With his doctorate from Princeton, Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has become the prime example of a special breed of soldier: the warrior-scholar, trained in history and politics as well as how to fight wars.
Now there’s a variation on the theme: the warrior mathematician, adept in the complex modeling that has become a key part of military planning.
With roadside bombs the leading killer of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, military commanders have turned increasingly to the use of social network analysis to identify the key players in the groups responsible for the bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
The approach is rooted in the belief that a roadside bomb is never the work of one individual alone.
Like so many political debates in our society, the argument over Proposition 19, the initiative to legalize marijuana in California, is portrayed as good vs. evil, black vs. white, us vs. them – while nobody is looking objectively at the medical science of marijuana. If research does enter the debate, each side touts the scientific bits that bolster its arguments and then ignores the rest.
