A whimsical collection of patches, emblems and insignia associated with classified Department of Defense programs has recently been published in a book by experimental geographer Trevor Paglen.
“Readers of this book will find a collection of images that are fragmentary, torn out of context, inconclusive, enigmatic, unreliable, quixotic, and deceptive,” the author warns. “Readers will find, in other words, a glimpse into the black world itself.”
See “I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World” by Trevor Paglen, Melville House Publishing, March 2008.
“Military patches and logos–simply the latest examples of heraldry dating back thousands of years–are by definition symbolic, so it is no surprise that they contain symbols. What is surprising is that these symbols often reveal information about … missions that are otherwise classified,” wrote space historians Dwayne A. Day and Roger Guillemette in an impressive analysis of several such images. See their “Secrets and Signs” in The Space Review, January 7, 2008.
Wired’s Danger Room blog recently featured some of the “Most Awesomely Bad Military Patches.”
When the U.S. government funds the establishment of a platform for testing hundreds of behavioral interventions on a large diverse population, we will start to better understand the interventions that will have an efficient and lasting impact on health behavior.
The grant comes from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) to investigate, alongside The British American Security Information Council (BASIC), the associated impact on nuclear stability.
We need to overhaul the standardized testing and score reporting system to be more accessible to all of the end users of standardized tests: educators, students, and their families.
Integrating AI tools into healthcare has an immense amount of potential to improve patient outcomes, streamline clinical workflows, and reduce errors and bias.