Category: Collaboration Zones

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Patrick Meier: Become a (Social Media) Data Donor and Save a Life

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Geospatial
Patrick Meier

Become a (Social Media) Data Donor and Save a Life

I was recently in New York where I met up with my colleague Fernando Diaz from Microsoft Research. We were discussing the uses of social media in humanitarian crises and the various constraints of social media platforms like Twitter vis-a-vis their Terms of Service. And then this occurred to me: we have organ donation initiatives and organ donor cards that many of us carry around in our wallets. So why not become a “Data Donor” as well in the event of an emergency? After all, it has long been recognized that access to information during a crisis is as important as access to food, water, shelter and medical aid.

Read full post.

Phi Beta Iota:  This has very provocative and inspiring implications for redefining (or restoring) what it means to be human — the art of sharing information to help the community, the collective, survive and prosper.  We are honoring Dr. Meiers original idea by including Data Donor as a permanent search term for the Open Source Everything Highlights.

See Also:

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Chuck Spinney: Syria Lessons Learned and Current SitRep

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney

Attached is a very thoughtful report on what is happening to Syria, written by a long-time observer of the Middle East.

Chuck Spinney
La Spezia, Italia

The Destruction of Syria

by Patrick Seale

Agence Global, 24 Jul 200012

Once one of the most solid states in the Middle East and a key pivot of the regional power structure, Syria is now facing wholesale destruction. The consequences of the unfolding drama are likely to be disastrous for Syria’s territorial integrity, for the well-being of its population, for regional peace, and for the interests of external powers deeply involved in the crisis.

EXTRACT:

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Don Beck: Three Book Rave and Spiral Dynamics in September

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence
Don Beck

Dear Friends,

Here’s an old question I often put to my students in training: When you find yourself enveloped in twilight, can you be sure it’s just before the dark of night … or, instead, before a bright new day will dawn? Think about that for a while.

Indeed, no one can doubt that at this point the state of the world is of grave concern.
But have you noticed?  As our complex global challenges increase by the day, also more and more extraordinary human beings are pointing to a different direction for humankind. Unlike those succumbing to despondency and fear, they bear bright tidings – not of the imminent collapse of all we hold dear but of wise new ways to a whole other manner of doing and being. These intrepid ones are beacons of clarity and light for our world. They sound the clarion call for new systems of seeing, solving, and evolving.

Right now, the best-selling books by three such excellent humans compel our attention. We have written to you about them before, but the sheer importance of their recent publications bears repeating.

Foremost thought-leaders all, these authors are…

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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.

Click on Image to Enlarge

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Mini-Me: NCAA fines Penn State $60M, vacates wins from 1998-2011

Academia, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Culture, Ethics, Idiocy
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

NCAA fines Penn State $60M, vacates wins from 1998-2011

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — The NCAA crippled Penn State football for years to come and practically tore Joe Paterno's name out of the record books Monday, erasing 14 years of victories and imposing an unprecedented $60 million fine and other punishment over the child sexual abuse scandal.

“Football will never again be placed ahead of educating, nurturing and protecting young people,” NCAA President Mark Emmert declared in announcing the penalties.

The governing body of college sports shredded what was left of the Hall of Fame coach's legacy – the sanctions cost Paterno 111 wins and his standing as the most successful coach in the history of big-time college football – while dealing a severe blow to the university's gold-plated gridiron program.

The NCAA ordered Penn State to sit out the postseason for four years, slashed the number of scholarships it can award and placed football on probation, all of which will make it difficult for the Nittany Lions to compete at the sport's highest level.

Raising the specter of an exodus of athletes, the NCAA said current or incoming football players at Penn State are free to immediately transfer and compete at another school.

For a university that always claimed to hold itself to a higher standard – for decades, Paterno preached “success with honor” – Monday's announcement completed a stunning fall from grace.

Read full article with video and photos.

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Smart Planet: In the Philippines, turning plastic waste into fuel

05 Energy, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Knowledge

In the Philippines, turning plastic waste into fuel

Plastic waste is a problem all over the world. And it is especially troubling in the Philippines where plastic waste piles up in Manila’s Payal landfill, unable to decompose. But one inventor thinks he might have found the answer to this chronic problem.

Jayme Navarro, founder of Poly-Green Technology and Resources is converting plastic waste into fuel through a process known as Pyrolysis.

ECO-Tech explains how it works:

“Pyrolysis is a fairly simple process, it starts by drying plastics to be processed. They are then shredded into smaller pieces, and heated in a thermal chamber. The melted plastic is continually heated until it boils and produce vapors. The vapor is passed into cooling pipes and distilled into a liquid, which is chemically identical to regular fuel.”

And one of the great benefits of converting plastic to fuel is that the fuel burns cleaner because of a low sulfur content. Navarro estimates that the fuel will be 10-20 percent cheaper because of the low production costs since the raw material is available in such large quantities.

The method has already been approved for industrial use and it is being tested for use in vehicles.

Reuters reporter Elly Park says: “While plastic fuel technology isn’t anything new, Navarro believes that an industrial scale version of his technology can not only help drivers on the road, but help the country dig itself out of its trash problem.”

Inventor turns plastic trash into liquid gold  [Reuters]

Filipino Inventor Turns Plastic Trash Into Liquid Gold  [ECO-Tech]

Photo via flickr/JMacPherson

See Also:

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

Video: Japanese Machine Making Fuel from Plastic, “Trash into Treasure”

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Tom Atlee: Empowering Public Wisdom – A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics

Cultural Intelligence, Worth A Look
Tom Atlee

Dear friends,

A year ago Doug Reil, the associate publisher of North Atlantic Books, explored with me the possibility of writing a manifesto to clarify my vision of a wise democracy.  The culmination of that conversation is my new book EMPOWERING PUBLIC WISDOM: A PRACTICAL VISION OF CITIZEN-LED POLITICS to be released August 7 as part of NAB's Evolver Series.

My 2003 book THE TAO OF DEMOCRACY outlined the theory of holistic politics and listed numerous resources to realize it.  EMPOWERING PUBLIC WISDOM takes the next step, painting a fairly detailed – but of course not final – vision of how we could make it happen.  It highlights our need for real wisdom to successfully address our 21st century challenges and explores how we can co-create that wisdom in ways that will transform our sense of what democracy is all about.

I invite you to read a bit more about it and to order it in advance for only $14.95 from online or local bookstores.  Your order will encourage more bookstores to stock it, and that will help more people see it and buy it, which in turn will help this vision of a wise democracy come to life in the rich compost of our currently wasting-away democracy.  Along those lines, if you'd like to alert your social networks to this, please do.

Amazon Page

To give you a better sense of EMPOWERING PUBLIC WISDOM, I've enclosed a description of the book and its table of contents as well as several thoughtful endorsements.  At the book's new website – http://empoweringpublicwisdom.us (still under development) – you can also read my brief “Manifesto: A call to establish a legitimate, wise, powerful, collective voice of the people” that declares the intent of the book right upfront.  You can also buy the book there.

Finally, the transformational network Reality Sandwich is collaborating with NAB to serialize EMPOWERING PUBLIC WISDOM online – approximately one chapter every 3 weeks.  Chapter 1 “Democracy is about power- and the people” is already posted at http://bit.ly/EPW-Ch-1 .

Please join me in spreading the word about this new resource for a co-intelligence society.  The state of democracy everywhere suggests it is time for a change.

Coheartedly,
Tom

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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