They were more impressed with my rapid-fire interactive summaries of Hollywood takes on cyberwar and cyber dystopia. Or so they tweeted.

Jumbos: what did you think? Please post in the comments. Thanks!

Excellent questions afterwards:

• What do you think about SOPA?
  –Same old, same old. Good thing we have the 4th Amendment.
• What do you think about American public diplomacy in the age of Facebook, crowdsourcing, and mashups?
  –I follow Alec J. Ross’ Twitter feed.
• Who studies this stuff? Why don’t more women study this stuff?
  –Berkman Center isn’t a bad point of departure and they employ women.
• What skillz should I acquire for my career?
  –Depends whether you want to work infosec, haxor, or as a risk-analysis suit.
• How can I keep my bits safe?
  –Surf safe, be smart.
• Where can I read about cybersecurity for the home user?
  –It’s a moving target. Lots of the simple answers you know. EFF and EPIC are good places to start.
• What do you worry about most?
  –War.

On one level, the topic was whether cyberspace is a domain and why. In another sense, it was a talk about why we’re still talking about that. With so much ink spilled since the 1990s on strategy of cyberwar, cyberattack, and cyber defense, why are we still dithering over first principles? And is there any practical effect? Is the domain determination consequential, specifically with regard to the organs of government and military to protect American interests.

Many of the hot current issues got raised during the Q&A:

1. How do we prepare government and the military to share responsibility for cyberspace with the private sector?
2. How do we characterize the risks of cyber attacks, and can we have any useful measures of them?
3. What is the government empowered to do on our behalf?
4. What makes attribution difficult, or even different, in cyberspace?
5. Why not simply refer nonstate cyber attacks to the relevant authorities in the host country?

My talk revisits an earlier blog post and focuses on a few points outlined below. I won’t summarize the other talks here, but they were well worth the time invested. In the Q&A, we referred to Jody Westby (2004) International Guide to Cyber Security, and to Qiao and Wang (tr. 2002) Unrestricted Warfare.

Things in cyberspace are located manywhere, not somewhere. That makes it hard to characterize what’s next to what, what is close to what, and how long it takes to get from somewhere to somewhere else. That distinction makes it essentially hard to say how concepts from land, sea, air and space have analogs in cyberspace.

Transit in cyberspace can refer to movement either of information or laptops, but not teleportation. The kinetic capabilities of cyber-enabled assets are still bound by the laws of physics.

Adjacency has a specific meaning in cyberspace. Things are adjacent when they can communicate directly with one another–either on the map of physical wires, compatible data standards, mutual encryption and decryption technologies, and shared understandings of trust in infosec. We can choose to make systems connect or disconnect. We can choose to grant access or to forbid access; and we can choose to penetrate forbidden systems. Adjacency is both a policy choice and the outcome of cyber operations.

Time is the key variable affecting the difficulty of control in cyberspace. Time is required to gain access to IT assets. Time is required to execute instructions. Time is required for humans to make decisions to cooperate on problem solving across legal and political boundaries. Time is required for attribution during cyber conflict. Time is required to develop effective cyber tactics to support non-cyber actors across the spectrum of business, government, and military.

Effective response in cyberspace will require political-military, public-private and international cooperation. Adversarial attempts to penetrate and mislead potential allies will poison the well for cooperation. So our strategic end forbids us in some profound sense from developing and deploying a cyber doomsday device, which would serve as the linchpin of deterrence.

Putting our cyber assets off in a silo will deprive them of necessary day-to-day training and operation with non-cyber forces. That daily interaction is crucial for understanding how cyber assets support low-level tactical units, how non-cyber operators handle cyber failures of various kinds, and what cyber capabilities are most worth developing. In short, a cyber silo is exactly the wrong strategy.

Finally, I warned of the dangers in substituting metaphor for policy in public discourse. Arbitrary features of extended metaphor may sway the judgment of non-technical personnel on enormously important matters of investment and strategy. Pervasive cyber euphemisms reinforce the culture of secrecy surrounding capabilities and tactics, to the detriment of legitimate oversight based on existing law, ethics, and risk management.

Econometrics in R
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Econometrics.html

Graphical presentation of regression results
http://tables2graphs.com/doku.php?id=04_regression_coefficients

A good site for Stata users that want to learn R
http://www.statmethods.net/

UCLA’s library for R beginners
http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/

StackExchange for statistics
http://stats.stackexchange.com/

Of course the answer is, “Stop. Put down the pen. Ask yourself what the map must communicate.”

But once you’ve got a clear idea about that, and therefore the data you need to gather, and the way you’d like to analyze that data, … you may well need some new tools.

Network maps

• Mass and spring diagrams, for example in 2d and 3d
• Circular network diagrams
• Edge frequency distribution, for example in this paper
• Linear layout for visualization of networks
• And the infamous complex systems PDF that made the NYT
  • (Beware! Causal loop diagrams have advocates too.)

Data visualization

• William Cleveland Visualizing Data
• Flowing Data
• Information Aesthetics
• Edward Tufte‘s blog

Software

• ggobi
• GraphViz
• Protovis
• statnet (packages within R)
• ucinet (grandfather of social network analysis software)

Other people’s roundups

• INSNA
• Journal of Statistical Software
• CRAN Task View gRaphical models in R
• ReadWriteWeb
• Visual Complexity
• Wikipedia

I’ve got some older posts on academic software for the interested reader.

Other approaches

And there’s my writing on dyadic dataset visualization through the use of cross-sections. Rather than a graph theoretic approach, I’ve advocated for the use of cross-sectional maps and hierarchic clustering as alternatives. Cross-sectional maps allow you to present high-quality cross-sections of trade and investment data. Once you’ve got maps or cartograms of the cross-sections, you can create visualizations of series in the data. Very useful.

Hierarchic clustering can capture other relationships that derive from dyadic data, without directly visualizing the graph itself. I’ve argued that trade relationships derive from concentration of trade, specifically clubs of prominent countries and cliques of polarized trade partners. Hierarchic clusters can distill pictures of these two facets of dyadic trade data, without stacking the deck too much.

[A great conversation with David Braid of The Finance Lab today sparked this little discussion. He is brewing a project the global financial system which looks very promising. Our conversation touched on the Fed's map of the shadow banking system and Jess Bachman's US budget graphic.]

Documents

• National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace (US-CERT)
• Cyberspace Policy Review (White House Office of Cybersecurity)
• Presidential Decision Directive 63 (Clinton via FAS)
• US Cyber Command fact sheet and website

News items

• Stuxnet
• Ghostnet
• Estonia
• Georgia
• Rod Beckstrom
• Howard Schmidt
• William Lynn discusses the cyber domain in Foreign Affairs

Academic works

• Technology, Policy, Law and Ethics Regarding US Acquisition of Cyberattack Capabilities (Owens, Dam and Lin, eds.), full text at Macarthur Foundation
• Proceedings of a Workshop on Deterring Cyber Attacks (National Research Council Committee on Deterring Cyberattacks, Steinbruner, chair) *
• Building Security In (Gary McGraw and US-CERT)
• Cyber Warfare and Cyber Terrorism (Janczewski and Colarik, eds.)
• Cyberpower and National Security (Kramer, Starr and Wentz, eds.)
• Cyberpower (Nye)
• Cybersecurity Agenda (EastWest Institute)
• Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency and their final report
• International Guide to Cyber Security (Westby)

* Beth: if you’d like to tackle cyber deterrence, Lukasik’s conference paper in these Proceedings (eds. Steinbruner et al., 2010, pp 99-111) is an interesting departure point for debate.

According to McWhorter: if a linguist ran an elementary school, they would chuck the principle that singular third person pronouns can only come in the varieties “he,” “she,” “he or she,” and such ugly postmodernisms as “s/he.” How I have mistreated my students. All I can say is I hoped spare them the wrath of fellow overzealous grammarians.

He’s got further ammunition for Star Trek fans: fascination with split infinitives and sentence-ending pronouns was an alien effort to port Latin grammatical rules into English, not an effort to reflect well spoken English.

What reduces the value of something economically? Increased supply or reduced demand are two key factors. And indeed, journalism as a profession has been consistently devalued economically as a result of one of those factors: increasing numbers of people who want to be journalists and who will work for free, or for low wages. The result is that the wages of journalists are very low – a pattern which predates the internet and the rise of blogging, etc.

This is rife with the same fallacies that convinced Lou Dobbs that unskilled immigrant labor drives down middle class American wages. Bradshaw’s pseudo-economic analysis treats journalists like fungible, undifferentiated commodities, just about the same as feed corn.

There are lots of markets where giving some stuff away doesn’t make the other stuff worthless. In fact, free-beer software creates entire business ecosystems for software, hardware, and services. Strategic giveaways are good business strategy. For more on that, read Tapscott and Williams or Chris Anderson.

Then there’s the question of whether blogs and papers are in the same market. They’re not. Newspapers do the hard job of editing: screening, curating, and fact-checking stories. The whole reason that you’ll pay to read the Financial Times but not my blog is because of their hard-won reputation for excellence.

If your newspaper is printing roundups of the “Here’s what the blogs are saying about…” variety, it’s time to switch your subscription.

Next, although entry-level journalists are badly paid, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the economics of Nicholas Kristof’s salary. Kristof’s pay goes up or down based on what the papers can afford, which is driven by subscriptions and advertising. In fact, the more liars and bad writers are out there with healthy audiences, the bigger is the pie for the best journalists to fight over. Effectively, that’s just a few million more hacks that Kristof is better than. The best columns in journalism are a classic positional good: their worth is determined by how much better they are than their competitors.

Unless Joe Q. Public seriously gets so sleepy befuddled distracted reading my blog that he forgets to click through to the NYT op-ed page, it’s hard to draw a connection between the audience for their columns and the audience for mine.

What’s the most likely relationship between pickup basketball attendance and Shaquille O’Neal’s salary? I would guess NBA teams pay better when more amateurs play basketball.

Now it’s possible that newspapers used to make a play similar to cable television by bundling Reuters feeds in with great journalism. Here is a possible scenario: what if papers used to buy the feeds at wholesale prices and sold them at retail, then took the proceeds to underwrite sound editorial practices, expensive offices for foreign correspondents and star columnists. Enter feed aggregators on the Web, and the business model takes a hit. Anyone that was buying the Wall Street Journal and only reading “What’s News” can now afford to cancel. (With cable, I’ve been waiting for the day when I can tell the good people of Comcast, “No really, I’d only like NESN and Comedy Central. You keep the other 50 channels and pro-rate my monthly bill for the difference.”)

For another comparison, take academic publishing, which effectively doesn’t pay for articles. Academics don’t write out of sheer altruism. They do it because it’s the ultimate signal of research quality, extremely costly to fake and the sine qua non of tenure promotion, book deals and competitive grants. Academic publishing has exploded recently and journal fees have risen despite making no contribution to academic salaries.

All of which is to say, the practice of abusing interns isn’t unique to journalism; the market for “news stories” doesn’t necessarily look like first-semester supply and demand curves; and the woes of journalism’s labor market aren’t the fault of bloggers.

Check Paul Bradshaw’s logic, …

What reduces the value of something economically? Increased supply or reduced demand are two key factors. And indeed, journalism as a profession has been consistently devalued economically as a result of one of those factors: increasing numbers of people who want to be journalists and who will work for free, or for low wages. The result is that the wages of journalists are very low – a pattern which predates the internet and the rise of blogging, etc.

Angela’s point, however, is not about the economic value of professional journalism but the editorial value – the quality, not the quantity.

There’s an obvious link between the two. Pay people very little, and they won’t stick around to become better reporters (witness how many journalists leave the profession for PR as soon as they have families to feed). Rely on interns and you not only have a more unskilled workforce but the skilled part of your workforce has to spend part of its time doing informal ‘training’ of those interns.

So where do bloggers come in? Angela mentions them in two senses: firstly as being chosen over experienced journalists, and second as part of a list of people willing to work for little or for free.

But, unlike the labels ‘intern’ and ‘freelance journalist’, ‘blogger’ is a definition by platform not by occupation, and takes in a vast range of people, some of whom are very experienced journalists themselves (with high rates), and some of whom have more specialist expertise than journalists. It also includes aspiring journalists and “cut price freelancers”.

Does their existence ‘devalue’ journalism? Economically, it certainly increases the supply of journalism and so drives down its price.

But editorially? Well, here we have to take in a new factor: bloggers don’t have to write about what publishers tell them to. And most of them don’t. So while the increase in bloggers has expanded the potential market for contributors – it’s also expanded the content competing with your own. Competition – in strictly economic terms – is supposed to drive quality up. But I’m not going to argue that that’s happening, because this is not a market economy we’re looking at, but a mixed one.

… responding to Angela Saini.

For anyone who says that it’s impossible to survive as a journalist these days and get paid a decent wage, I’d say, if you keep up your skills (including multimedia skills), quality and standards, then you can. I have, as have many other writers and broadcasters I know. Whatever may happen to the industry, editors and readers can’t resist brilliant, exclusive stories. So don’t get sucked into the idea that journalism isn’t a profession. And know your worth.

If any of my works exist on your server, and if you intend to exploit them commercially, I wish to negotiate for a share of the revenues. I hereby opt out of any commercial exploitation of my works, either for a fee or as a free addendum to another commercial service, subject to further negotiation.

You may use works I have uploaded to your site prior to today under a CC-BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license. Details are available here. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Sincerely,

Ben Mazzotta

I have to admit I was surprised to discover that SSRN presumes authors want a 0% share of the $9.99 for bound volumes of papers posted to its website. The letter I received from SSRN today requires authors to opt out, if they don’t wish to cut themselves out of the revenues for print-to-order PDF collections.

Dear Ben Mazzotta,

In response to requests from authors and readers to purchase printed and bound hard copies of papers on SSRN, we will soon release a “Purchase Bound Hard Copy” service for most free PDF files in SSRN’s eLibrary. We have contracted with a New York company to do the printing, binding and shipping.

The price for one or more bound hard copies will be $9.99 per copy plus shipping. Free PDF files with a minimum of 19 pages and a maximum of 240 pages will be eligible for printing. The PDF document will be printed in black and white, “perfect bound” with a glossy color cover, and shipped to United States addresses only. A “Purchase Bound Hard Copy” option will be added on the abstract page of each eligible paper. The existing options, including free One-Click Download, will remain the same, and each purchased hard copy will count as a download.

Any author, who does not want to have his or her free papers in the SSRN eLibrary available for this new service, can opt out at any time by emailing the request to AuthorSupport@SSRN.com, or calling the SSRN office at 877-SSRNHelp (877.777.6435) in the United States, or +1 585 442 8170 outside of the United States, between 8:30 am and 6 pm Monday through Friday (U.S. Eastern). If you request to opt out of the “Purchase Bound Hard Copy” service, ALL papers that are authored or co-authored by you will not display the “Purchase Bound Hard Copy” option on your abstract page(s). Please notify us by Friday, October 29, 2010 if you do not want your papers included in the initial roll-out of this new service. You may change your participation status at any time in the future.

We hope you will enjoy the convenience of this new service.

Gregg Gordon
President
Social Science Research Network

Even worse, there’s no option for authors to specify a royalty. Isn’t it self-evident that the authors would want a share of the revenues when customers pay to have their works printed? SSRN could simply add a field to each author’s page, where authors would specify the royalty they’d like to charge for commercial printing of their works. Let the market work its magic: if the royalty is too high, users will leave my measly working papers out of their bound volumes.

Disclaimer: I don’t have any skin in the game. None of my papers appear on SSRN.

If he had said that installing Norton Internet Security on every computer in America was the definition of a cyber shield, or ordering drone attacks against suspected zero-day-threat writers, or requiring American companies to write back doors for the feds into encryption, or mandating the use of federally issued firmware in critical industries….well, then that would be the definition of a cyber shield. It’s a completely empty term.

US urges NATO to build ‘cyber shield’
(AFP) – Sep 15, 2010

BRUSSELS — NATO must build a “cyber shield” to protect the transatlantic alliance from any Internet threats to its military and economic infrastructures, a top US defence official said Wednesday.

Cyber security is a “critical element” for the 28-nation alliance to embrace at its summit of leaders in Lisbon on November 19-20, US Deputy Defence Secretary William Lynn said in Brussels.

“The alliance has a crucial role to play in extending a blanket of security over our networks,” Lynn said.

“NATO has a nuclear shield, it is building a stronger and stronger defence shield, it needs a cyber shield as well,” he said at a forum hosted by the Security & Defence Agenda think-tank.

The Pentagon’s number two called for adopting the Cold War-era strategy of “collective defence” in the cyber arena.

“The Cold War concepts of shared warning apply in the 21st century to cyber security. Just as our air defences, our missile defences have been linked so too do our cyber defences need to be linked as well,” Lynn said….

The Pentagon was forced to review its own digital security in 2008 after the most serious cyber attack on the US military’s networks, which came from a tainted flash drive that was inserted in a military laptop in the Middle East.

Lynn said the Pentagon strategy has identified “five pillars” to cyber security: recognising cyberspace as the next domain of warfare; the need for active defences; the protection of critical infrastructure; enhancing collective defence; and the need to “marshall our technological prowess.”

How exactly would a cyber shield work? While it’s a compelling metaphor, it contains absolutely no technical information about the policies being advocated. Would the shield be comprised of software that runs on every American and allied desktop computer? Or comprehensive packet filtering at the level of backbone routers? Or just a big piece of steel wedged into your intercontinental fiber optic connections?

The metaphors you should bear in mind for cyberspace are more like Goethe’s Sorceror’s Apprentice, adapted for the silver screen by Disney. Digital data can be endlessly copied. If you accidentally leave the backup of the company’s email server on the public website, you have to assume it’s now publicly available. Electronic SCADA systems replace direct physical operation of industrial systems with software controlled systems, including everything from the operational controls of aircraft to oil refineries to trading platforms to medical devices.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a proper role for international cooperation and civil-military cooperation in cyber defense. It’s just that thinking about cyberspace as a space doesn’t get you very far.

The basic functions of {estout} are modeled on the Stata package estout. Once the R user has a dataset and a regression format in memory, {estout} will

1. Print tables of summary statistics in CSV or LaTeX format.
2. Print regression results in CSV or LaTeX format.

All the normal bells and whistles for econometrics are in there: reporting both coefficient estimates and their standard errors, asterisks for alpha=0.10, 0.05, and 0.01 significance levels, R-squared and number of observations. Options to customize are clearly marked in the documentation.

RESULTS’ policy staff is capable of extremely precise writing on economic and social issues. In the section on the IMF, however, value judgments, perjorative adverbs, and accusations of anachronism substitute for any concrete proof that the staff’s ideas hold true. Examples:

• “prioritized extremely low inflation”
• “policies may have seemed appropriate”
• “policies are no longer appropriate”
• “immediate consequences … included steep layoffs”
• “IMF policies have prevented countries from adequately investing in public infrastructure and workforce”
• “restrictive spending policies”
• “the inflation reductions that the IMF desires”
• “targets are so much lower than many economists outside the IMF believe they need to be”
• “unemployed nurses…because the government cannot afford to hire them.”
• “anti-growth, restrictive deficit and inflation targets”

The only specific policy analysis on offer is that the IMF’s inflation target is below 5%, when some unnamed, non-IMF economists believe 5% to 20% annual inflation may not harm the long-run growth trajectory of the country. Long-run growth rates for most countries cannot exceed a few percent. Sustained economic growth of 7% to 9% is often described as a miracle in economics.

Not dampening GDP growth is just the tip of the iceberg. Inflation rates on the order of 20% are extremely difficult for households with savings. Unless you can find a place to put the money, such as real estate or a bank account with a 20% interest rate, inflation steals the value of your assets. Of course, a few can afford to send their money offshore and let those savings ride out the inflation in a dollar-denominated or euro-denominated bank account. High inflation drives capital flight and currency devaluation.

20% inflation will erode the value of your savings by 90% after ten years, unless you have sufficient interest to offset the inflation. Not much point in saving for the kids’ college then, is there.

The IMF is the favorite whipping boy of short-sighted populists who prefer to undermine a country’s currency for short-sighted gains, and wait for someone else to foot the bill a generation later. Many countries face hard choices about how to pay for social services, such as health and education. In the long run, however, large deficit spending and infusions of foreign cash can drive up wages, make it harder to start businesses, and make it harder for ordinary people to afford imported goods–which might include food, clothes, fuel, and other daily necessities.

Blaming the IMF for the reality that every country must confront its budget constraints is like blaming the fund for gravity. –Ken Rogoff, 2003

The best argument in favor of high inflation isn’t even mentioned in the article. If you were a radical populist, you could argue that inflation represents a transfer of wealth from people who save money to people who spend it. The longer you save, the more you lose. This benefits those with jobs but no savings, at the expense of those with savings. But you should also acknowledge that the least well-off savers probably have the least ability to protect themselves from inflation, meaning that middle income households face a greater inflation penalty than the rich.

According to RESULTS article, the IMF’s judgment only matters because bankers and the World Bank, who ultimately hold the purse strings for poor countries, listen to the IMF’s judgment. Doesn’t that beg an interesting question? Why, exactly would these conscientious bankers let themselves be hoodwinked by an ignorant IMF? In fact, sound macroeconomic policy is one of the most important conditions for creating sustained economic growth.

The IMF has taken tougher lashings from sharper pens. Because RESULTS provides direct connection from the Washington policy staff to motivated local activists, I believe it is important to point out the weaknesses in the so-called facts about the IMF on the RESULTS website. Many dedicated RESULTS activists don’t have the time to learn international macroeconomics, which explains the links between countries’ fiscal deficit spending, public debt, interest rates, exchange rates, economic growth, and global investment.

RESULTS has many achievements to its credit in global health, education, and economic development. RESULTS chapters have pushed hard to win Congressional appropriations for worthy policies, and I am proud to count myself among those who have joined in the letter writing and media campaigns. Examples:

• child survival,
• the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM),
• the Global TB Drug Facility,
• universal primary education,
• microfinance, and
• targeting the poorest of the poor with microfinance dollars.

This post is part of a conversation I had with friends and colleagues from the Fletcher School about the nature of the Afghan war leaks, specifically occasioned by their comments and a New Yorker article on Julian Assange from June of this year. In particular, Kate Brodock, Mark Belinsky of 4Hours, Emily Jacobi of Glean and Gleam, Patrick Meier of iRevolution, Mary Joyce, and Josh Goldstein of In an African Minute have insightful comments, mostly not (yet) available on their blogs. (All of which by the way are great. Sign up for RSS feeds.) Drew Conway at Zero Intelligence Agents has neat statistical graphics on the leaks data. Others who don’t have blogs, I won’t name here without their permission. My comments on email I wrote in haste, so I have cleaned them up a bit here. For factual summaries of the leak itself, you can find a multitude of blog posts and media.

According to the New Yorker’s portrait of Assange, he is an iconoclast possessed of immense talents and an abiding cynicism about the motives and methods of government. His organization Wikileaks wamts to forever ensure citizens’ access to information, specifically information that corporations and governments might find damaging and wish to hide. In this case, by accepting and posting the contents of the Afghan war leak, Wikileaks has helped a soldier release classified information, in this case a small mountain of it. Assange believes the government’s control over information amounts to a form of oppression. He intends to break that oppression and hold them to account of the facts–preferably all of the facts, all of the time. Friends of mine pointed out that Wikileaks was instrumental in exposing Kenyan corruption; and that both the media and “our 20th century institutions” are inadequate to the task of keeping citizens informed about the war. Access to the stream of raw information will let citizens make informed decisions.

More access to the raw information is undoubtedly good for journalists. The media’s distance from the Pentagon and the White House has repeatedly been called into question. And, no one has a monopoly on the war narrative. Points well taken. On the other hand, some of the worst mistakes from the Bush-Cheney era were founded on cherry-picked facts rather than seasoned, contextual analysis. More raw information need not lead to better analysis or better decisions. It is not clear to me that the Afghan war leaks will improve America’s conduct in the war. And I question anyone’s ability, even the “experts” my friends advocated, to vet disclosures of this magnitude. The consequences of disclosure are very hard to predict, and more so when details are scattered through tens of thousands of documents.

[Assange] had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are corrupted by institutional hierarchies, and by “patronage networks”—one of his favorite expressions—that contort the human spirit. He sketched out a manifesto of sorts, titled “Conspiracy as Governance,” which sought to apply graph theory to politics. Assange wrote that illegitimate governance was by definition conspiratorial—the product of functionaries in “collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population.” He argued that, when a regime’s lines of internal communication are disrupted, the information flow among conspirators must dwindle, and that, as the flow approaches zero, the conspiracy dissolves. Leaks were an instrument of information warfare. [from the New Yorker]

Graph theory or no graph theory, Assange’s intent here is to wage war on the Obama Administration, by attacking the American public’s political will to continue the fight. He is specifically opposed to the policy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with disregard for the law he attempts to bring about a change to the Administration’s stated policy. Let’s grant him that the information is too cold to be acutely dangerous in a tactical sense, although that’s another argument worth having.

The purported source of the leaks is facing prosecution. If there is a federal crime involved and Assange’s Wikileaks assisted in that crime, then even if the crime is morally justified, it would appear he and Wikileaks also face civil and criminal liability.

Are laws on the classification of information just? They are overly broad and subject to little oversight, but they are created with a multitude of purposes. National security as a rationale is favored because it refers to a lot of things that by definition can’t be brought under public scrutiny. It is, as so many have pointed out, a way of shutting the door on open debate.

But the purposes of confidentiality are many. Your financial and health records, your private correspondence, and the sanctity of your personal affairs are protected under federal law. The Constitution does not seek to justify this protection. It simply states it as an absolute, a standard against which other laws are to be judged. In practice, a web of laws, federal regulations, and professional codes govern standards of confidentiality and disclosure for business and for individuals. Attorneys, financial professionals, corporate R&D, and health care apply vastly different protections to  information due to the complex consequences of inadvertent disclosure.

Imagine if your small business was targeted, or if Google were targeted, or if Lockheed Martin were targeted by a similar disclosure of thousands of internal reports and communications not intended for public release. The damage to shareholders and management would be immense, partly because of the sheer irresponsibility of the leak per se, and then again from regulatory penalties, civil liability, and ruined corporate strategy. Malicious disclosure in business and government goes by the same name: espionage. In private life it can end marriages, friendships, and careers. The fact that the adversary here is The Man does not change the character of this leak.

It is bad for State and Defense to live in fear that every honest assessment of the day’s events might one day be leaked to the world at large by a well-intentioned, conscientious junior employee. Diplomats cannot naively air the same views in public that they hold in private, nor run around telling our allies what we really think of them day in and day out. That is a recipe for poisoning partnerships. With due respect to journalists, everyone knows the Pentagon lies about the war in Afghanistan. There were good reasons the Pentagon’s Vietnam briefings were called the Five O’clock Follies.

This disclosure is a watershed event. It drives home the ease with which any individual can compromise the boundary between internal and public information. Actions of this type can undermine American strategy in the war. Political decisions about partnerships have tactical consequences, witness the importance of Turkish air bases in 2003.

In order to applaud Wikileaks for its role in this disclosure, I believe you have to hold two opinions. First, that the injustice of the Afghan war is so immense that citizens have a responsibility to bring about its immediate end, through civil disobedience or comparable means. Second, that Wikileaks is well qualified to assess the potential harm that might be inflicted as a result of the disclosures. You have to make up your own minds about the ethics of the Afghan war. On the second question, though, I invite you to think carefully through the wisdom of giving unaccountable, private organizations the power to disclose stolen, sensitive information based solely on their judgment that the benefit outweighs the harm. Can you reconcile the indiscriminate, voluminous, and quotidien nature of the leak with a story about plucky and righteous individuals bending unjust government to their will? To me, the leak betrays haste, youth and passion. I cannot buy into Assange’s vision of a world without confidentiality or privacy.

I don’t buy the Robin Hood argument here, and I don’t see this as a Tank Man moment.

The beliefs including ending the era of “white guys with white shirts… determining the relationship”, replacing ideology with openness, and broadcast with conversation.  Yet the policies described in the article reveal a shift in the type of “white men in white shirts” making policy decisions: away from career diplomats and towards young staffers and technology entrepreneurs. The article opens with a full-page photo (left) of the two young leaders of this movement – Jared Cohen and Alec Ross- walking in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Blackberries in hand: two white men in white shirts shaping the (new, digital) relationship America will have with the world.

You’ve got a point, in that a list of Voice of America headlines on Twitter does not equal social media. But Ross and Cohen have about 300,000 followers apiece. They spend a lot of time answering messages, tweeting about others’ blogs, and sharing personal details that are decidedly off-message. In short, they listen–and in a distinctively Twitter way. You can’t simply buy 300,000 followers the way you can buy broadcast hours and or a media company. Well, you could, but I don’t think they did.

Where is the beef? Is it the New York Times’ selection of Twitter celebrities for a focus piece? Or is it that Ross and Cohen’s approach to “muslim engagement” (as presented in the article) is shallow and rings hollow? Or is it that Google is a poor choice of partner for technology innovation?

I disagree that Google’s apps won’t constitute innovation. It’s hard to overstate the impact that the Web, web search, web transactions, and mobile telephony have had on our personal lives, our education, our political discourse, and our commerce. Google has the luxury of distributing apps for free, which might just create rivers of economic value somewhere downstream. And unlike a hydroelectric dam, once the app is released it lives or dies by consumer demand (even at the price of zero), provides no immediate opportunities for corruption, and consumes no state resources.

I would be surprised if State didn’t meet with local activists, and I’d be even more surprised if the NYT ran feature articles on those meetings.

But I like your post on the Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks.

No, it’s a big deal. Really.

Have you forgotten the joys of being a first-year R user, either begging advice off of friends or using Google to search archives of the R-help list? (Firefox has a dedicated search add-on for the R-help archives.) Yes, it gets the job done, but it’s kludge. If you’re a self-taught R programmer you know what I’m talking about.

StackExchange for Statistical Analysis will let experienced users answer statistics questions, presented in a legible format, and good answers are promoted to the top of the list. Questions can be tagged by subject matter and by package. Proper formatting for code swatches, and for discussion. It’s modeled on StackOverflow.

A well-designed, user generated site for statistics might make it possible for newbies to learn without posting a thousand redundant and ill-posed questions to the help list. It might make it more palatable for experts to monitor discussions and lend a hand from time to time, rather than having to offer up a personal email address as a sacrificial lamb to the greater good of teaching statistics.

Young experts don’t want to have to monitor email all day to be part of the discussion. Their answers belong on a website with a normal content management system, with good search functions and user interactions.

Go sign up. Or read Tal Galili’s post on why you should sign up. Compare it to what’s on offer at MetaOptimize and I think you’ll agree this is a much more general-interest statistics tool.

We launched the 2010 World Development Indicators today, except this year we launched it on data.worldbank.org—the Bank’s new open data site that frees up more than 2,000 indicators previously available only to paying subscribers. We’re pushing to share our data with the world, and the WDI is a wonderful platform for this. Year after year, we pull together data from many places—across international agencies and countries– in one place to draw a statistical image of the world. This year, whole new audiences will be able to access our work….

Knowledge is the application of information, and that’s especially true about the open data initiative. We knew that people wanted the data. We wanted to find the best way to get it to them. We knew that we had many different types of users: the researcher, the academic, and the development practitioner.. The student, the curious amateur, the journalist, and the application developer– theyalso wanted the data. But each has a different need and uses the data in different ways.

Today we open up the Bank’s data, not just the WDI, for all users. By sharing it openly, we are encouraging its use. We are determined to keep improving the site and making it better for all users.

The World Development Indicators are the authoritative reference on political, economic, and social conditions in most of the world’s countries. When analysts want general comparisons of a large number of countries, the World Bank is the source they turn to. While not all specialists agree on the numbers reported for particular series and particular countries, WDI is the international community’s best effort at a dataset with global coverage on issues of global social importance. It replaces the Babel of national accounts reporting with standard, comparable number for as many countries as can provide data. Access to these resources is now available to anyone in government and civil society that can access the Internet. What a coup!

Imagine my surprise when I received an email today with updated login information. My first thought was, “What a precisely targeted phishing email. Why would anyone want to phish my IVSL credentials?” Next year: I’ll convince IVSL not to send out username/password combinations by email.

Best wishes to IVSL and to my colleagues at the University of Duhok.

Honestly. Beefed up law enforcement? Where does Gady think most infections in Africa originate? Why would he presume that the botnets are home-grown?

Governments should find ways to make legitimate software available at prices users can afford. That means not taxing software imports, encouraging the use of free and open source software, and ensuring broadband access. Yes, greater bandwidth, and not less bandwidth, is crucial to safer computing. Bandwidth will give end users access to security updates and current virus databases that are prohibitively difficult to download when connections are slow.

Improved cyber security will come from responsible use of computers, not prosecution of abusers. The problem for African governments is to protect their users from cyber crime. They cannot and should not expect to administer people’s computers for them. Who among us would trust the government to install our anti-virus software for us? Not I, thank you very much. The key is to create market conditions where everyone can afford safe software.

In many countries, cracked versions of name brand, expensive software are the norm. When you need a new copy of MS Office, or Adobe Illustrator, or SPSS, or FinalCutPro, you simply walk down to the local CD shop and pick up warez for pennies on the dollar. No one who has travelled widely will dispute that this is the reality–particularly in the segment of the market where infections are highest. Nobody knows what has been packaged with these cracked warez, and no one can be sure that security patches will be available to these users.

Moreover, most African countries (with some exceptions, such as Egypt and South Africa) lack the legal infrastructure they would need to prosecute, let alone stop, the rapid increase in cybercrime. Nor is there much coordination between countries on how to deal with cybersecurity, despite commitments made at a Regional Cybersecurity Forum for Africa and Arab states held in Tunis in 2009. Promises made to develop national cybersecurity strategies and better monitor the crime will likely fall flat on a lack of funding.

There are a few bright spots in this dismal picture. Some African countries really have made headway, at least on a national level. Tunisia, for example, drafted a national cybersecurity strategy and specific legislation for electronic identification, and has been able to create the first national security institute in Africa. Nigeria, home of the infamous “419″ scam, so named for the code of law that prohibits it, has developed a national cybersecurity initiative mostly aimed at raising awareness and battling online fraud.

Unfortunately, in cyberspace, the whole is only as strong as its weakest link — and the majority of African countries are downright frail. That fact won’t be lost on skillful cybercriminals operating out of an unregulated Internet café in the slums of Addis Ababa, Lagos, or Maputo. The biggest botnet the world has ever known could be lurking there.

I’m always happy to see cybersecurity in the news. Franz-Stephan Gady’s piece in Foreign Policy makes an important point: the distance between countries is lower online than it is offline. When broadband access comes to Africa, we will face greater exposure to a great number of botnets. But there’s no reason to pick on African botnets, especially given that at present, the connectivity of infected hosts in Africa is so much lower than those in Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Earlier this year I posted on the use of cartograms to visualize dyadic trade flows.

About UseR!

useR! 2010, the R user conference, will take place at the Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 2010-07-21 to 2010-07-23. Pre-conference tutorials will take place on July 20.

The conference is organized by NIST and funded by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing.

Following the successful useR! 2004, useR! 2006, useR! 2007, useR! 2008, and useR! 2009, conferences, the conference is focused on:

1. R as the `lingua franca’ of data analysis and statistical computing,
2. providing a platform for R users to discuss and exchange ideas how R can be used to do statistical computations, data analysis, visualization and exciting applications in various fields,
3. giving an overview of the new features of the rapidly evolving R project.

As for the predecessor conferences, the program consists of two parts:

1. invited lectures discussing new R developments and exciting applications of R,
2. user-contributed presentations reflecting the wide range of fields in which R is used to analyze data.

A major goal of the useR! conference is to bring users from various fields together and provide a platform for discussion and exchange of ideas: both in the formal framework of presentations as well as in the informal part of the conference in Gaithersburg.

Prior to the conference, on 2010-07-20, there are tutorials offered at the conference site. Each tutorial has a length of 3 hours and takes place either in the morning or afternoon.

Academics need three main functions for equation editors.

1. Format the text.
2. Assign sequential numbers.
3. Update references to Equation (2), whenever the number changes.

OpenOffice has all this built in. Neat! Read the wiki FAQs on OpenOffice Math or the concise, illustrated Getting Started with Math. The tricky part is to remember:

“fn” + F3

In order to add an equation, type “fn” and then hit F3. This creates a box for the equation and assigns it a number. The equation’s box and number appear in the text, and the equation editor appears in a separate pane at the bottom of the screen. You type in plain text, which is converted to graceful mathematical typesetting.

The syntax for OpenOffice equations is remarkably similar to LaTeX syntax, and fairly intuitive. For example, “integrate x dx” is typed “int{x}dx”. Superscripts use the ^ character, and subscripts the _ character. Greek letters, calculus, and set operations are straightforward.

Later, you will want to refer to an equation by number. This is, after all, the main purpose of numbering the equations, so you don’t have to repeat the entire thing each time you discuss it. OpenOffice thinks of these equation numbers as “cross-references,” meaning that you have to >Insert >Cross-reference, and then select how you’d like it to appear.

“Equation ” + >Insert >Cross-reference >Reference …becomes…

Equation (2)

And the number (2) will change if you add further equations to the text. If OpenOffice forgets to update this field, you can update all using the >Tools >Update menu.

What about other ways of referring to the equation? Changing the format of the cross-reference to a caption does pretty much what it says.

>Insert >Cross-reference >Caption …becomes…

Newton’s Third Law of Motion (e.g.)

Cross-references across chapters of a book (sub-documents in a master document) are possible. Read the FAQs above.

Compare this to the equation numbering in MS Word.

Mary Ann Davidson, CSO (Oracle). Required reading! Ms. Davidson masters the subject in bright prose. This is an excellent indictment of the rush deploy smart grid technologies before we’ve had time to harden them from the types of attacks that routinely take computers off line. Thought experiment: what level of unplanned downtime would you be comfortable with for your house’s electrical power? water? energy? Would you try to save 10% on your electric bill if for a system that you couldn’t be sure would work more than 99.9% of the time?

Even better, Ms. Davidson points out a crucial flaw in education. Computer science is applied mathematics, and few departments teach young programmers how to write secure software. If university departments don’t teach secure programming, we will need professional certifications to substitute, as with medical residencies, CFA exams for financial analysts, and professional societies for engineers and architects.

Vice Admiral Mike McConnell (Booz Allen Hamilton). Sound byte: “If there were a cyber war today, the United States would lose.” Some excellent recommendations for training a new class of software engineers, security professionals, and managers. Don’t be distracted by the salacious and unwarranted assertion at the outset. The rest of the testimony is good, and nobody is better informed than the Admiral.

Dr. James A. Lewis (CSIS). A couple of interesting metaphors. He compares cyberspace to a condominium and to a shopping mall, meaning that the space is all privately owned, and that neighbors have a compelling interest in one another’s behavior. Therefore all should be willing to submit to greater regulation. I’m inclined to agree with Borg’s statement (below) that government regulations are unlikely to keep pace with the rate of innovation. Rather  than ask the government to certify that buildings are safe, wouldn’t we be better off with private certification of a standard of risk, as we currently do with automobiles, houses, and financial management? Computers and especially software are endlessly complicated, and don’t lend themselves well to the same type of governance as broadcast media and airplane safety.

Lewis also makes a crucial overstatement when he says that there are no rules on the Internet or that the Internet is a wild west. Actually many national and state authorities have control over Internet commerce, fraud, and even transborder crimes. At a more fundamental level, Lewis’ lawless vision of the Internet is fundamentally at odds with Internet governance over every layer of the Internet, from the development of hardware standards and Internet protocol, to the assignment of names and numbers, to the software that runs servers and home desktops. Re-read Lessig, and see if you can imagine the Internet truly without rules.

Scott Borg (US-CCU). Focuses on 3 central problems: (1) the conflict is already here; (2) cyber conflict threatens future American prosperity; (3) fixing markets is the key to improving cyber security. I agree with Borg, but then I’m biased.

Rear Admiral James Arden Barnett, Jr., Ret. (FCC). An interesting point of view. I don’t have any problem with DHS assisting the country with situational awareness, but the philosophy of defense is extremely centralized. The greatest specific policy errors of homeland security in the last ten years have been efforts to provide one-size-fits-all information and requirements from a central national office: the national threat level scale, vastly increased expenditures on passenger screening at airports, and advice on creating a safe room for chemical gas attacks inside your home. There are too many computers, and too many businesses to expect that federal marshals can secure their IT infrastructure for them. Effective homeland defense will require businesses and individuals to have cheap, effective, and secure choices to accomplish the things they already know how to do: run their businesses and their households.

During the Cold War, deterrence was based on a few key elements: attribution (understanding who attacked us), location (knowing where a strike came from), response (being able to respond, even if attacked first) and transparency (the enemy’s knowledge of our capability and intent to counter with massive force).

All three of these conditions fail.

Attribution is impossible without cooperation. Assessing Russian culpability for attacks against Georgia during the 2008 war required an international, private effort and more than a year of time. At present, we only have the cooperation of our allies, and at best partial cooperation.

Response requires access. In the cyber domain, access is the measure of distance. Preparing the ground for a careful, calibrated, and proportionate response requires huge amounts of time and expertise. We must have detailed counterstrike plans; but these are not limited to a few hundred cities and three prongs of a nuclear triad. These plans involve exponentially greater numbers of individual agencies, firms, and computer systems spread throughout the world. Let’s assume you can somehow identify a private foreign corporation is responsible for attacks against America. Computer network operations provide a vastly increased set of targets and methods of attack, but all of them require access. Consider a typical corporate infrastructure, replete with servers, desktop workstations, cloud computing services, smartphones, global travel, SCADA systems, and manufacturing plants. Consider their customers and stakeholders, including a global pool of investors (potentially including Americans), the host government, and an innocent civilian population (the firm in question could supply vital infrastructure, such as water, electricity, phone service, or banking). No matter what the planned response, cyber warriors will spend years preparing the ground by gaining access to target systems, or risk ineffectual and indiscriminate counterattacks.

Transparency is the key to ineffective response. In everyday cyber security, the greatest threat is the unknown threat. Blogs and books about Zero Day Threats–threats that your Norton AntiVirus can’t screen out because they’re too new to have a “fingerprint” in the database–abound. Our adversaries already know we listen to essentially all broadcast media and cellular phone conversations worldwide. They operate within the paradigm of the global passive adversary: they attempt to segment the parts of the conversation so that our listening efforts can’t reassemble all the pieces. They use disposable cell phones and cell phone numbers. They use paper communications rather than email and bank wires. The greater the threat of an American response against a given information system, the greater the incentive for our adversaries to harden those systems against unauthorized access. Concerted efforts by national governments to steal information from our civilian and military computers in the 1990s and 2000s shocked the national press because the scale of the intrusions was previously unthinkable. In the nuclear age, Dr. Strangelove pointed out that transparency was essential to the strategic function of the Doomsday Device, but in the cyber age the same principle does not apply.

Cooperation is vital to situational awareness in cyber defense. By that I mean, it is costly to determine whether existing systems suffer from unauthorized access. Each firm, each home user, each government agency has (legal) access only to its own systems. With effort and expense, it is possible to monitor those systems for unauthorized access. But the level of  access required to diagnose the status of those systems is not (legally) available to other firms and government agencies. We cannot assess our own security posture without extensive cooperation. We may not even be able to recognize ongoing cyber attacks until months after the fact without it.

In the nuclear age, deterrence rested on the ability to reataliate against state adversaries when we could recognize attacks quite literally from space. In the cyber age, we will not know the location or identity of the adversaries when military attacks begin. We may not recognize the effects of peacetime attacks for many months after they begin. And we will not be able to observe or respond to attacks without the cooperation of many countries and companies around the world.

Blanket threats of massive retaliation will serve primarily to poison international and public-private cooperation.

With all due respect to the Admiral, deterrence cannot work for cyber defense as it did for nuclear defense.

I gave a short talk to the research staff on my last day there, 5 February 2010. Comments from Director Andrew Catley, Berhanu Admassu, Yacob Akliku, Yosef, and Fletcher’s own John Burns were enormously helpful to my thinking. I am also deeply grateful to stakeholders at the Ministry of Agriculture (DRMFSS), WFP, FAO, USAID, CARE, Save the Children, and Nyala Insurance for their generous contribution of time and subject matter expertise.

Skype 2.1 for Linux requires PulseAudio as as sound manager. Unfortunately this means that the crucial sound settings are scattered all over the map. Unfortunately the promising “PulseAudio Device Chooser” applet does not permit you to choose the current source of sound that the operating system (and therefore your applications) is paying attention to. For that, you’ll have to adjust the system sound preferences. Under the Input tab, select the appropriate device and adjust the gain.

Further bad news: I haven’t yet found an automatic switch that toggles back and forth to the headset microphone when you plug a headset in.

Further bad news: Skype doesn’t contain any settings to override PulseAudio in the GUI preferences / configuration. You’re stuck with PulseAudio for the time being.

Larry Lessig‘s recent BlipTV short endorsing Khazei describes the race in the following terms:

1. a rich man,
2. a calculating insider,
3. a populist pol,
   … and then [cue inspirational theme music] …
4. a visionary leader and social entrepreneur, the only one who is up to the billing of Successor to Teddy.

A look at the four campaign websites reveals marked similarity on the issues they perceive voters care about: health care, jobs, recovery, and two wars.

Do you buy Lessig’s characterization of the race? Is Khazei the only visionary in the race? Is vision the essential qualification for the Senate?

Does the United States Senate even matter anymore in the formulation of American foreign policy?

These slides follow the method laid out in Jong-Eun Lee, “Two Maps for the World’s Trade Integration,” Applied Economics Letters, 11:4 (2004). All computations were performed in R.

What is the current MS Word solution to this problem? I’d be interested to know how others manage.

UPDATE (3/24/10): Please check out OpenOffice Math, which makes the LaTeX plugin largely obsolete. Most users will have everything they need in the way of math, from calculus to Greek letters to set operations to summations.

In a nutshell, the talk argues that cartograms and dendrograms can give students and practitioners a better understanding of the patterns of trade among partner contries, both for teaching and for research. We have thousands of observations of dyadic relationships in panel datasets. Most often these datasets are presented as aggregates: total annual world trade, top exporters in world trade, top exporters, top exporters in an industry sector, top exporters to a political union (such as the EU), top exporters within a geographic area, etc. What these statistics ignore is the information in the dyadic trade flows: who trades with whom?

What I offer is a way to crunch down the total number of country dyads into manageable graphics that can appear on a single slide. We can look directly at the dyadic patterns of trade using hierarchic clustering (dendrograms). We can compare partner trade flows across countries and time periods using cartograms. The techniques are not new; what is new is the presentation of rich international trade datasets in relatively complete format that can be digested by inspection, rather than with complex and poorly understood statistical techniques. Complete annual sets of cartograms and dendrograms give scholars the power to explore the distribution of dyadic trade and discover hypotheses that are worth testing more carefully, either with quantitative or qualitative methods.

One of the reasons trade courses have focused so much on models, theorems, and policy of international trade is that it is hard to describe trade patterns in any meaningful and comparable terms. My slides suggest how to do exactly that: present changes to global trade patterns in a succinct, visual format that enables rich comparisons across time and space.

Bravo! Free, multi-user, qualitative data analysis for anyone with a web browser. They have clearly stated data warehouse privacy disclosures as part of the user agreement, and a tutorial for new users.

Thank you, Dr. Shulman.

From the About Us page:

The original QDAP lab was founded in the fall of 2005 by Dr. Stuart Shulman at the University of Pittsburgh. QDAP-UMass, founded in September of 2008 when Dr. Shulman moved to the Department of Political Science at UMass Amherst, trains and employs personnel able to code text from a wide variety of sources. Original material for content analysis might include in-depth interviews, open-ended survey answers, field notes, transcripts from focus groups or Web logs (blogs), e-mails, Web site content, results from database searches (such as LexisNexis™), congressional testimony or other historical texts, and a host of other unstructured but digitized text data sets. QDAP-UMass employs both UMass Amherst and University of Pittsburgh students, as well as professional staff trained in using ATLAS.ti (www.atlasti.com) as well as the Coding Analysis Toolkit, invented by Dr. Shulman. QDAP-UMass will continue to develop and make available online tools to improve the accuracy, reliability, and validity of coding projects.

Manual gain settings still did better than the default.

–UPDATE

PulseAudio is installed by default with Karmic, no matter what flavor of ALSA you had running before.

In PulseAudio, you’ll have to identify the hardware that you want to be your primary sound source, such as the Internal Audio or an external device. Internal Audio means the built-in sound jacks, often a 1/8″ stereo jack for headphones and a similar one for an external mic. If you’re plugging into your system with red and green 1/8″ jacks from a headphone, you’ll want to select these settings. Devices that connect through USB should have a different name, such as the name of the headphones or webcam with integrated microhpone.

Once you’ve got the hardware identified, you’ll need to adjust the gain on the input. The gain was too low on mine; I’m sure this could be configured millions of ways in yours. In ALSA mixer it was easy to pipe the sound back out through the system’s speakers; I found that to be difficult on my system. Also, PulseAudio did not get along with Audacity, so it was hard to check the settings that way. The object is to adjust the gain (mic volume) so that the levels appear mostly about halfway up the scale. If you’re pinned at the right, your voice will distort on Skype. If you’re pinned on the left nobody will hear you.

What about Skype? All right, back into Skype. The settings you want are in >Options >Sound Devices. I generally don’t let Skype adjust the volume because it messes things up more than it helps. Your mileage may be better than mine, and I am sure Skype will improve that by the time you read this.

Select the default PulseAudio devices for inputs and outputs–mine didn’t have any other alternatives using the default install on Karmic. Good luck.