To paraphrase Yogi Berra it's déjà vu all over again for KBR.
In my Aug. 31 post I wrote about a significant pro-veteran ruling in the Oregon KBR Qarmat Ali litigation. This is the case where Oregon National Guard troops allege KBR's liability for negligence and for fraud arising out of plaintiffs' exposure to sodium dichromate and resultanthexavalent chromium poisoning while assigned to duty at the Qarmat Ali water plant in 2003.
Paul Papak, the federal district judge rejected the motion by KBR and co-defendants to dismiss the suit for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction and rejected it.
On the move to open source (or some other non-open source license like CC) and which license will be used:
“Reason for making Geoportal open source? Like anyone, Esri responds to trends in the IT industry, we listen to requests from our users to take a more collaborative approach to development, and source code was already part of the Geoportal license: It just made sense to do this now. The choice for creative commons has not been finalized, but is a good model for the approach we’re looking for. We are still reviewing the most optimal license model.”
Phi Beta Iota: If Oracle were to leverage Sun Office and immediately offer the eighteen analytic functionalities defined in Diane Webb's CATALYST, all as open source, that would be a game-changer. In the meantime, hats off to ESRI for finally getting the picture on F/OSS.
Renewed instability in global food markets requires urgent response, UN expert said
An independent United Nations human rights expert today called on governments and the international community to promptly tackle the renewed instability of global food markets, noting the related social unrest that has hit some countries in recent weeks.
EXTRACT 1: An endless supply of data, probably unparalleled in its breadth and depth, flows from every continent to a cluster of buildings on the edge of the English Garden in Munich. An encyclopedia of life, its dangers, its injustices, its coincidences, is being assembled there. There is probably no other place on Earth where the risks of the modern world are being studied more intensively and comprehensively than at the headquarters of Munich Re, the world's risk center.
EXTRACT 2: Today Munich Re wins accolades for its restraint, while its shareholders are eagerly awaiting the results of a new project. The goal of the project under development in Oechslin's department, more comprehensive than any other project before it, is to redefine the limits of knowledge by developing a global risk model.
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Phi Beta Iota: This is a superb article that ably documents how much can be known–and shared–that most governments and international organizations are simply not conscious of, or if conscious, exploiting microscopic bits of the data for nefarious purposes. These are the kind of people that could and should be at the heart of creating a World Brain and Global Game.
“Sharing is Contagious” charts how we are increasingly growing up sharing files, photos, knowledge, and daily thoughts—and how these collaborative behaviors are moving into other areas of our lives. From bike-sharing to co-working to peer-to-peer rental, a dotted line is forming between “what’s mine,” “what’s yours,” and “what’s ours.” Technology and peer communities are enabling old market behaviors including bartering, swapping, trading, renting, lending, and sharing to be reinvented in ways and on a scale never possible before.
Phi Beta Iota: The authors of the book are on a marketing buzz curve–we are actually entering the age of collection production of just enough just in time everything, and “consumption” of every sort is passe. Less than a minute ago. Our Collective Intelligence will create infinite wealth in part by exposing and eradicating all fraud, waste, and abuse.
BI implementations fail because they are sold to the IT departments and not to the business users. The use case and ROI needs to be built with the business users. If that is not done, it results in:
high probability of self-ware
lack of ROI for the business user
a pure IT project not driven by the needs of the business
Phi Beta Iota: For decades we have been railing against the substitution of technology for thinking; the absence of processing power and analytic desk-top tool-kits, and so on. We have also pointed out that “BI” is nothing more than data mining, that competitive intelligence ignores context, and that only commercial intelligence with a 360 view as well as historical and future forecast aspects will do. Peter Drucker said in Forbes ASAP on 28 August 1998 that we have spent the past 50 years focused on the T in IT, and need to spend the next 50 focused on the I. That is what this web site and the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 seeking donors, are focused upon. The World Brain and Global Game, connecting all minds to all information in all languages all the time, is achievable. Paul Strassmann was the first to point out in a very credible documented way that the ROI for most IT investments in the Fortune 500 is negative to neutral. IT is not pulling its weight because IT has no strategy and no intellectual frame of reference, e.g. connecting dots to dots, dots to people, and people to people so as to achieve specified outcomes.
Phi Beta Iota: All well and good, but nothing here about whether the government has a holistic strategy, adequate decision support, Whole of Government planning and programming, and so on. This is a good start that could be made vastly better by embracing the larger contruct of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic.