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Starting in July 2009, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists fielded a multinational team of reporters to uncover the special interests attempting to influence negotiations leading to the pivotal December talks on a climate change treaty in Copenhagen. The project built upon the Center’s previous reporting in Washington on efforts to influence the U.S. Congress in The Climate Change Lobby. The ICIJ team involved reporters in eight of the major economies deemed essential to a successful treaty: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, and the United States.

November 04, 2009, 11:01 pm
Washington — Toward a Stalemate in Copenhagen

Phi Beta Iota: Governments are incompetent at global Earth Intelligence (although the Earth Science Initiative under Bush-Cheney showed real promise), and corporations lie. It is not helpful to have the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Honorable Al Gore also play very loosely with the truth. The one public interest solution, and one alone that will enable humanity to achieve conscious evolution: creation of a World Brain with an embedded EarthGame.

2009/11/032009/11/03

Journal: Airplane Wings from Soy…Soon

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 12 Water, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Technologies

Not New, But Improved

Allison Arieff

Meet Stella.

At first glance, this little yellow giraffe looks like a lot of other kids’ bath toys. But Stella is made from Renuva, a little-known material that could change for the better the way hundreds of things, from upholstery to airplane wings, are made.

The story of how Stella came to be made from this material, a soy-based alternative to polyurethane (which is typically petroleum-based), provides a model for how stuff can be better designed in the future.

Phi Beta Iota: While folks focus on the Al Gore show and the important but isolated challenge of reducing our carbon footprint, the avant guarde is way down the road with sustainable design, green chemistry, zero waste, and so on. It's all connected, we need to get truth on the table, and we need to do the right things righter. Stella is a poster child for a new paradigm of ecological economics, natural capitalism, and conscious evolution. Learn more about Renuva from Dow below.

Learn More

2009/11/032009/11/03

Journal: Chuck Spinney Sends–Katrina & Fear

03 Environmental Degradation, 08 Wild Cards, 12 Water, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military

The Detritus of Katrina and the Paralysis of Fear:
A Metaphor for Contemporary Politics

The vast Mississippi Delta in Louisiana is sinking as sea water from the Gulf of Mexico seeps in to destroy its fresh water marshlands. The Army's Corps of Engineers says it can not protect New Orleans from the inevitable storm surges caused by hurricanes (see the Guardian report attached below).

Some may dismiss this warning as alarmist hype, and the Army's Corps of Engineers certainly does not have an enviable track record in this regard. That said, the Corps' warning does make evident the political-economic detritus left over from Hurricane Katrina. Inferentially, the warning also highlights the hollowness in the scare tactics used by global warming advocates to raise money for their far more costly ambitions, not to mention the paralyzing political-economic consequences posed by the politics of fear practiced by the Pentagon.

The reality of the Delta thus becomes a metaphor for the larger emptiness that now pervades American politics.

Below the Fold: Balance of Spinney Comment, Full Article with Highlight, Books
Continue reading “Journal: Chuck Spinney Sends–Katrina & Fear”

2009/10/31

Journal: Baffling Patterns Form in Scientific Sandbox

Academia, Analysis, Earth Intelligence, Media, Methods & Process

Full Story Online

Brandon Keim

October 28, 2009

NOTE: Brandon Keim’s Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes; Wired Science on Twitter. Brandon is currently working on a book about ecosystem and planetary tipping points.

With nothing more than beads in a glass box, physicists have revealed yet another mysterious property of granular solids, now recognized by scientists as a unique state of matter, like solids or gases.

When the box was filled to the brim and rotated, the beads moved in patterns known from convection clouds — another system whose basic physical dynamics are only dimly understood.

The experiment, displayed in a video posted Monday to arXiv, was a variation on one performed 70 years ago by Japanese physicist Yositsi Oyama, who observed that beads of different sizes placed in a rotating circular drum would eventually self-sort by size.

That intriguing result set in motion the study of granular solids, which behave in ways that can’t be predicted with known physical laws. And though research has accelerated in the last decade, scientific understanding of granularity is roughly akin to that of fluid dynamics in the 18th century.

2009/10/302009/10/30

Search: World-Wide Linguist Supply

Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time, Threats, Tools

Great search, thank you.

The OSS-EIN solution for this problem is as follows:

1. All World Language human linguist-interpreters

2. Telelanguage (an open source software) registration for in-house and for-fee linguists

3. Via InfoSphere AB in Sweden, European graduate students fluent in the target language and competent in English, French, or German also

It was the latter that allowd us to find, evaluate, and report on 396 terrorist, insurgent, and opposition web sites in 29 languages over the the course of 60 days for under $60,000 in 1997. We still do this today, using cover support plans as needed.

The solution requires that the client not be an idiot and demand US citizenship and any kind of US clearance for translations that can be handled in near real time. For example, captured Dari documents inthe field should be digitized within minutes and translated within hours. Anyone that cannot do this for our troops fighting in the field should be fired.

2009/10/232009/10/24

Journal: “Biz” Intelligence or Earth Intelligence?

Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Full Story Online

Asean CIOs list biz intelligence top priority

By Liau Yun Qing, ZDNet Asia
Friday, October 23, 2009 03:07 PM

CIOs view leveraging analytics to gain a competitive advantage and improve business decision making as a top priority, according to an IBM study, which polled IT heads in Asia and across the globe.

Released Thursday, the study revealed that 87 percent of CIOs in Southeast Asian nations identified the ability to see patterns in vast amounts of data and extract insights, or business intelligence and analytics, as a crucial way to enhance their organizations' competitiveness. The survey polled 2,500 CIOs worldwide, 86 of whom were from Asean.

Phi Beta Iota: “Biz Intel” is sophmoric–internal data mining and visualization. See below for a proper holistic approach to Organizational Intelligence.

Continue reading “Journal: “Biz” Intelligence or Earth Intelligence?”

2009/10/012012/08/17