Marc | February 21, 2009
Last Thursday (Feb. 19th, 2009), Inside Higher Ed published an article by Dr. Adam Silverman called The Why and How of Human Terrain Teams. This piece, which is well worth reading, is one of the few that has come out by an HTT member describing their actions in the field – it also “enjoys” comments [...]
Marc | February 18, 2009
I’ve been thinking about the effects of ‘net interactivity on perception and the formation of meaning systems for a long time now (about 20 years). A lot of this thinking has been focused on population level, structural changes that have taken place, i.e. a shift from redistributive communications systems to reciprocity based communications systems (e.g. [...]
Marc | February 10, 2009
Tom Ricks has a series of posts on the Battle of Wanat last summer over at Foreign Policy that is well worth reading for a number of reasons. First of all, Tom has done some excellent research and, unlike many, offers questions rather than answers (although he has a few of those). Second, his research, [...]
Marc | February 6, 2009
There are times when I get totally frustrated with computers. I had this post all ready to go with just some final edits to make on the 1st when my laptop died and I was stuck without a keyboard. I have been thinking a lot, lately, about how the map-territory paradox applies to cross-cultural (mis)communications. [...]
Marc | January 14, 2009
There is a very interesting round-table discussion going on over at Chicago Boyz on Clausewitz (with a big hat tip to SWC colleague and friend Zenpundit). Possibly the most interesting (to me at least) entry so far is on Military Genius by Nathaniel T. Lauterbach. Outside of it being a truly great post, it carries [...]
Marc | January 13, 2009
In the past couple of posts, I have been jotting notes, as it were, about how people view ways in which we, as a species, simulate our perceptions of objective reality and then pass on our understandings of how best to operate within these perceptions. All well and good but, in an age when we [...]
Marc | January 10, 2009
I wanted to post a quick follow-up to the example I used in my last post regarding conceptualizations of space and time. In it, I noted that “For the irhabi, the Area of Operations (AO) is glocal while for much of the Western military the AO is local (i.e. geographically limited)”, an observation I stand [...]
Marc | December 22, 2008
It certainly seems as if my previous post on the idea of evaluating the HTS caused a fair bit of reaction on both theoretical and epistemological grounds. I thought it would be worthwhile to pull out some of the ideas I talked about in that post a little more. And, I’ll admit, that I was [...]
Marc | December 12, 2008
For the past couple of weeks, I have been involved in multiple conversations covering quite divergent subject matter, that all boil down to a basic problem in social epistemology. The main thrust of all of these conversations has been how, and why, people confuse a “map” [theory] with a “territory” [reality].
Marc | November 18, 2008
For over a month, now I have been wresting with ideas about education, training and ethics. Last night, I received an email from a student asking me if we could have an extra class added into my course in applied epistemology so that everyone who is presenting could have more time for their presentations. In [...]
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