Tom Atlee: Dialogue and Deliberation Resource Center

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence
Tom Atlee

The Greatest Dialogue and Deliberation Resource Center

Dear friends,

Many of you already know about the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD).  But I'll bet most of you have not checked out NCDD's incredible (as in unbelievably gigantic and useful) online Resource Center.  It is my own first stop when I'm looking for a process or resource having anything to do with powerful conversations.  People often ask me for stories about community conversations, and I send them to the NCDD Resource Center.  There are materials there for beginners and experts, practitioners and activists, journalists and artists, mediators, anarchists, business consultants… you name it!  It is as democratic and useful as a library or a sidewalk – everybody is welcome.  It is totally free and always expanding.  Anyone interested in any aspect of making a difference with conversations can get familiar with it – and have fun exploring.  I think it is one of the most amazing “secrets” of the dialogue and deliberation movement.

I'll stop raving about it now to give you a few minutes to check it out.  Below is a writeup to get you started.  Have fun!

Coheartedly,
Tom

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NCDD's Resource Center –
http://ncdd.org/rc

The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) has been cataloguing resources about and for dialogue and deliberation since 2002.  At http://ncdd.org/rc, you can access more than 2,600 discussion guides, assessment tools, case studies, public engagement programs and organizations, articles, books, videos, and more.

Dialogue and deliberation are innovative processes that bring people together across divides to discuss, decide, and collaborate on today's toughest issues.  NCDD's Resource Center was designed to connect you with the information, guidance, theory, and examples you need to engage people effectively.

You can use the search field, categories and tags, or additional sidebar navigation options to hone in. We especially recommend you use the “I’m Looking For…” sidebar box that lets you cross-search categories and tags. Use the site map at http://ncdd.org/rc/contents to see a full list of all the categories and tags, or just look over the most recently added resources at http://ncdd.org/rc/resources.  Do you know of a great resource on dialogue, deliberation, or public engagement that should be added to NCDD's Resource Center?  Use the form at http://ncdd.org/rc/add to submit your favorites!
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Patrick Meier: State of the Art in Digital Disease Detection & Mapping

Advanced Cyber/IO, Earth Intelligence, Knowledge
Patrick Meier

State of the Art in Digital Disease Detection

Larry Brilliant's TED Talk back in 2006 played an important role in catalyzing my own personal interest in humanitarian technology. Larry spoke about the use of natural language processing and computational linguistics for the early detection and early response to epidemics. So it was with tremendous honor and deep gratitude that I delivered the first keynote presentation at Harvard University's Digital Disease Detection (DDD) conference earlier this year.

Larry Brilliant

The field of digital disease detection has remained way ahead of the curve since 2006 in terms of leveraging natural language processing, computational linguistics and now crowdsourcing for the purposes of early detection of critical events. I thus highly, highly recommend watching the videos of the DDD Ignite Talks and panel presentations, which are all available here. Topics include “Participatory Surveillance,” “Monitoring Rumors,” “Twitter and Disease Detection,” “Search Query Surveillance,” “Open Source Surveillance,” “Mobile Disease Detection,” etc. The presentation on BioCaster is also well worth watching. I blogged about BioCaster here over three years ago and the platform is as impressive as ever.

These public health experts are really operating at the cutting-edge and their insights are proving important to the broader humanitarian technology community. To be sure, the potential added value of cross-fertilization between fields is tremendous. Just take this example of a public health data mining platform (HealthMap) being used by Syrian activists to detect evidence of killings and human rights violations.

Mini-Me: AE911Truth LA Press Conference w/ Ed Asner at Premiere of 9/11: Experts Speak Out; 5-22-12

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

AE911Truth LA Press Conference w/ Ed Asner at Premiere of 9/11: Experts Speak Out; 5-22-12

This is the major press conference that AE911Truth held at the occasion of the World Premiere of their powerful myth-shattering documentary “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out” on May 22, 2012 in Beverly Hills, CA. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth founder, Richard Gage, AIA and AE911Truth supporter and actor, Ed Asner, teamed up to lay into the media in an effort to hold them accountable for their 10-year silence on the subject of the abundant scientific evidence and eyewitness testimony that pulls the rug from under the official story of the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11. This new documentary, introduced by Gage, following the press conference hosts 43 technical and building professionals who cite the evidence and call for a new investigation. It also includes 8 psychology professionals who are well versed in the difficult issues that viewers of this film may face when confronting the evidence.

 Watch Video Below.

Phi Beta Iota:  We are deeply sympathetic about the fact that most Americans, including well-educated Americans and especially well-educated Americans employed by the federal government, simply cannot comprehend this stuff.  They live in a dream world, where America can do no wrong, government can be trusted, Dick Cheney deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and Barack Obama earned the one he got for his first ten days in office, etcetera etcetera.  If the measure of a nation is the combination of public intelligence and public integrity, the USA is deeply mired in a cesspool of its own making.

Patrick Meier: Sell the WHY Not the WHAT with Comment on WHY of OSINT and M4IS2

Cultural Intelligence
Patrick Meier

Does Your Brand Have a Plot?

I overheard this intriguing question whilst at SXSW 2012 earlier this year. The question came to mind again recently while watching Simon Sinek's excellent TEDx talk on “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” All too often, most companies seek to inspire customers (to purchase their product or service) by explaining “What they do” rather than “Why they do” what they do. This approach, as it turns out, is exactly the wrong way to catalyze inspiration. Sinek demonstrates how starting with why makes all the difference when seeking to inspire others.

Take Apple as an example:

“If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: we make great computers; they are beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. Want to buy one? … And that's how most of us communicate, that's how most marketing is done, that's how most sales is done […]. We say what we do, we say how we're different or how we're better, and we expect some sort of behavior, a purchase or vote […]. But it's uninspiring. Here's how Apple actually communicates. Everything we do, we believe in changing the status quo, we believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user-friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?”

Sinek's main take away message from this example (and indeed his entire talk) is that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. This explains the importance of starting with why:  your purpose, your cause, your belief. ”

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Owl: China Swamps US Across the Board – Made in China Computer Chips Have Back Doors, 45 Other “Ways & Means” Sucking Blood from US

02 China, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Military
Who? Who?

Two Ways the Chinese May Take Over the World and the US:

1) Chinese Stuxnet for the Rest of the World

If what this analyst says is true, it paints a truly astonishing in implication and very, very ugly picture of the national security situation in store for most governments – especially in the US:

Hardware Assurance and its importance to National Security

Current issues. UK officials are fearful that China has the capability to shut down businesses, military and critical infrastructure through cyber attacks and spy equipment embedded in computer and telecommunications equipment. The Stuxnet worm is the most famous and best case example of a cyber attack on a network which wreaked devastation having easily compromised conventional software defensive systems. There have been many cases of computer hardware having backdoors, Trojans or other programs to allow an attacker to gain access or transmit confidential data to a third party. Considerable focus and expense has been invested in software computer networks and system defences to detect and eradicate such threats. However, similar technology with antivirus or anti Trojan capability for hardware (silicon chips) is not available. The computer or network hardware underpins and runs all the software defence systems. If the hardware has a vulnerability then all the energy in defending at the software level is redundant. An effort must be made to defend and detect at the hardware level for a more comprehensive strategy.

Our findings. Claims were made by the intelligence agencies around the world, from MI5, NSA and IARPA, that silicon chips could be infected. We developed breakthrough silicon chip scanning technology to investigate these claims.

We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip.

We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure.

Read full article.

2) 45 Signs That China Is Colonizing America

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Howard Rheingold: Meta-Cognition

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics
Howard Rheingold

Metacognition — awareness of one's attention and thinking process — is increasingly a 21st century necessity. — Howard

Metacognition — I Know (or Don't Know) that I Know

At New York University, Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Steve Fleming is exploring the neural basis of metacognition: how we think about thinking, and how we assess the accuracy of our decisions, judgements and other aspects of our mental performance.

Metacognition is an important-sounding word for a very everyday process. We ‘metacognise' whenever we reflect upon our thinking process and knowledge.

It's something we do on a moment-to-moment basis, according to Dr Steve Fleming at New York University. “We reflect on our thoughts, feelings, judgements and decisions, assessing their accuracy and validity all day long,” he says.

This kind of introspection is crucial for making good decisions. Do I really want that bar of chocolate? Do I want to go out tonight? Will I enjoy myself? Am I aiming at the right target? Is my aim accurate? Will I hit it? How sure am I that I'm right? Is that really the correct answer?

If we don't ask ourselves these questions as a kind of faint, ongoing, almost intuitive commentary in the back of our minds, we're not going to progress very smoothly through life.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The role of ethics and philosophy in channeling and integrating knowledge is not sufficiently appreciated at this time.  Apart from being ignorant in the whole, we also lack integrity in the whole.

Koko: Canadian Tar Sands Up Close and Personal

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government
Koko

Koko sad.

The Canadian Oil Sand Mines Refused Us Access, So We Rented This Plane To See What They Were Up To

Robert Johnson

Business Insider, 18 May 2012

When reaching out to Alberta oil sands companies before a trip to Canada last month, I thought all of them mined oil the same way — they don't.The open mining most people think of when they picture the oil sands is just one way of extracting crude from the ground, but it is without a doubt the most dramatic. And we had to see it.

Check out the pictures >

After being refused a mine tour and any type of access to a mining site or equipment, Business Insider rented a plane that I used to see everything I could of the mines on my own.

Restricted to flying no lower than 1,000 feet above the ground, I spent nearly two hours leaning out the window of a small Cessna 172 with a long lens, snapping pictures and trying to keep warm.

The oil sands hold up to two trillion barrels of oil spread over more than 54,000 square miles, making it the second largest oil deposit in the world after Saudi Arabia.

The amount of energy spent recovering that oil and the pollution created in refining it is immense and the impact on the environment profound.

Check out the pictures >

noble gold