Not happy with what came up for this search, so here is the human-in-the loop answer.
The OSS.Net, Inc. archives, including all electronic copies of all proceedings, training, lectures, and so on, is forever. In the second column of this web site, under Antecedents, you will find a direct link back to OSS.Net, Inc. At OSS.Net, Inc. all of the original front page categories still have hundreds of links that are not represented here at Phi Beta Iota. Everything else (documents) is represented here at Phi Beta Iota. All things being equal, you are better off searching here unless you are looking for links you remember, e.g. under Information Operations (IO) at the OSS.Net site.
The two organizing documents, www.oss.net/LIBRARY and www.oss.net/COMMUNITIES both remain active and cover OSS.Net, Inc. web site contents from the past, they are not updated to reflect all that has been added to Phi Beta Iota from Earth Intelligence Network and from Amazon.
HOWEVER, Phi Beta Iota, this web site, was created for three reasons: 1) because we finally got fed-up with Amazon's unrealiability and capriciousness in censoring and gutting original works; 2) as a better front end for OSS.Net and EIN, both of which are now “static” as sites but active as archives (we load all the new stuff to the server in Sweden, and then link to it from Phi Beta Iota); and 3) to serve as the virtual index and endnotes for the new book, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability, which is being translated into multiple languages and will also have this web site easily accessed in multiple languages.
Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace
A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.
Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
Phi Beta Iota: This is righteous, but as Howard Bloom addresses in Global Brain, it will taqke 50 years and it will not achieve the intended result until the children who START with this are adults in power. In the meantime, the adults in power who are both digitally and ideologically impaired, will continue to favor war to profit the few over peace to provide prosperity to the many.
Twitter Teams with Haiti Telco To Provide Free Text Tweets
WIRED 22 February 2010
Text messages have already raised $32 million for Haiti relief. Now Twitter is partnering with the devastated nation’s dominant telco to provide free text Tweets to Haitians so they can better keep in touch with each other and the outside world.
“Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes on the company’s blog. “To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.”
The move is much more than a gesture, as it might seem in place where limitless text plans abound and the standard of living is much higher. Under Digicel’s pre-paid plan Haitians pay $0.08 to text locally, $0.15 to text internationally and $0.23 to send an MMS. But considering that the country’s per capita income is about $1,300, that would be the equivalent of $2.46, $4.62 and a whopping $7.07 in the U.S. (which had a 2008 per capita income of about $40,000).
As has become almost routine now, the initial flood of information and pictures to emerge from the disaster zone reached the world via Twitter, and the use of texting is an especially crucial lifeline in the underdeveloped world.
Phi Beta Iota: BRAVO TWITTER! Who would have thought Haiti would be the silver lining for the poor. At one stroke Twitter hass connected scharitable giving from the 80% that do not normally give, with the bottom-up needs of the poor articulated via Twitter for free. Now if Twitter can team with others such as Nokia, Microsoft, and IMB to offer free cell phones to the five billion poor, with back office harvesting of the data and a global grid of volunteer translator educators in 183 languages, we save the world quick time.
FOLKS: I have three articles you should see. After nine years, the 9/11 Truth Movement is beginning to be taken seriously by the AntiWar movement.
I have published a primer on this issue that introduces the evidence to the curious.
And at this point, it's time to take the case to the courts. We are working on doing just that, starting with the case of Don Meserlian. We are using a law called “Misprision of Treason.”
Phi Beta Iota: There is absolutely no question that 9/11 was not properly investigated, and that adequate grounds exist to indict Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for letting it happen and putting a missile into the Pentagon; and to indict Rudy Guliani and Larry Silverstein and their insurance company and security company collaborators for mudering most of those who died in NYC with controlled demolitions. We say indictment, not verdict. As with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the murder of Martin Luther King, the Tonkin Gulf incident, the USS Liberty, and the USS Scorpion, the truth is certain to come out eventually, and that is a good thing–The truth at any cost reduces all other costs. See all of our 9/11 book and DVD reviews here: 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs (27).
Engaging, Earnest, New Insights, a Great Contribution
February 22, 2010
Serge Michel, Michel Beuret, Paolo Woods (Photos)
Of the modest number of books focused on China in Africa, this is one of the two best, and both are unique–if you buy only one, at least read my summary of the other, China into Africa: Trade, Aid, and Influence Whereas this book is direct journalism with wonderful color photos and direct ground-truth stories, China Into Africa is a best in class collection of academic essays.
Sixteen full pages of color photos in the middle of the book were unexpected and a complete delight.
On balance between the two books, this one taught me more and provided insights I could not get elsewhere to include the clear understanding, documented across multiple encounters by the authors, that the Chinese consider any Chinese business area or housing area of, by, and for their Chinese workers, to be sovereign territory of China immune to indigenous inspection or intervention.
Highpoints for me:
+ Africa is undergoing a huge transformation, and in combination, the infusion of Chinese infrastructure with the discovery of new energy fields and the growing need of all for what Africa has, is creating a perfect environment for a wealth explosion, and the US is missing it.
+ US has given up in Africa, in large part because the US Government other than the military does not have the resources, the human capital, the area knowledge, or the innate interest to actually do something strategic. The Chinese, in contrast, are unifying and pacifying Africa with infrastructure and commerce, while gaining direct access to natural resources that they can take possession of at half the market value by controlling the supply chain and no doubt lying about how much they are extracting.
+ Chinese presence in Africa is vertically and horizontally integrated, to include relatively thorough exploitation of what I have named the eight tribes of intelligence (academic, citizen-civil sector, commercial, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental), the Chinese appear to be way ahead of the US and all others in the Information Operations (IO) domain.
Engaging, Earnest, New Insights, a Great Contribution