Almost a Three–Ambitious Title, Narrow Focus

November 29, 2009

Charlotte Hess

An MIT publication from 2007, this is actually knowledge from the 2000-2004 timeframe, and it is annoying narrow knowledge written from legal-economic point of view. Well-intentioned, no doubt, this is not the “inter-disciplinary” work that it claims to be, and I demonstrate restraint in not scoring it as a three. Despite references to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, these folks are largely out of touch with Web 2.0 to Web 4.0, collective intelligence, wealth of networks, and tao of democracy concepts, authors, and works. This is not a substantive contribution to evolutionary anything (cultural evolution, evolutionary activism, conscious evolution). The index STINKS and there is no consolidated bibliography.

This is not a book that focuses on innovation as much as on structured processes and conventions. I left it at four in part because this is a very good job on one part of the elephant (the anus or intellectual property of old part) and I really appreciated the six of the twelve contributions by Nancy Kranich, James Boyle, Peter Suber, Shubha Ghosh, Peter Levine, Charles M Schweik.

My fly-leaf notes (useful stuff from the book):

Continue reading “Review: Understanding Knowledge as a Commons–From Theory to Practice”

2009/11/202009/11/21

Review: Going Rogue–An American Life

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Biography & Memoirs, Censorship & Denial of Access, Culture, Research, Politics, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

No Index But a Proven Player in American Heartland

November 17, 2009

Sarah Palin

EDIT of 20 Nov 09. This is my final review.

The book consists of five parts.

Part I: Life up to the call from John McCain. The book I read and appreciated earlier, Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned the Political Establishment Upside Down was instrumental in her selection, along with the heroic work of a band of bloggers, covers most of this ground so the first half will be old hat to those who followed Palin before she became VP. Stuff better told here includes Todd being the Big Man on Campus (BMOC) with TWO “rides” when others had none; beauty contests paid for college; eloped, terrible pain of pregancy, lost second child, Exxon Valdez killed fish prices down 65%, lost some bids for office, and very meaningful for me, with respect to Downes syndrome, she asked “why us” and Todd responded “why not us.”

Part II: Photos, very disappointing for pre-campaign, better for campaign but over-all TERRIBLE.

Continue reading “Review: Going Rogue–An American Life”

2009/11/172010/05/13

Journal: Deep Secrets, Copenhagen World Government, the M-Fund, and the Future

Censorship & Denial of Access, Earth Intelligence, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Phi Beta Iota: Conventional minds cannot handle the esoteric, in part because they have been dumbed down by really rotten educational systems that emphasize rote learning, and in part by social conventions that reward loyalty to idiocy over self-discovery and “branching.” We are seeing a convergence in “revelations” as more individuals achieve “hacker-like” open minds despite the Paradigms of Failure. Today we bring together three stories: Deep Secrets; UN use of climate change to achieve World Government “functionality (an oxymoron); and the M-Fund in Japan.

Abstract & Source Online

Deep Secrecy

David Pozen

Stanford Law Review, Forthcoming

This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles. [Emphasis added. Click on logo for rest of abstract and Keywords.]

Copenhagen World Government.

Here are two of the most troubling sections.

Continue reading “Journal: Deep Secrets, Copenhagen World Government, the M-Fund, and the Future”