In her new book “The Shock Doctrine — The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” Naomi Klein (author of “No Logo”) argues that in times when a society is at shock, savvy politicians and industry leaders use this situation to push through new laws and policies that would never have passed in normal times.

Only a crisis — actual or percieved — produces real changeMilton Friedman

Examples are outsourcing the “War on Terror” to Halliburton and Blackwater after September 11., granting iraqs oil reserves to Shell and BP, and selling beaches to tourist resorts after the tsunami in Southeast Asia swept away the fishermens huts.

Alfonso Cuarón — director of “Children of Men” and some other remarkable movies — made a companion short film. It’s worth watching.

The books website kann be found here.

WIRED features an interesting interview with psychologist Philip Zimbardo who conducted the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. He links his research to actual events like Abu Ghraib or jewish wardens in nazi concentration camps.

Read "How Good People Turn Evil, From Stanford to Abu Ghraib" over at WIRED.

The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study of human responses to captivity and its behavioral effects on both authorities and inmates in prison. [...]
Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of both guards and prisoners living in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.

Finally, Zimbardo, alarmed at the increasingly abusive anti-social behavior from his subjects, terminated the entire experiment early. from wikipedia

Goog Magazine tells us about who possesses nuclear weapons and what would happen if an atomic bomb detonates in New York City.

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts — for support rather than illumination. Andrew Lang

Peter Norvig wrote an excellent article on how to conduct empirical studies and how to interpret the resulting data.

He starts with common mistakes like a lacking or wrong control group, too few subjects for your experiment, or the lack of a theory. He continues with common mistakes in data interpretation. Mixing up conditional probabilities P(A|B) with P(B|A), or confusing causality with correlation.

Norvig is well known to almost every computer scientist as he published the leading book "A Modern Approach To Artificial Intelligence".

If you're too lazy to read Novigs article or found interest in this topic, you may also like to watch Peter Donnelly's talk at TED 2005. He talks about common misconceptions in statistics and presents many comprehensible examples.