Month: April 2012

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Patrick Meier: Filtering Tweets Real-Time for Crisis Response

Advanced Cyber/IO
Patrick Meier

Twitcident: Filtering Tweets in Real-Time for Crisis Response

by Patrick Meier

The most recent newcomer to the “tweetsourcing” space comes to us from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Twitcident is a web-based filtering system that extracts crisis information from Twitter in real-time to support emergency response efforts. Dutch emergency services have been testing the platform over the past 10 months and results “show the system to be far more useful than simple keyword searching of a twitter feed” (NewScientist).

Here's how it works. First the dashboard, which shows current events-of-interest being monitored.

Click to see origiinal post with screen shots.

Click on Image to Enlarge

I look forward to following Twitcident's developments. I'd be particularly interested in learning more about how Dutch emergency services have been using the tool and what features they think would improve the platform's added value.

Berto Jongman: Here is the reference paper:

Twitcident: Fighting Fire with Information from Social Web Streams

See Also:

Graphic: Twitter as an Intelligence Tool

Howard Rheingold: News Filters for the Future – Technical Services or Human Networks?

Howard Rheingold: Open Source Intelligence Meets Real-Time News and Data Curation – SwiftRiver

Mini-Me: Bin Laden death-detecting analytics service signs partnership with Twitter

Patrick Meier: Crisis Mapping Syria – Automated Data Mining and Crowdsourced Human Intelligence

Patrick Meier: Mobile Technologies, Crisis Mapping, & Disaster Response

Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)

 

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William Grieder: Maybe the Fed Can Save the Day – a Huge Flip

03 Economy
William Greider

The Federal Reserve Turns Left

by William Greider

Published on Saturday, April 14, 2012 by The Nation

Washington is lost in a snarl of confusion, cowardice and wrongheaded ideological assumptions that threaten to keep the economy in a ditch for a long time. That prospect is not much discussed in the halls of Congress or the White House. It’s as though the crisis has been put on hold until after the presidential election.

As almost everyone understands, nothing substantial will be accomplished this year. President Obama is campaigning on warmed-over optimism and paper-thin policy proposals. Republicans propose to make things worse by drastically shrinking government spending, when the opposite is needed to foster a real recovery. The president, like the GOP, embraces large-scale deficit reduction. In these circumstances, it’s just as well that the two parties cannot reach agreement. After the election they may make a deal that splits the difference between bad and worse. In the worst case, they might inadvertently tip the economy back into recession.

In this sorry situation, there is really only one governing institution with the courage to dissent from the conventional wisdom—the Federal Reserve. The central bank declines to participate in the happy talk about recovery or in the righteous sermons attacking the deficit. In its muted manner, the Fed keeps explaining why the house is still on fire, why more aggressive action is needed, and is gently nudging the politicians who decide fiscal policy to step up. But its message is ignored by Congress and the president and viciously attacked by right-wing Republicans who say, Butt out.

The stakes in this elite dialogue are enormous. The outcome will be more meaningful for ordinary citizens than any other issue at play in this year’s campaign. If the Fed is right and politicians refuse to act, Americans may be condemned to a bitter slog through many years of stagnation.

Continue reading “William Grieder: Maybe the Fed Can Save the Day – a Huge Flip”

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DefDog: Nurturing Innovation in Spite of Really Rotten Rote Education + RECAP

04 Education, Cultural Intelligence
DefDog

For years I have done similar approaches when teaching….and have been told to stop because “it is not the way it is done!”  My classes were consistently better equipped to deal with the problems they faced as intelligence officers than the school house folks……they weren't afraid of an intelligence failure of the information kind, only the grey matter kind…..

Educating the Next Steve Jobs

How can schools teach students to be more innovative? Offer hands-on classes and don't penalize failure

By TONY WAGNER

Wall Street Journal, 13 April 2012

Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. To find out how to encourage these skills, I interviewed scores of innovators and their parents, teachers and employers. What I learned is that young Americans learn how to innovate most often despite their schooling—not because of it.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The article restates what has been known for decades.  That the WSJ should think this is in any way new is itself a statement on the WSJ state of mindlessness.  Schools today — the exceptions aside — are industrial era rote prisons that beat the creativity out of children by the fifth grade.  There is a need to learn history and memorize formulas — no question on that point — but learning to learn in the modern era — and learning to program the electronic tools with which we can learn and share and make sense despite the moral and intellectual constipation of Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name just three dead-end companies — this matters.

See Also:

Continue reading “DefDog: Nurturing Innovation in Spite of Really Rotten Rote Education + RECAP”

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Mini-Me: How the US Struck Back to Strangle the Arab Spring

02 Diplomacy, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Revolution vs. Counterrevolution: Whatever Happened to the Arab Spring?

by ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH

CounterPunch, Weekend Edition April 13-15, 2012

Within the first few months of 2011, the U.S. and its allies lost three loyal “friends”: Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Zine el-Abbidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Saad Hariri in Lebanon. While Mubarak and Ali were driven out of power by widespread popular uprisings, Hariri was ousted by the parliament.

Inspired by these liberating developments, pro-democracy rebellions against autocratic rulers (and their Western backers) soon spread to other countries such as Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

As these revolutionary developments tended to politically benefit the “axis of resistance” (consisting of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas) in the Middle East, the US-Israeli “axis of aggression” and their client states in the region mounted an all-out counterrevolutionary offensive.

Caught off-guard by the initial wave of the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, the US and its allies struck back with a vengeance. They employed a number of simultaneous tactics to sabotage the Arab Spring. These included

(1) instigating fake instances of the Arab Spring in countries that were/are headed by insubordinate regimes such as those ruling Iran, Syria and Libya;

(2) co-opting revolutionary movements in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen;

(3) crushing pro-democracy movements against “friendly” regimes ruling countries such as Bahrain, Jordan and Saudi Arabia “before they get out of hand,” as they did in Egypt and Tunisia;  and

(4) using the age-old divide and rule trick by playing the sectarian trump card of Sunnis vs. Shias, or Iranians vs. Arabs.

Read full article (elaboration on each of the four strategies in being listed above).

Phi Beta Iota:  Meanwhile within the USA, Ron Paul has been bought off and firmly put back in place as part of the controlled opposition, and Occupy has been very successfully squelched by encouraging their inherent tendency to kum-ba-ya themselves to their own early demise.  Now the 1% has what is left of Occupy competing for small scholarships to tread water and remain irrelevant.  It is still possible to re-ignite the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 possibilities, but each month that passes without public coalescing around this ONE THING that the all can agree on and force upon the corrupt two-party tyranny in Congress, is another stake in the heart of the Republic.

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Worth a Look: THE SMART NATION ACT – Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

Worth A Look
Amazon Page

From the Publisher

This book, while available to the public and especially to those who hope to restore informed democracy by reducing secret back room deals and lies based on secrecy, was actually published in order to distribute 1,000 copies to every Senator, every Representative, every Governor, and every Cabinet Officer, as well as 200 American thought leaders and 200 international thought leaders. We must defeat the attempt by the spies to control Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and instead have the Open Source Agency as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) under diplomatic auspices. The book provides the road-map for public intelligence in the public interest.

Towards an Informed Public August 12, 2007

By Retired Reader

This book is really a compilation of the writings of Robert D. Steele that are relevant to the Smart Nation Act. This remarkable piece of legislation was introduced by Congressman Rob Simmons (R, Ct.) in September 2006 and represents an effort to persuade congress to think seriously about the kind of real intelligence reform that Steele has been advocating for close to twenty years. Simmons, like Steele, has a background in intelligence and is a rare informed critic of the U.S. Intelligence System. Needless to say there is neither powerful lobbyist support nor national security establishment support for real intelligence reform. And especially since few voters care one way or the other about such issues, this act will probably go nowhere.

What is commonly forgotten is that intelligence in the CIA sense of the word is simply processed information focused on specific subjects in such a way as to provide unique knowledge of those subjects. Intelligence does not have to be classified. It usually is classified for one of three reasons:1) to protect the sources and methods by which it was produced; 2) to protect bureaucratic turf from rivals; and 3) to prevent the subject(s) of the intelligence from realizing that unauthorized persons are in possession of knowledge about them. Steele correctly maintains that classification hinders the development of real knowledge about a variety of subjects and is largely unnecessary.

The core of the Smart Nation Act and Steele's primary theses is that an Open Source Intelligence Agency based on the free flow of information, the widespread use of outside experts, and the input from everyone including common citizens would provide better and cheaper intelligence than that now obtained from the existing U.S. Intelligence System. This agency would not be the typical hierarchy, but would be organized into semi-autonomous cells of researchers, analysts and experts. Each of the 50 U.S. States would have a local information processing center that would replicate the national Open Source Agency. These local centers would support state level activities requiring intelligence support and provide intelligence information from such sources as first line emergency response teams. Central to this whole concept is that the intelligence accumulated by these agencies would be available to every one so that the U.S. could actually achieve the Jeffersonian dream of an informed public.

So is this so much `pie in the sky' rhetoric and hopelessly impractical? Apparently Representative Simmons doesn't think so and neither does this reviewer.

See Also:

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

2012: The Battle for the Soul of the Republic

2012 PREPRINT FOR COMMENT: The Craft of Intelligence

2012 THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

2010  INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity & Sustainability

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Event: 14-17 June Strasbourg P2P within Council of Europe

Collective Intelligence

Vinay Gupta writes:

The Council of Europe to _fund an unconference in Strasbourg_ with a dramatically P2P component. Basically, we're doing a social network analysis of the web site, and then inviting the maximum number of people who want to meet each-other – i.e. it's a fully P2P selection process, not in the simple “competitive voting” sense, but in the sense of “maximizing the number of desired meetings in a set of possible invitees” – it's *really* decentralized in basic attitude.

Vinay is also looking for potential attendees to the conference who are familiar with the p2p perspective, so as to invite them to Strasbourg

For more info

The overview

The selection process for funded travel

The agenda, including the unconference