John Robb: 3D Printing of Weapons – Public Power by Printer

10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Hacking, Hardware, Liberation Technology
John Robb

Printing Weapons at Home for Fun and Mayhem

It's now possible to print functional weapons at home.  This is going to progress rapidly now.

Think: global file sharing of designs for servicable weapons, from pistols on up to ?, that can be printed at home.  What you can print — from the materials to the size/quality of the object to the completeness (snap together construction) — is already moving forward quickly.  The weapons effort will just be along for the ride.

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“HaveBlue” has tested the first “printed” firearm and it works.  Here's his site, but it's VERY slow.   It didn't blow up in his face.

Granted, he used an older professional grade Stratys 3D printer to do it.   Printeres are much better now and handle many new materials.

Haveblue has been testing the “market” for distributing CAD/CAM weapons designs.  His post of an earlier design to Thingverse (a site for 3D printing design patterns) led to a change in their policy (although it hasn't been enforced).

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Haveblue's work is based on the Solidworks files available for download from the CNCguns site.  Here's his earlier project:

Phi Beta Iota:  Violence should be a last resort — publics today are far from fully exploiting the use of public intelligence in the  public interest.  However, it bears mention that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King were quite clear:  non-violence is preferable to violence, but violence is preferable to continued oppression.  Most governments, including the European governments still favoring banks over people and refusing to honor the Iceland model, no longer represent their publics and have lost all legitimacy in the eyes of many.  We pray they will awaken to the reality that those governments that do not empower, protect, and respect the public, will ultimately be abolished.  In the meantime, they are merely ignored.

Patrick Meier: Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, Knowledge
Patrick Meier

Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge

I have been writing and blogging about “information forensics” for a while now and thus relished Nieman Report’s must-read study on “Truth in the Age of Social Media.” My applied research has specifically been on the use of social media to support humanitarian crisis response (see the multiple links at the end of this blog post). More specifically, my focus has been on crowdsourcing and automating ways to quantify veracity in the social media space. One of the Research & Development projects I am spearheading at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) specifically focuses on this hybrid approach. I plan to blog about this research in the near future but for now wanted to share some of the gems in this superb 72-page Nieman Report.

In the opening piece of the report, Craig Silverman writes that “never before in the history of journalism—or society—have more people and organizations been engaged in fact checking and verification. Never has it been so easy to expose an error, check a fact, crowdsource and bring technology to bear in service of verification.” While social media is new, traditional journalistic skills and values are still highly relevant to verification challenges in the social media space. In fact, some argue that “the business of verifying and debunking content from the public relies far more on journalistic hunches than snazzy technology.”

I disagree. This is not an either/or challenge. Social computing can help every-one, not just journalists, develop and test hunches. Indeed, it is imperative that these tools be in the reach of the general public since a “public with the ability to spot a hoax website, verify a tweet, detect a faked photo, and evaluate sources of information is a more informed public. A public more resistant to untruths and so-called rumor bombs.” This public resistance to untruths can itself be moni-tored and modeled to quantify veracity, as this study shows.

Full post less two graphics below the line.  Original post.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge”

Michel Bauwens: Collective Presencing: A New Human Capacity

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, P2P / Panarchy
Michel Bauwens

Collective Presencing: A New Human Capacity

This is the first in a series of articles introducing the phenomenon and practice of Collective Presencing, a new capacity evolving in humanity at this time. Great thinkers have foreseen its coming—we recognise it in Aurobindo’s descent of the supramental and Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. But what exactly do those terms mean? Where these gifted individuals intuited and envisioned the birth of this new collective capacity at the dawn of the last century, we are now starting to be able to describe it from experience.

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While many might recognise the phenomenon from transpersonal group work and other such practices, so far as we are aware, this is the first attempt to articulate it as a path and a set of capacities that can be intentionally developed…

this is one of the best and finest descriptions I have read in a long time. Thanks Helen…AC

Via Anne Caspari

Patrick Meier: Enhanced Messaging for the Emergency Response Sector (EMERSE)

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Geospatial, Mobile, P2P / Panarchy
Patrick Meier

Enhanced Messaging for the Emergency Response Sector (EMERSE)

My colleague Andrea Tapia and her team at PennState University have developed an interesting iPhone application designed to support humanitarian response. This application is part of their EMERSE project: Enhanced Messaging for the Emergency Response Sector. The other components of EMERSE include a Twitter crawler, automatic classification and machine learning.

. . . . . . . .

The iPhone application developed by PennState is designed to help humanitarian professionals collect information during a crisis. “In case of no service or Internet access, the application rolls over to local storage until access is available. However, the GPS still works via satellite and is able to geo-locate data being recorded.” The Twitter crawler component captures tweets referring to specific keywords “within a seven-day period as well as tweets that have been posted by specific users. Each API call returns at most 1000 tweets and auxiliary metadata […].” The machine translation component uses Google Language API.

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Read full post.

Anthony Judge: Implication of Indwelling Intelligence in Global Confidence-building

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
Anthony Judge

Implication of Indwelling Intelligence in Global Confidence-building

Sustaining the construction and dynamic of psychosocial reality through questioning

EXTRACT:

In a period in which security concerns have given a special sense to exclusive acquisition of “intelligence” on a global scale, there is a case for exploring the implications of other understandings of intelligence in a global knowledge-based society. What of distributed intelligence, collective intelligence, self-reflective intelligence and the nature of indwelling intelligence — as a complement to corresponding forms of ignorance?

Introduction
Overview
Experiential operational descriptors
Engagement with indwelling intelligence through nature
Engagement with indwelling intelligence through buildings and artefacts
Indwelling intelligence of the human body
Indwelling intelligence in personal life experience
Indwelling intelligence through encounter with an “other”
Indwelling intelligence within collectives and communities
Indwelling intelligence within systems of belief
Branding barrier, semiotic barrier and status barrier
“Universal” intelligence from an “unconditioned” perspective?
Indwelling intelligence from an extraterrestrial perspective
Intraterrestrials? Outdwelling intelligence? Cyclic intelligence? Mirror awareness?
Periodic possibility: an alternative presentation
Intelligence and Ignorance: a necessary complementarity?
Dynamic of indwelling intelligence: questioning learning
Engendering global confidence through sustaining an indwelling question
References

Read full posting with many links and some illustrations.

Anthony Judge: 30 Disabling Global Trends (Article)

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
Anthony Judge

Convergence of 30 Disabling Global Trends

Mapping the social climate change engendering a perfect storm

Introduction
Checklist of 30 disabling trends
Spiraling trends: cyclones in a climate of change?
Interweaving “cyclones” and “anti-cyclones” in a global system
Emergent polyhedral configuration of alternating systemic functions
Insights from the Conference of the Birds?
Conclusion
References

EXTRACT:

Checklist of 30 disabling trends

Continue reading “Anthony Judge: 30 Disabling Global Trends (Article)”

Michel Bauwens: What is specific about the positioning of the P2P Foundation?

Access, Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Knowledge
Michel Bauwens

What is specific about the positioning of the P2P Foundation?

“Like Oekonux, the P2P Foundation is a collective marked by diversity, but it also has dominant personalities and themes, with a substantial influence of the author of this article, who is also the initiator and founder of the initiative. So, when I make claims here below, and above, on the ‘P2P Foundation’s approach, they are my own approach, not necessarily the approach of every participant in our community and knowledge commons.

Learn more.