Category: Collaboration Zones

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Journal: Mercury Makes You Gay…

11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Birds Are Becoming Gay From Mercury Pollution, According To New Study On White Ibis Breeding

A new study on white ibis breeding has discovered that mercury pollution is resulting in males of the species mating with each other.

Dr. Peter Frederick of the University of Florida embarked on the five-year research to determine what was significantly impacting the reproduction of the birds, but even he was stunned by the findings. “We knew mercury could depress their testosterone levels but we didn't expect this,” Frederick told the Telegraph.

According to Nature.com, coal-fired plants and gold mining are the main sources of global mercury pollution, though the burning of medical and municipal waste is likely the prime culprit in Florida, ingested by the wetlands birds through their food sources.

Phi Beta Iota: We did a double-take, and then checked to make sure this was not in the Comedy section.  This helps emphasize what many books have been reviewing, which is the unanticipated and now unaddressed impact on humanity of the many toxins and pollutants that corporations are allowed to not just externalize, but include within their products or as a side effect of their services.  “True costs” is the meme, and Transparency is the method.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disease

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Environmental Degradation (Other than Emissions)

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Poisons, Toxicity, Trash, & True Cost

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Reference: Transparency Killer App Plus “Open Everything” RECAP (Back to 01/2007)

Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Key Players, Mobile, Officers Call, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)

Gregory UnruhGregory Unruh

Director of the Lincoln Center for Ethics in Global Management at Thunderbird

Posted: December 3, 2010 03:21 PM

Transparency: The Internet's Killer CSR App

EXTRACT: Today “Wikileaks” makes the McLibel case look like child's play. Corporate executives should watch closely as diplomats cringe under the sudden and violent spotlight. The same scrutiny is coming to the corporate world. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has already announced the private sector is his next target. It may be that governments find a way to silence Assange (Wikileaks.org is already undergoing shadowy cyber attacks to shut it down) but it wont stop the wave of involuntary transparency that the Internet provides. Transparency is the Internet's killer CSR app. You can either get out in front of it or fall prey to it.

Read entire post….

Phi Beta Iota: The post is an elegant, concise articulation such as has not appeared elsewhere to our knowledge.  The lines are drawn, all that is lacking is the precipitating factor to launch the revolution.  “Profit Recovery” is going to join “True Cost” as the new meme, but instead of secretive beltway bandits maurading across the health industry–to take one example–it will be the public willfully exposing that which must be restored to the Commonwealth.

See Also: (46 Items):
Continue reading “Reference: Transparency Killer App Plus “Open Everything” RECAP (Back to 01/2007)”

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Journal: Groupon’s Missed Opportunity

11 Society, About the Idea, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, IO Mapping, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process

Groupon's Missed Opportunity

The tech industry has a total crush on Groupon, that darling of the start-up scene that emails you huge discounts on everything from Gap jeans to gym memberships. Now that Google is about to acquire the Chicago-based start-up for billions of dollars, it’s like the tech blogs are all competing to see who can gush the most about how great Groupon is and how smart Google is for wanting to acquire them. It’s really not that big of a deal – how many times have we seen this kind of Cinderella story before?

Though I don’t find the acquisition all that interesting, I’m fascinated by the concept of Groupon, mainly for the incredible opportunity they missed. On the surface, Groupon seems to be about killer deals. They negotiate huge discounts with national and local businesses in exchange for the promise of thousands of new customers – pay $25 and get $50 worth of Thai food, for example, or pay $60 for a normally $250 dental exam. It’s a classic loss-leader tactic – gain new customers at a loss in hopes that they return and generate more business later.

When you take a closer look at Groupon’s phenomenal success, though, there’s a lot more going on than just bargains. Groupon was one of the first companies to successfully harness the power of group behavior across the social web in the name of a common purpose. That’s incredibly powerful! Think of the potential – for the first time in history, the physical barriers to collective, powerful action have been torn down, and Groupon figured out how to focus that power into a single, common goal. That’s huge!

Continue reading “Journal: Groupon's Missed Opportunity”

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Worth a Look: The New Capitalist Manifesto

02 China, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Worth A Look
Amazon Page

The Worst Trade in the World

It's often said that America's an uncompetitive economy–unable to produce stuff that satisfies global demand. Hence, a yawning current account deficit.

I'd say the reality's harsher. America's caught in a toxic, self-destructive relationship with the globe's second most significant economy. In short, it's making the worst trade in the world.

See tables of what US exports to China (good stuff) and what China exports back to the US (mostly bad stuff).

Amazon Pre-Publication (4 January 2011) Review:

Product Description

Welcome to the worst decade since the Great Depression. Trillions of dollars of financial assets and shareholder value destroyed; worldwide GDP stalled; new jobs vanishingly scarce. But this isn’t just a severe recession. It’s evidence that our economic institutions are obsolete—a set of ideas inherited from the industrial age that no longer work for business, people, society, or the future.

In The New Capitalist Manifesto, economic strategist Umair Haque argues that business as usual has outgrown the old paradigm of short-term growth, competition at all costs, adversarial strategy, and pushing costs onto future generations. These outworn assumptions are good for creating only “thin” value—gains that are largely illusory and produce diminishing returns every year.

For “thick” value—enduring, meaningful, sustainable advantage that deeply benefits the larger society—Haque details five new cornerstones of prosperity in the twenty-first century:

•Loss advantage: From value chains to value cycles
•Responsiveness: From value propositions to value conversations
•Resilience: From strategy to philosophy
•Creativity: From protecting a marketplace to completing a marketplace
•Difference: From goods to betters

The New Capitalist Manifesto makes a passionate, razor-sharp economic case that these methods will produce a more enduring prosperity for business as well as society.

About the Author

Umair Haque is the Director of the London-based Havas Media Lab and heads Bubblegeneration, a strategy lab that helps discover strategic innovation. He studies the economics of the future: the impact that new technologies, management innovations, and shifting consumer preferences will exert tomorrow on the industries and markets of today.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Bio-Economics

Worth a Look: Book Reviews of Capitalism Reincarnated

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on China

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Civilization-Building

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Collective Intelligence

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Common Wealth

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Conscious, Evolutionary, Integral Activism & Goodness

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Dialog for Truth & Reconciliation

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Reference: The Walk from “No” to “Yes” (William Ury)

Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence
William Ury

Finding the 18th camel….

15,000 tribes in touch with one another

The secret to peace is not easy, not new, but it is simple: We are the secret to peace, Us acting as a surrounding community.

The circle revisited…

The third side of any conflict is those not party to the conflict.

TEDX Presentation on Abraham's Walk (Unity & Respect)

William Ury is a mediator, writer and speaker, working with conflicts ranging from family feuds to boardroom battles to ethnic wars. He's the author of “Getting to Yes.” Full bio and more links

Tip of the Hat to John Steiner.

Phi Beta Iota: This is kum-ba-ya hand-holding at a world-class level.  Utterly brilliant on the process, totally lacking on the facts and how to use them, pooling of resources and how to use them, etcetera.

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Journal: WikiLeaks Collaboration, WikiLeaks Attacked + CYBER RECAP

07 Other Atrocities, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Cyberscams, malware, spam, InfoOps (IO), IO Multinational, Standards, Technologies
DefDog Recommends...

Respected media outlets collaborate with WikiLeaks (NewsMeat)

WikiLeaks turned over all of the classified State Department cables it obtained to Le Monde, El Pais in Spain, The Guardian in Britain and Der Spiegel in Germany. The Guardian shared the material with the New York
Times, and the five news organizations have been working together to plan the timing of their reports.

They also have been advising WikiLeaks on which documents to release publicly and what redactions to make to those documents, Kauffmann and others involved in the arrangement said.

WikiLeaks switches to Swiss domain after attacks (NewsMeat)

Wikileaks was forced Friday to switch over to a Swiss domain name,
wikileaks.ch, after a new round of hacker attacks on its system prompted its American domain name provider to withdraw service.

WikiLeaks' U.S. domain name system provider, EveryDNS, withdrew service to the wikileaks.org name late Thursday, saying it took the action because the new hacker attacks threatened the rest of its network.

“Wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure,” EveryDNS said in a statement.

Phi Beta Iota: The first story represents the emergence of hybrid governance and hybrid capabilities networks that will over time displace the inherently corrupt hierarchical stovepipes of the Industrial “Rule by Secrecy” era.  The second story represents both the emergence of jackals in cyber-space, attacking “because they can,” and the abject failure of both the Internet Service Providers (ISP) and the US Government to provide order, discipline, and security in cyberspace.  We recommend that WikiLeaks seek severe financial damages from both Amazon and EveryDNS–both have failed to be honest and diligent.  At the same time, this is an opportunity: any country, such as Chile, that can integrated unlimited low-cost renewable energy, massive data storage & services, and multinational intelligence, all in a cyber-cocoon of absolute confidence immune to attack, will bury the US and EU ISP and telecommunications industries.

See Also:

Reference: Bruce Schneier on Cyber War & Cyber Crime

Journal: Cyber-Heist 2nd Generation

Journal: Pentagon Network Attacks–Cloud Truth?

Journal: Who Controls (and Secures) the Internet?

Journal: US Research & Development in the Toilet

Journal: Army Industrial-Era Network Security + Cyber-Security RECAP (Links to Past Posts)

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Reference: General David Petraeus–An Examination

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 10 Security, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Chuck Spinney Recommends....

David Petraeus — Hero Celebrity

By Michael Brenner (Senior Fellow, the Center for Transatlantic Relations) – Huffington Post – December 2, 2010

There is one celebrity with the makings of a national hero, someone who has the qualities that might carry him right into the White House. It is David Petraeus. He is almost universally credited with the brilliant achievement of saving American honor and gaining an approximation of ‘victory' in Iraq. President Obama himself is in awe of this warrior-intellectual to whom he defers on all matters in the Greater Middle East. Petraeus' mythic standing is a perfect example of how the compelling demand for a hero creates the illusion that indeed a savior has arrived.

Read the balance of the article…