Zero Intelligence Agents

Yesterday the Harvard Business School released a new study on the social behavior of Twitter users. Zach Tumin, of the Harvard Kennedy School, and I read the report and were suspicious of its conclusions—having doubts about its methodological foundations. We decided to compile our concerns into a blog post, and Zach has published [...]

My favorite podcast, Armed with Science, is covering a topic near and dear to ZIA readers tomorrow at 2PM ET.
Episode #15: Utilizing Social Science Research to Navigate the Human Terrain
Drs. Ivy Estabrook, program officer for the Human, Social, Cultural and Behavioral Science program at the Office of Naval Research, and Elisa Bienenstock, Chief [...]

Over the summer, many of my favorite bloggers and national security thinkers collaborated on a book entitled, Threats in the Age of Obama. As the title suggests, the book contains several short thought pieces on threats facing the United States.
Now that Obama has passed the manufactured benchmark of 100 days in office, many of [...]

A quick reminder that my favorite podcast, Armed with Science, will have the Director and Deputy Director of the Defense Department’s Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Coordination Office on today at 2PM EST.
Armed with Science host John Ohab will take your questions live via Twitter @ArmedwScience. This a great opportunity to interact directly with two [...]

I have been getting pulled in several of directions this week, and as a result have not been able to post as much to ZIA as I would like. A large contributor to my attention deficit here has been the superb level of discussion going on at the Wired for War Symposium at CTLab.
First, [...]

Our book lab symposium on Peter Singer’s Wired for War has begun over at the Complex Terrain Lab. Only a few hours in, and there has already been some excellent posts.
Singer himself begins the discussion with some excellent opening remarks. Next, Charli Carpenter, of Duck of Minerva, presents some fascinating ideas about governance in [...]

I am very pleased to be participating in the latest symposium at CTLab, which will focus on Peter Singer’s new book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.
The symposium begins on Monday, March 30th, and includes several great authors, many of whom are also active bloggers on the ZIA [...]

At the WMD panel discussion I attended last week, a single sentiment kept returning to the floor; chemical and biological weapons pose the most immediate threat to America, and the scientific community needs to be provocative in preventing the dissemination of this knowledge and material. The panelists, then, will be pleased to learn that [...]

I have long been neglecting to update my list of daily reads, but today is when that ends. Many of these sources may be familiar, but some have only recently come online. I have separated the sites into rough coverage areas below, however, that categorization only appears in this post and is not [...]

I have been neck deep on PyVote development this week, and as such I have not been able to keep up a good flow of new ZIA posts. This, however, means there will be an upcoming post on the forthcoming PyVote update, and some detail on how the project is evolving. In a [...]