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Articles by Eric Schewe
As Militaries Adopt AI, Hype Becomes a Weapon
Excitement about generative artificial intelligence has reached fever pitch since the launch of ChatGPT and image engines like MidJourney in the past year. Yet both elation or anxiety about the new technology’s applications in the present lead soon to bigger, existential projections about the future. With the exception of the “singularity” and AI replacing humanity directly, no outcome provokes quite the same amount of anxiety as the effect AI could have on warfare.
As Militaries Adopt AI, Hype Becomes a Weapon
Shopping 11 hours ago The best free AI training courses from Google Mashable - Joseph Green • 11h Boost your productivity and better understand machine learning. TL;DR: Google is offering free AI training courses for everyone in the UK. Boost your productivity and better understand machine learning with a little help from Google.
In Sudan's Civil Conflict, the Arab Cold War Widens
After one month, there’s no end in sight to the civil conflict between two rival military leaders in Sudan that has wracked its capital, Khartoum. The fight emerged from the messy politics following the 2019 social revolution and military coup that overthrew Sudan’s thirty-year dictator, Omar al-Bashir.
Connie Converse Wasn't Just a Folk Singer. She Was a Scholar, Too.
The coincidence of artistic and academic talent is not uncommon in brilliant people; how to reconcile and channel those talents is often a challenge. The world is getting better acquainted with such a talent, 1950s singer-songwriter Elizabeth Converse, with the release of a new book about her life this month. Converse, who performed as “Connie,” sang self-penned solo songs with her guitar around New York City at a time that such a highly personal perspective was unusual.
Security Studies: Foundations and Key Concepts
As a principle of international statecraft, “security” dates to the end of World War II and the rise of the United States as a superpower. America veiled its new hegemony behind the principle of nation-state sovereignty and exercised its power through economic grants, military aid, and international organizations like the United Nations. Although it dismantled fascist regimes immediately, it also pressured Allies with empires—such as the United Kingdom—into decolonization in following decades.
Even in Kazakhstan, Bitcoin Can't Escape Geopolitics
We live in an era of contradictions, and nothing embodies those contradictions like cryptocurrency. This futuristic method for anonymous virtual payments over the internet employs the much-hyped blockchain technology. In short, each crypto coin uses a publicly visible database that tracks all the trading activity in its network with code that is nigh impossible to fraudulently alter.
Settlements and the Israel-Palestine Conflict: Background Reading
After a relatively dormant period, the Israel-Palestine conflict erupted into open war last week. Hamas in Gaza and the Israeli army are engaged in the first sustained exchange of rocket fire and airstrikes in seven years. The near-term cause of the fighting was a series of recent disputes over the usage of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nearby Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, as Israel’s national holidays conflicted with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Semiconductor Shortages End an Era of Globalization
One year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, supply and demand in the global economy have both gone haywire. At the beginning of the crisis, there was a panic over the supply of basic necessities, with selfish shoppers hoarding up toilet paper and bottled water. Shortly thereafter, demand vanished for in-person services in restaurants, live entertainment, and retail, leading to massive unemployment that further limited demand.
Local Energy Deregulation Makes Climate Disasters Worse
Temperatures in the United States’ plains states finally returned to normal this week after a record-shattering cold wave. The weather front was notable both for the severity and duration of low temperatures, setting 6,000 new daily and weekly records between 25 to 45 degrees lower than average around the plains states.
After the Capitol Riot, Who Will Govern Speech Online?
The January 6 attack on the Capitol has transformed politics in the United States in ways that journalists, lawyers and politicians are still struggling to understand. It was at once the chaotic culmination of a right-wing movement before and during the Trump administration and a stunning symbol of a possible future. Like so many other political events in the past decade, it again revealed how social media has made once unthinkable political events possible.
Remote domain joined computer updates
Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives Re: Remote domain joined computer updates From: Eric Schewe Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2020 23:03:37 +0100 We ran into the same issue. For AV we're using SCCM Endpoint Protection (SCEP) and have it configured to fall back to the cloud if it can't reach the SCCM servers for updates.
Opinion: The Fraught History of Cops and Bikes
Eric Schewe Bike New York this week called on the NYPD, among other things, to put more officers on bicycles in order to improve community policing. But the NYPD’s recent use of bikes against Black Lives Matter protesters — as well as the NYPD’s history with biking and relations with cyclists — shows that this demand is deeply problematic.
With the Coronavirus, Science Confronts Geopolitics
Columnist Eric Schewe The world faces an increasingly serious medical threat from the novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2. The virus causes a respiratory disease dubbed COVID-19 that appears to be much less deadly than the earlier incarnation of SARS that spread worldwide in 2002-2003. This has increased the likelihood that it could infect a much larger population, as many people are able to incubate and transmit it with no symptoms.
Bipartisan Forever Wars
In his 2019 State of the Union address, President Trump proclaimed: “great nations do not fight endless wars.” This sentence summed up an important part of his right-wing populist campaign rhetoric—that the United States should reduce its overseas military commitments and focus on putting “America First.” It also distinguished him from mainstream Senate Republicans, who just days earlier had voted en masse to oppose any withdrawals of troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
Iran in the Trump Era
President Trump’s January 3, 2020, decision to order a drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq has backfired in spectacular fashion. Less than two months ago, the streets of nearly every major city in Iran were choked with more than 200,000 anti-regime protestors. They chanted slogans against recent increases in gas prices and income inequality. They set fire to hundreds of banks and other businesses.
Why There Is No "Countervailing Power" Against Monopolies
One of the most important political trends of the 2010s was a renewed focus on income and wealth inequality. It was heresy until recently to acknowledge that, since the 1970s, both the Republican and Democratic parties pursued relatively similar policy aims on business deregulation. These policies have resulted in increasing inequality.
The Fear That Synthesizers Would Ruin Music
There was a time when the sound of synthesizer was so new and otherworldly that it provoked strong emotional responses—anger, fear, laughter. As the English professor Nicholas Laudadio recounts in the journal Science Fiction Studies, a German musicologist complained in 1954 that they reminded him of “barking hell-hounds—these sounds come from a world in which there are no humans, but only devilish beings.” Of course, the electrical transmission of sound is as old as the telephone (1876).
Residential-Parking Permits: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
New York’s three million free parking spaces — about 20 square miles and 7 percent of all city land — are by all accounts grossly underpriced for some of the world’s most-valuable real estate. Depending on the time of day, even the most coveted spaces may be used for free by any driver — a custom that subsidizes car ownership and driving in the city with America’s densest public transit and contributing to the carnage, congestion, pollution, and road rage on our streets.
Why Did Ousted Egyptian President Morsi Lose Power?
Egyptian Ex-President Mohamed Morsi died of a heart attack on June 17, 2019, in a soundless cage in a Cairo courtroom. A leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi was Egypt’s first democratically elected president. His 2012 election was also the first fairly contested presidential election in Egyptian history. It occurred following the popular revolution in 2011 that compelled the military to depose thirty-year president Hosni Mubarak.
How Natural Gas Helped Make our Industrial World
The natural gas industry is enjoying a renaissance, thanks to the widespread adoption of fracking around the country in the past fifteen years. In that time, domestic production of natural gas has increased around 50%. Natural gas now accounts for 1/3 of the energy produced in the United States, more than any other source. Until recently, natural gas was billed as the “green” fossil fuel.
How European Empires Helped Shape the Hajj
The annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, is one of five “pillars” of Islam, an obligatory observation of faith once in the lifetime of every Muslim who is physically and financially capable of making it. The Hajj occurs once a year during five days of the lunar Muslim calendar, and so moves forward about ten days every solar year. The largest annual gathering of people on Earth, Mecca hosts roughly 700,000 Saudi subjects and 1.3 million expatriates, set by national quotas.
Why Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" Is So Beloved
Legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis recorded the second and final session of his seminal album Kind of Blue on April 22nd, 1959. It remains the best-selling jazz album of all time. Its unforgettable solos by Davis, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and pianist Bill Evans create an ethereal atmosphere; the album continues to be one of the most beloved records in jazz. Kind of Blue popularized a new approach to improvisation.
Sudan's Revolution and the Geopolitics of Human Rights
Sudanese Army leaders removed President Omar al-Bashir from power in a coup d’etat on April 11, 2019. This move came after five months of mass demonstrations in the major cities of the country. The demonstrations were sparked by sharp reductions in the bread subsidy but sustained by widespread resentment toward government corruption and the country’s decades of civil war in Darfur and the region that is today South Sudan.
Enfranchisement Is the Only Route to Security
By many standards, the United States in 2019 is a prosperous country. Yet a new report by the United Nations reveals that many Americans feel deeply unhappy. Moreover, they are increasingly pessimistic on a wide range of problems facing the country, according to the Pew Research Center. Americans feel fundamentally insecure about their standard of living, personal debt, personal safety, opportunities for advancement, and increasingly, climate change.
Border Walls are Symbols of Failure
In this column, I’ve explored the idea that security ideology creates a mirror version of the world around us. Beyond any specific technology or procedure, security “works” when it makes us believe that it solves an identified problem. This is not to deny the real risks of death or injury as a result of terrorism—but only to point out that satisfying beliefs is security’s highest priority.
Socialist Sci-Fi Reimagined the Future
Science fiction as we know it dates back to the late ninteenth-century works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. A new book by James Gleick argues that the genre only became possible after the rapid social and technological changes of the industrial revolution. Suddenly people believed the future could be starkly different from the present—an attitude that makes itself felt in the sci-fi they created. The space race era of the 1950s was fervent in its sci-fi utopianism.
War Has Made Afghanistan's $1 Trillion in Minerals Worthless
Middle East observers surfaced last month to remind the American public that the United States’ war in Afghanistan had entered its seventeenth year. This makes it by far the longest military conflict in American history. Although Trump ran on a platform of military disengagement around the world, he has appointed retired generals James Mattis as his Secretary of Defense and John Kelly as his chief of staff and adopted their imperial outlook on U.S. national security.
Why Can't the TSA Just Go on Strike?
The longest partial government shutdown in American history has passed the one-month mark at the time of this writing, and negotiations to end it are not promising. When the shutdown began on December 22, 2018, eight hundred thousand federal workers were put out of work. Around half of them are required to continue working without pay. Meanwhile, wealthy Senators continue to be paid. Notably, the shutdown has affected the 50,000 Transportation Security Administration screeners in American airports.
The World's New Private Security Forces
Since the end of the Cold War, the world has seen rapid privatization of public spaces, services, and resources. The question intrinsic to the business of security becomes: How can an intangible concept like security be turned into a commodity to be packaged, labeled, and sold? This process is one of the neoliberal practices that have created so much recent demand for private security services, argues scholar George Rigakos.
How the Brownie Camera Made Everyone a Photographer
Long before the present-day avalanche of selfies and memes wrought by the convenience of camera-equipped smartphones, another technological revolution irrevocably changed the relationship between the average person and photo images. Prior to 1900, photography was largely an activity for experts. Wet plate chemical development was tricky and a slow, low-demand endeavor.
Do Security Robots Signal the Death of Public Space?
Who would say they are “against” safety or security? The language and ideology of security have become widespread enough to be nearly unquestionable in contemporary life. And yet the public outcry when a particular security operation oversteps commonly-accepted norms illustrates how conflicted we remain about the costs of safety. For example, last year the tech startup Knightscope introduced its K9 model, a 400-pound autonomous security robot.
Why Yemen Suffers in Silence
Children are starving to death in Yemen. The NGO Save the Children has estimated that in 2017, more than 50,000 children died from cholera and famine caused by Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign and naval blockade against the country. A further 8 million Yemenis are near starvation. What Saudi Arabia is Doing in Yemen Since 2011, Saudi Arabia has sought to bolster its power and authority in the Middle East, and in the Arabian Peninsula in particular.
A Fragile Balance in Iran
The January 8th death of one of the icons of the Iranian Revolution, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani,—along with a contentious political transition in the United States between administrations with starkly different stances on Iran—poses significant challenges to the 39-year old state. There has never existed a political system similar to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Global Food Security: A Primer
Who decided what you ate today? Most adults in the United States would say that they themselves had decided. After all, our twenty-first-century consumer economy presents us with an ever-increasing number of enticing choices, and we often use our diets to make statements about our identities and lifestyles. Not everyone has that luxury of choice, real or imagined.
Why is the U.S. Military Occupying Bases Across Africa?
In recent months, many Americans have been surprised to learn that the U.S. has an extensive military presence in Africa. An intelligence snafu over fitness tracker data produced by U.S. soldiers using Fitbits and other devices while running laps provided a clear snapshot of their deployments. In November 2017, fitness database Strava produced a Global Heatmap showing popular exercise routes as glowing yellow streaks.
Why Do So Many Indonesian Men Smoke? | JSTOR Daily
Indonesia has the highest smoking rates in the world: while 56% of men smoked in 2000, 76% of men did in 2015. Far fewer women smoke (4% and falling). This trend has occurred both among adult men and very young boys, sparking such sensational coverage as the “smoking 2-year-old” in 2010 (who has since quit with counseling). How has this happened? In the Western world, the rise and fall of cigarette smoking seems a uniquely twentieth century phenomenon.
Are Reforms Part of Saudi Arabia's PR Campaign?
In September, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced to the world that it would begin licensing women to drive in 2018. It will be the last country in the world to do so. News outlets around the world hailed this move as a positive reform and a sign that further liberal changes would be occurring in the absolute monarchy.
The Dilemma of Sanctions on North Korea
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho claimed back in September that President Trump’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric towards the country amounted to a “declaration of war” by the United States. However, in a certain sense, the United States is already at war with North Korea—and has been for 67 years. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice agreement.
How To Recycle Half A Million Flooded Cars | JSTOR Daily
As the center of the petroleum industry in the United States, Houston faces significant environmental damage from Hurricane Harvey. The most spectacular example during the storm was an explosion and fire at the Arkema chemical plant in Crosby, Texas. But Harris County has the largest number of Superfund sites in the country, and the region is still discovering the extent to which floodwaters spread around human and petrochemical wastes.
"Jay Walking" and the Fight for the Streets
There’s a struggle for space going on in America’s streets. Debates over the priorities of cars, public transit, and pedestrians are nothing new. But for the past 90 years, they have mainly occurred among urban planners and city council members. However, with car ownership losing its luster and younger Americans moving to cities in the past ten years, pedestrian and bike advocates are literally pushing guerilla plans to take back the streets for non-drivers.
National Security and the Rise of American Air Power | RealClearDefense
Since the end of the Cold War, it has been an unspoken truth that the United States has established a type of imperial power over the Earth. Its military outspends the next ten highest-spending militaries put together. It operates 19 of the world’s 36 aircraft carriers. As such, it is the only military that can project force anywhere in the world, and it has structured its commands into global zones to reflect that fact.
How Cassette Tapes Helped Muslim Revivalism | JSTOR Daily
Secular writers often claim the rising tide of religious fundamentalism in the past forty years represents a return to the past. But modern conditions play a crucial role in religious revivalism. The goals and attitudes of revival movements also break with the past, despite often reproducing certain conservative values. New communication media and technology helps the spread of religious messages and the construction of communities of believers.
Papers, Please: The Invention of the Passport
The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. Immigration and national security remain at the top of President Trump’s agenda. He issued a revised executive order on March 6th that maintained the ban on new immigration and refugees from six majority-Muslim countries in the Middle East. It removes restrictions on those who already have visas and Iraqi citizens.
America's State Secrets and the Freedom of Information Act | JSTOR Daily
As the media and President Trump continue to trade accusations that one anothers’ claims are “fake news,” access to authoritative information about the Federal government remains crucial to the public interest. A powerful sovereign state like the United States has legitimate reasons to keep secrets. But since September 11, 2001, the government has radically expanded the size and complexity of its military-espionage industry.
The Historic Echoes of Trump's Immigration Ban
Both the US public and the executive branch are still processing President Trump’s recent executive order barring citizens of seven majority-Muslim states from entering the United States for 90 days, including legal residents. Meanwhile, what strikes some as a hastily implemented and drastic measure has caused diplomatic and administrative chaos. It would seem this move marks the tactical beginnings of Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States altogether.
How Trump’s Generals May Change Washington | JSTOR Daily
President-elect Donald Trump formally named Marine ex-General James Mattis his nominee for Secretary of Defense, following his pick of ex-Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor. Rumors flew that former Marine General John Kelly was his choice for Secretary of Homeland Security, and that General David Petraeus was in the running for Secretary of State.
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