Matt Wretchard at the Belmont Club has an excellent idea for new software.
He prefaces his description of the software by describing the current scenario of someone trying to decipher the meaning of and relations between isolated events in a rapidly changing war by listening to a media which doesn't do a good job of giving context:
One of the challenges facing intellectuals at a time when the political and cultural dimensions of war have grown in relation to the purely military is how to make sense of information acquired through the public intelligence system: the news media. Because modern American warfare now involves only a very small percentage of the population it has become a kind of spectator sport where the plays are actually called from the stands. One would hope on good information. Yet a news industry whose techniques were adequate to cover traffic accidents, murders or cumbrous wars in which armies moved a few hundred yards a day must now must cover events whose complexion can alter in hours. The difference is that this time there is no low-tech acetate overlay, maps, or timeline in battalion notebook. Battlefield events are still reported like isolated traffic accidents, conveying no sense of spatial location, temporal development or continuity.
One of the things that's most special about our brains is not that they store lots of information, but that they're able to make connections and draw conclusions between different things in our experience. His software idealizes a "brain assistent" which would help us make connections between lots of events that our brains might not make on their own by giving us a visual as well as temporal map of current situations in the war:
The ideal situation would be to track events in two dimensions, space and time, on a computer screen, and to be able to double click on it to drill down on all the supporting material material, rated by reliability, to discover the underlying basis for its plotted position. Additionally, one should be able to follow its connections to other related events, people or places. Husabayah, also known as Al-Qaim, has been in the news before. It was the scene of intense fighting between the US Marines and Syrian infiltrators all of last year, as described by Ron Harris of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But whether software or grease pencil is used, the public will find it hard to make sense of the war or reach any reasoned conclusions about it until it can follow events in a more systematic way.
P.S.
(Incidentally, I wrote software a few months ago which allows the user to do something very similar to what is described above. It allows the user to define relationships between any arbitrary event, object, person, geographical location or event. The idea was to allow the user to build an unlimited network of connections between any entities so that indirect relationships could be "discovered". The user could then follow the connections or have the whole network displayed from the viewpoint of any chosen node. It took about four days to write and requires Microsoft Access 2000 or better to run. It was the quickest way to prototype the concept. I've sent free evaluation copies to a few bloggers over the last few months. One day I'll do it properly.)
The military and our intelligence services must already use something similar to this. I'd be fascinated to see it.
Thursday, May 20, 2004
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