DHB, which specialized in making body armor used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, paid for more than $6 million in personal expenses on behalf of Mr. Brooks, covering items as expensive as luxury cars and as prosaic as party invitations, Ms. Schlegel testified.

Also included were university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees, and, for him, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.

For comparison purposes, note that 20.7% of CNN’s viewers are black. For MSNBC, the number is 19.3%.

For Fox News, it’s just 1.38%.

By a landslide the ‘Back’ button was the most clicked of all navigation buttons which include the Back, Forward, Reload, Stop, and Home buttons. Across Windows, Mac and Linux 93.1 percent of users clicked the button at least once over the course of a five-day period. In total the study reported that users clicked on the back button 66 times over the course of five days.

It’s been a while, but as a graduate student I did some usability testing at a conference where I saw behavior that I still find baffling. We didn’t have a super fancy protocol, but basically sat people down at a computer and asked them to try and find some content on a new web site we were building. Not only did most users make use of the back button, but several of them clicked on the back button before they clicked on anything else. To this day, I still don’t know what they could have been thinking. At best they might have stumbled onto a page with the content they wanted, and had this not been a controlled environment, who knows where they may have landed. My best guess is that when presented with a new interface they simply reached for the one spot in the interface that they were familiar with, in the hopes that it might lead them somewhere without having to learn the new interface.

June 2010 11 Second Club Entry, “It didn’t make the noise”

One last thing– the notes on the source audio were a little vague this time. This comes from the current season of Doctor Who, “The Time of Angels.”

Long wars are antithetical to democracy. Protracted conflict introduces toxins that inexorably corrode the values of popular government. Not least among those values is a code of military conduct that honors the principle of civilian control while keeping the officer corps free from the taint of politics. Events of the past week — notably the Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s dismissal — hint at the toll that nearly a decade of continuous conflict has exacted on the U.S. armed forces. The fate of any one general qualifies as small beer: Wearing four stars does not signify indispensability. But indications that the military’s professional ethic is eroding, evident in the disrespect for senior civilians expressed by McChrystal and his inner circle, should set off alarms.