami last week, where he was selling homemade “bootlegs” – photos and drawings imitating other artists’ work – outside an art fair. Is he even a fan of the artists, like Elizabeth Peyton, John Currin and Vik Muniz, that he mimics? “Some of them I like, but the money’s green any way you slice it,” he said. Cremaster Fanatic, which is studded with referral ads for Amazon and eBay, isn’t making any money – yet. “I don’t know how well the business model will work out,” Mr. Doeringer said.

Is Cremaster Fanatic the first Warholian Web site? Mr. Doeringer said: “I prefer to think of … what’s his name? Uh … Andy Kaufman. With the best of his work, all the wrestling stuff, you were never really sure if it was made up or what was really happening.” Mr. Doeringer is perhaps the first artist to work in the medium of enthusiasm: “I’m getting the full fan experience,” he said.

Swiss Blocks Accounts in Oil Co. Probe

3 December 2004, 4:26pm ET

GENEVA (AP) — Swiss justice authorities have blocked bank accounts containing $100 million in an investigation of an alleged bribery scandal tied to a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., the oil services company formerly headed by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

Geneva state investigator Daniel Dumartheray confirmed a report in the daily Tribune de Geneve that the freeze was imposed after France asked Switzerland to grant judicial assistance for its investigation in the case. He declined to identify the accountholders or the banks involved.

It was unclear whether the frozen money was part of the total $180 million allegedly paid by an international consortium to win contracts for a natural gas project in Nigeria between 1995 and 2002.

The French investigation, launched in October 2003, centers on allegations that the TSKJ consortium paid illegal commissions in connection with a $4 billion contract it won in 1995 to build and expand a Nigerian liquefied natural gas plant.

The four partners in the consortium were M.W. Kellogg Co., a subsidiary of Dresser Industries; Technip SA of France; ENI SpA of Italy; and Japan Gasoline Corp.

Halliburton acquired Dresser in 1998 _ three years after Cheney began his 1995-2000 tenure as Halliburton’s CEO _ and combined its Brown & Root subsidiary with M.W. Kellogg to form engineering and construction unit KBR.

The consortium got other contracts involving the Nigerian plant in 1999 and 2002.

Last month, Halliburton said an ongoing internal investigation by the Houston-based conglomerate had still not found any evidence that supports claims of bribery.

The U.S. Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission and Nigerian officials also are investigating.

In June, Halliburton fired two consultants including former KBR chairman A. Jack Stanley, for violating the company’s business code of conduct by receiving “improper personal benefits” related to TSKJ’s construction of the Nigerian plant.

Halliburton shares rose 13 cents to close at $38.74 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.

Multimillionare developer Rick Caruso is walking past the shops on Royal Street in the heart of the French Quarter, surveying the streetscape with all its architectural elegance and decay.

Little escapes the notice of the Los Angeles businessman: the ornately carved crown moldings, the wrought iron balconies, sizzling gas lanterns, cypress shutters, cracked sidewalks, leaning walls, bare wires. The place is beautiful but worn out. To Caruso, it looks like a dump.

“They certainly haven’t spent any money on maintenance,” he says. “I don’t see any reason to ever come back here again.”

Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan opposed Caruso’s effort to remove Parks as chief, but says he admires the developer’s business sense.

“His father is a wealthy man, so he came to it the easy way,” Riordan says. “But he never let that make him lazy.

“I think he’s ready to take over Los Angeles.”

NOTE

The text of this story was taken down at the request of the LA Times (May 14, 2008). The timing of this request to remove the text is probably related to the recent opening of Caruso’s Americana mall in Glendale, which was lavishly and flatteringly covered by the LA Times.

The story which was taken down was an interesting portrait of Caruso as a born-wealthy Republican fundraiser with an avowed hatred for the disorder of living cities. It’s an interesting picture, especially given the rumors of his possible run for LA mayor. Sadly, the original link to the story on the Times website is now broken. However the full text of this article seems to be available for purchase for just $3.95.

Four bucks may seem like a lot just to read a short biographical article from 2004. But clearly the Tribune-owned LA Times knows how to run a profitable business, so rather than question their economic decisions, let us simply wish them the best.

THE NATION

PR Meets Psy-Ops in War on Terror

The use of misleading information as a military tool sparks debate in the Pentagon. Critics say the practice puts credibility at stake.

By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer

December 1, 2004

WASHINGTON — On the evening of Oct. 14, a young Marine spokesman near Fallouja appeared on CNN and made a dramatic announcement.

“Troops crossed the line of departure,” 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. “It’s going to be a long night.” CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallouja had begun.

In fact, the Fallouja offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert’s carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation — or “psy-op” — intended to dupe insurgents in Fallouja and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials.

In the hours after the initial report, CNN’s Pentagon reporters were able to determine that the Fallouja operation had not, in fact, begun.

“As the story developed, we quickly made it clear to our viewers exactly what was going on in and around Fallouja,” CNN spokesman Matthew Furman said.

Officials at the Pentagon and other U.S. national security agencies said the CNN incident was not an isolated feint — the type used throughout history by armies to deceive their enemies — but part of a broad effort underway within the Bush administration to use information to its advantage in the war on terrorism.

The Pentagon in 2002 was forced to shutter its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), which was opened shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, after reports that the office intended to plant false news stories in the international media. But officials say that much of OSI’s mission — using information as a tool of war — has been assumed by other offices throughout the U.S. government.

Although most of the work remains classified, officials say that some of the ongoing efforts include having U.S. military spokesmen play a greater role in psychological operations in Iraq, as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al Jazeera to help influence the portrayal of the United States.

Other specific examples were not known, although U.S. national security officials said an emphasis had been placed on influencing how foreign media depict the United States.

These efforts have set off a fight inside the Pentagon over the proper use of information in wartime. Several top officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs — disseminating truthful, accurate information to the media and the American public — and psychological and information operations, the use of often-misleading information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.

Several of those officials who oppose the use of misleading information spoke out against the practice on the condition of anonymity.

“The movement of information has gone from the public affairs world to the psychological operations world,” one senior defense official said. “What’s at stake is the credibility of people in uniform.”

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said he recognized the concern of many inside the Defense Department, but that “everybody understands that there’s a very important distinction between information operations and public affairs. Nobody has offered serious proposals that would blur the distinction between these two functions.”

Di Rita said he had asked his staff for more information about how the Oct. 14 incident on CNN came about.

One recent development critics point to is the decision by commanders in Iraq in mid-September to combine public affairs, psychological operations and information operations into a “strategic communications” office. An organizational chart of the newly created office was obtained by The Times. The strategic communications office, which began operations Sept. 15, is run by Air Force Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, who answers directly to Gen. George W. Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Partly out of concern about this new office, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, distributed a letter Sept. 27 to the Joint Chiefs and U.S. combat commanders in the field warning of the dangers of having military public affairs (PA) too closely aligned with information operations (IO).

“Although both PA and IO conduct planning, message development and media analysis, the efforts differ with respect to audience, scope and intent, and must remain separate,” Myers wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Times.

Pentagon officials say Myers is worried that U.S. efforts in Iraq and in the broader campaign against terrorism could suffer if world audiences begin to question the honesty of statements from U.S. commanders and spokespeople.

“While organizations may be inclined to create physically integrated PA/IO offices, such organizational constructs have the potential to compromise the commander’s credibility with the media and the public,” Myers wrote.

Myers’ letter is not being heeded in Iraq, officials say, in part because many top civilians at the Pentagon and National Security Council support an effort that blends public affairs with psy-ops to win Iraqi support — and Arab support in general — for the U.S. fight against the insurgency.

Advocates of these programs said that the advent of a 24-hour news cycle and the powerful influence of Arabic satellite television made it essential that U.S. military commanders and civilian officials made the control of information a key part of their battle plans.

“Information is part of the battlefield in a way that it’s never been before,” one senior Bush administration official said. “We’d be foolish not to try to use it to our advantage.”

And, supporters argue, it is necessary to fill a vacuum left when the budgets for the State Department’s public diplomacy programs were slashed and the U.S. Information Agency — a bulwark of the nation’s anticommunist efforts during the Cold War — was gutted in the 1990s.

“The worst outcome would be to lose this war by default. If the smart folks in the psy-op and civil affairs tents can cast a truthful, persuasive message that resonates with the average Iraqi, why not use the public affairs vehicles to transmit it?” asked Charles A. Krohn, a professor at the University of Michigan and former deputy chief of public affairs for the Army. “What harm is done, compared to what is gained? For the first year of the war, we did virtually nothing to tell the Iraqis why we invaded their country and ejected their government. It’s about time we got our act together.”

Advocates also cite a September report by the Defense Science Board, a panel of outside experts that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, which concluded that a “crisis” in U.S. “strategic communications” had undermined American efforts to fight Islamic extremism worldwide.

The study cited polling in the Arab world that revealed widespread hatred of the United States throughout the Middle East. A poll taken in June by Zogby International revealed that 94% of Saudi Arabians had an “unfavorable” view of the United States, compared with 87% in April 2002. In Egypt, the second largest recipient of U.S. aid, 98% of respondents held an unfavorable view of the United States.

The Defense Science Board recommended a presidential directive to “coordinate all components of strategic communication including public diplomacy, public affairs, international broadcasting and military information operations.”

Di Rita said there was general agreement inside the Bush administration that the U.S. government was ill-equipped to communicate its policies and messages abroad in the current media climate.

“As a government, we’re not very well organized to do that,” he said.

Yet some in the military argue that the efforts at better “strategic communication” sometimes cross the line into propaganda, citing some recent media briefings held in Iraq. During a Nov. 10 briefing by Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, reporters were shown a video of Iraqi troops saluting their flag and singing the Iraqi national anthem.

“Pretty soon, we’re going to have the 5 o’clock follies all over again, and it will take us another 30 years to restore our credibility,” said a second senior Defense official, referring to the much-ridiculed daily media briefings in Saigon during the Vietnam War.

According to several Pentagon officials, the strategic communications programs at the Defense Department are being coordinated by the office of the undersecretary of Defense for policy, Douglas J. Feith.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

Artists and scientists, so the story goes, glare at each other across a cultural divide. The scientist coldly hacks nature into pieces. The artist is unwilling to do the hard work necessary to understand how the world works.

This story is mostly fiction, as the work of the printmaker Joseph Scheer makes abundantly clear.

For the past six years, Mr. Scheer has made pictures of moths. He does not use paint or silk screens to make them. Instead, he has devised a method for placing real moths on a high-resolution digital scanner without crushing them flat.

After correcting the colors on his computer, Mr. Scheer makes stunning prints, 3 feet by 4 feet, on soft Chinese paper.

Mr. Scheer exhibited a selection of his moth prints at a conference this month by the Rhode Island School of Design and the Providence Athenaeum. At the conference, titled “Inspired by Nature: The Art of the Natural History Book,” Mr. Scheer recounted how he wound up straddling art and science. “It’s the way obsessions happen,” he said. “It took over my life.”

It is easy to see how Mr. Scheer could lose himself in these images. His moths are almost hypnotic in their details. They are covered in a coat of hair as plush as mink fur. Their antennas look like crosses between ferns and radar dishes. Their wings seem to be assembled from a million dabs of a fine paint brush.

This is art inseparable from science, whether that science is the latest development in digital reproduction or an esoteric corner of entomology.

Mr. Scheer, the director of Alfred University’s Institute for Electronic Arts, collects moths around his home in Allegany County, N.Y. He has also traveled to moth-dense parts of the world, like Costa Rica and Australia.

He knows the life cycles of moths and their feeding habits. With the help of an international team of scientists, he has created an astonishing collection of roughly 20,000 images of moths.

He is part of a long tradition.

For centuries artists and scientists have been equally obsessed by the dream of a perfect vision of nature, preserved in a book of pictures.

Together, they have seized on every innovation in printing technology, from wood blocks to digital scanners, in the quest for that perfection. They have traveled around the planet in search of specimens to illustrate, and have spent years creating some of the most elaborate books ever published.

The notion of fixing nature to the page emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries, as modern Western science took shape. One image can sum up this urge. It comes from a book called “Worm’s Museum” published in 1655. The book is a 400-page description of a museum built by the Danish physician Olaus Worm to teach students at the University of Copenhagen.

The museum is long gone, but the frontispiece to “Worm’s Museum” reveals a room packed with items like narwhal skulls, conch shells and stuffed lemurs. By immersing oneself in this room, Worm believed that a person could come to a true understanding of nature. “Let us take off the spectacles that show us the shadows of things instead of the things themselves,” Worm wrote.

To some extent, natural history books did take off the spectacles. Artists began to pay careful attention to animals and plants as they really were, not as they had been traditionally drawn. Albrecht Dürer, for example, brought astonishing biological realism to subjects as ordinary as a hare or a dandelion patch. But shadows still remained.

Before the 18th century, European artists could rarely see a species that lived beyond their own continent. Even Dürer had to rely on third-hand stories when he drew a picture of a rhinoceros. Its armored skin wound up looking like a heap of shields.

Better visions of nature emerged in the 1700′s, as artists began to illustrate the discoveries of scientific expeditions. Opulent books were published, packed with pictures of the animals and plants native to North America and other new colonies of Europe. Exotic flowers began to fill the greenhouses of aristocrats, who commissioned lavishly illustrated books about their collections – ostensibly for the benefit of science but also to immortalize themselves. Their flowers might wilt, but their books would last forever.

Natural history illustrators could not simply paint a single sumptuous picture that would hang on some museum wall. Their images had to be reproduced in hundreds or thousands of books. The first natural history books used relatively crude woodblock prints, and later publishers seized on every new technology that came along, like engraving and lithography, to make their images more realistic.

The one great shortcoming of all these methods was that none could reproduce color. Color was important not just for aesthetics; it would also make scientific descriptions of animals or plants far more meaningful. The hunger for color drove publishers to all sorts of extremes, like having artists hand paint each engraving in a book after it was printed.

A spectacular example of what this hunger for colorized nature could produce is the 1854 book “Victoria Regia” or “The Great Water Lily of America,” which was exhibited at the Providence Athenaeum during the conference.

In the mid-1800′s, European explorers returned from the Amazon with stories of a fantastic water lily. Its disk-shaped leaves could support the weight of a grown man. It produced an endless supply of pinkish-white flowers, each reaching a foot across. Seeds were brought to Europe and the United States, and a few gardeners figured out how to cultivate them.

One of the titanic flowers was presented to Queen Victoria, and botanists gave it her name. Americans were just as excited when the flowers were cultivated on this side of the Atlantic in 1851, and the book “Victoria Regia” was published in 1854 to take advantage of the water lily craze.

To look at this book is an experience on a par with looking at Joseph Scheer’s moths. It is 27 inches high and 21 inches wide, but only 17 pages long. Most of those pages are full-page illustrations of the flower by William Sharp. The flowers seem to be the size of the moon, surrounded by odd bristling fruits and leaves that look like green lakes.

The startling colors of “Victoria Regia” were not painted by hand. “Victoria Regia” was the first American book to take advantage of a new printing method called chromolithography.

For each illustration, Sharp used a greasy pen to draw four slightly different pictures on four polished slabs of limestone. Each slab was then rolled with a different color of ink, which was only absorbed by the pen marks. A sheet of paper was then pressed against each slab, combining the colors into a single image. It is staggering to imagine printers struggling with such big plates, lining up all four colors perfectly.

But as awkward as it might seem, chromolithography was a huge leap forward for natural history books. They could be printed faster, with more consistent colors, and more cheaply than earlier books.

In some ways, little has changed in 150 years since “Victoria Regia” was published. In 2003, Mr. Scheer put a number of his moth prints into a book called “Night Visions.” As with “Victoria Regia” before it, “Night Visions” is both scientifically important and coffee-table eye candy. “Victoria Regia” took advantage of the then-new technology of chromolithography; “Night Visions” could not have existed before the invention of digital scanning. One book took 19th-century Americans to the Amazon; the other takes 21st-century Americans to the nocturnal world hidden in their own backyards.

Yet none of these images, no matter how glorious, can capture the fullness of nature, as recent work of another artist makes poignantly clear.

Rosamond Purcell, who also spoke at the conference, has spent more than 20 years exploring this gap between obsession and achievement. In 1986 she published “Illuminations,” a grotesque bestiary of sorts that she compiled from museum specimens.

A chameleon’s skeleton glows pink with preserving fluids. A bat in a collection bottle seems to draw its wing over its face like a vampire. These museum specimens are supposed to typify nature, and yet in her photographs they wind up looking supremely unnatural.

One of Ms. Purcell’s latest creations brings us full circle back to the all-encompassing ambition of early natural history. In the 1980′s she first came across the picture of Olaus Worm’s museum, and she has spent hours gazing at every object in the room. Her artistic obsession has now grown to match Worm’s scientific one: she has recreated the museum in three-dimensional detail. Real walls are now crowded with real turtle skulls, real ostrich eggs, real snake skins, a real oak tree that has grown around a real horse jaw. A real sturgeon and a real polar bear hang side by side from the ceiling.

Ms. Purcell has created a perfect representation of what was supposed to be the perfect representation of nature. And yet, as with Mr. Scheer’s moths, it can feel utterly unnatural. Gazing at Worm’s museum resurrected at last, do we finally see things themselves, or do we remain surrounded by shadows?

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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