Journal: Sharing is Contagious

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Full Story Online

“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.

Tip of the Hat to Pierre Levy at LinkedIn.

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.

Journal: Femicide, Educating Women, Saving Earth

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

CNN Story on TED Story

Tens of millions of ‘missing' girls

(CNN) — Discrimination against women and girls takes a staggering toll around the world, says author Sheryl WuDunn. It leads to as many as 100 million fewer females than males in the world.

Ending the oppression of women is the great moral challenge of the 21st Century, a cause she compares to fighting slavery in the 19th century and totalitarianism in the 20th Century.

The solutions, she says, are education and economic opportunity. Overpopulation is one of the larger contributors to poverty, WuDunn said. “When you educate a girl, she has significantly fewer kids.” Girls who go to school get married later in life and educate their children “in a more enlightened way.”

“So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts.

WATCH THE TED SHORT STORY

Phi Beta Iota: It merits comment that micro-lending was a success because its founder recognized that women, not men, would be the more reliable and productive catalyst.  It also merits comment that the best aid investment, dollar for dollar, is in the education of women.  What is missing is the “giant leap forward” that would come from distributing free telephones and creating multi-lingual call centers that educate women–and men–one cell call at a time, while serving as catalysts for harnessing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth, creating smart neighborhoods to smart nations to a smart planet.

Journal: TIME (Joe Klein) on Collective Intelligence

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Tom Atlee Recommends
Illustration by Stephen Kroninger for TIME

How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?

Joe Klein

Thursday, 2 September 2010

TIME Magazine

But what if there were a machine, a magical contraption that could take the process of making tough decisions in a democracy, shake it up, dramatize it and make it both credible and conclusive? As it happens, the ancient Athenians had one. It was called the kleroterion, and it worked something like a bingo-ball selector. Each citizen — free males only, of course — had an identity token; several hundred were picked randomly every day and delegated to make major decisions for the polis.

Actually, the Chinese coastal district of Zeguo (pop. 120,000) has its very own kleroterion, which makes all its budget decisions. The technology has been updated: the kleroterion is a team led by Stanford professor James Fishkin. Each year, 175 people are scientifically selected to reflect the general population.

Tom Atlee Comments:

I'm not yet up to diving in re this fascinating TIME article on participatory budgeting based on Deliberative Polling methodology  but some of you might want to.  Interesting that they don't cover Participatory Budgeting, which is becoming widespread in South America, or the experiments using Citizens Juries for budgeting in Canada… It is, of course, amazing that less-wise forms of deliberative democracy — like Fishkin's Deliberative Polls and AmericaSpeaks' 21st Century Town Meetings — are preferred by power-holders over more potent forms like Citizens Juries, Citizens Assemblies, Consensus Conferences, etc., to say nothing of Wisdom Councils (which aren't strictly deliberative).  On second thought, it is not surprising.. 🙂  But Fishkin and Lukensmeyer have the political savvy to clear the way for more advanced forms of wise democracy to emerge into public awareness and use.  It's up to us to use that space.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Journal: CIA Loves Blackwater; Arizona Ungovernable in South; Coast Guard Learns and Morphs from Katrina; Israeli Black Propaganda?

Cultural Intelligence

Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Blackwater Won Contracts Through A Web Of Companies. CIA mafia, illegal arms, 31 companies to deceive US Government, owner moves family to Abu Dhabi.

Signs in Arizona warn of smuggler dangers. Feds post 15, south Arizona now “ungovernable zone.”

For Coast Guard, Katrina's lessons are carried on. Overview in human interest context of how Katrina changed Coast Guard, relevant to BP Gulf disaster.

Israeli Black Propaganda?

Child Stealing Bread in Iran Gets Arm Crushed.

Phi Beta Iota: photo part of a collage, not properly sourced and possibly Israeli black propaganda. Normally the hand is cut off, no padding is needed, and we're not sure a child would receive this kind of punishment under these circumstances. Provided as indicator of what is being circulated across US military emails.  There is probably a half-pipe cradling the arm and hidden by the towel.  Cars do not mangle or even completely crush.  The absence of the after photo showing real damage is significant to us.

Journal: Australian Muslim cleric calls for beheading of Dutch politician

Cultural Intelligence

Full Story Online

Muslim cleric calls for beheading of Dutch politician

(Reuters) – A well-known Australian Muslim cleric has called for the beheading of Dutch anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders, a newspaper said on Friday.

Wilders told Reuters it was “really terrible news” and that he was taking it seriously.

“I will ask for clarification from the Dutch minister of interior/justice why the secret service and anti-terrorism unit NCTb have not informed me before and what the consequences will be for me,” he said in an email.

. . . . . . .

Wilders is currently on trial in the Netherlands for inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims.

Tip of the Hat to G. B. at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: The Netherlands is close to the Nordics in its reasoned governance, but even this great country can make mistakes.  As Howard Bloom discusses so well in Global Brain–The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, what children learn by the age of five to seven is life-defining.  If the government fails to educate the multi-cultural respect it aspires to, then it has to respect the concerns of its citizens who fear unassimilated resident as well as transient Muslims. This is one reason why Phi Beta Iota believes that education, intelligence, and research should be under a single Secretary-General who is co-equal to two others, one for Commonwealth and one for External Relations and Security.

See Also:

Review: While Europe Slept–How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (Hardcover)

Journal: Muslim Tide Arousing US Heartland Anger But Loss of Moral Legitimacy Via Israel and Loss of National Intelligence Shackles America

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Religion

Journal: General Petraeus–Human Terrain Team NOT

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence
"Is that HTT crawling across the rug over there?"

Did Gen. David Petraeus just call the Human Terrain System worthless? With a few choice sentences to the Wall Street Journal, the top commander in Afghanistan highlighted the disconnect between what the Army’s social science program is supposed to be doing — and what’s actually happening in the field.

We have never had the granular understanding of local circumstances in Afghanistan that we achieved over time in Iraq,” Petraeus told the Journal. “One of the key elements in our ability to be agile in our activities in Iraq during the surge was a pretty good understanding who the power brokers were in local areas, how the systems were supposed to work, how they really worked.”

Phi Beta Iota: The General fails to recollect that under the Cheney-Bremer regime, all were told to ignore the imams and tribal leaders.  It was only much later, after five years of failure, more or less, than some bright general decided to get back to basics.  As Winston Churchill liked to say, “The Americans always do the right thing, they just try everything else first.”  HTT has been a known failure since its inception.  For one view of how it should fit in with the other fourteen slices of Human Intelligence (HUMINT), see the new monograph from the Strategic Studies Institute,  Human Intelligence: All Humans, All Minds, All the Time (June 2010).    See also John Stanton on HTT Failures.

Journal: Mathematicians Get it Wrong…Again

04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Health, 11 Society, Academia, Cultural Intelligence, Officers Call
Full Article Online

Monday, August 30, 2010

Mathematicians Create Objective Quality of Life Index

The US comes second in a new quality of life index designed to be mathematically objective

Phi Beta Iota: The explanation of this is wrong.  There is nothing “objective” about it, and nothing “subjective” about the other indexes.  What is useful here is “elastic mapping”.  A linear model makes things seem clear, but it introduces distortions. A non-linear modeling technique, while confusing in one sense because you don't know exactly how it works, it still sensible if you use an image, as they do here, of relaxing springs among all the nodes.  And the result is less distortion, less to criticize, and more opportunity to consider the meaning, as they do here.  GDP gets you something, but health gets you something else, and it would be nice to have a mathematical rule that doesn't make it completely arbitrary how you balance the two, or the many contrastive factors that you choose.

See Also:
Review: The Hidden Wealth of Nations
Review: The Politics of Happiness–What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being
Review: IDENTITY ECONOMICS–How our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being
Review: Building Social Business–The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs
Review: Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth