Lukas Biewald, 11.09.10, 04:00 PM EST for Forbes.com
How crowdsourcing will change the way the world works.
s the amount of digital work increases and the amount of physical work decreases, our notions of employment and work change profoundly. Digital work doesn't require roads and factories; it requires a laptop and an Internet connection–equipment that people have access to in their homes. The need for offices, supervisors and rigid employment arrangements diminishes.
As technology improves, companies should theoretically be able to access in real-time the perfect person for a given job–the one who will do the job the best, enjoy it the most or do it the fastest. All these factors combine in a way that will change the landscape of work. Here's what I think that will look like:–Within a decade résumés will become less important as we continue to adopt newer, multifaceted ways to measure the quality of a candidate's work.
KABUL (Reuters) – When NATO leaders gather for a summit in Lisbon next week, where Afghanistan will top the agenda, they can expect a message waiting for them from the Taliban.
That message may well be a violent demonstration of their staying power, even though Washington and U.S. and NATO commanders have been talking up recent successes in Afghanistan before the summit and a strategy review by President Barack Obama next month.
This comes as many European NATO members begin to look at how long they can keep justifying their commitments to an increasingly unpopular war, and as Obama remains committed to beginning a gradual drawdown of U.S. troops from July 2011 before the 2014 goal set by Kabul to take total security responsibility.
President Obama was urged by the few White House insiders from whom he still takes advice to leave the country on his ten-day Asian trip, his longest trip abroad since becoming president, in order to not inflict any more damage to the Democratic Party in the wake of one of the worst electoral defeats for the party of an incumbent president in recent history. According to sources close to the White House, who put themselves in great danger by even talking to members of the media, the plans to have Obama leave for a visit to India, Pakistan, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan are an attempt to get Obama out of the country while top Democrats can sort through the political disaster created for the party by Obama's increasingly detached-from-reality presidency.
Virtual political guerrilla warfare has broken out between Obama's inner circle on one hand and senior Democratic officials, including outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Party strategist James Carville, former Demcratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, and, behind-the-scenes, Vice President Joe Biden and former President Bill Clinton, on the other.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a remarkable “hit job” that will need much more corroboration. We see two underlying stories that merit exploration. First Story: Obama is scaring his own party. It took a lot to piece together all the little bits that have been hyped together here. Second Story: Obama is beginning to see that he can only win a second term as an Independent, without Biden and without Clinton II. What we do know is that Obama's advisors to date have been a mix of pogomists, pollsters, and political groupies. If he ever gets a grip on strategic reality and commits to restoring the Republic with Electoral Reform, he could still be the George Washington of the 21st Century. On this article, at this time, we stand with Barack Obama and not his detractors.
Complete Madsen reprint below the line so our military colleagues do not have to visit the other site.
Sneaking subs into waters off the west coast — its happened before
By Wayne Madsen
The firing of a submarine-launched ballistic missile by a Chinese Jin-class submarine off the coast of southern California last Monday at the height of evening rush hour in Los Angeles was not the first time the U.S. Navy's anti-submarine warfare sensors in the Pacific have failed.
In 1981, a Soviet Victor-class nuclear submarine successfully evaded the Navy's Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) network of underwater hydrophones, Towed Array Sensor System (TASS) ships, and P-3 sonobuoy-equipped aircraft and popped up off the Oregon coast alongside a Soviet fishing fishing trawler.
Phi Beta Iota: We only know that we do not know the full story. We do believe that China and Russia are furious over Wall Street to Washington financial irresponsibility. The Chinese have a sense of humor, having previously popped a submarine up directly behind a US carrier after sneaking through an entire carrier battle group. This could be related to blocking any further US military exercises in the waters around Taiwan. The US Government really does not “understand” how quickly Taiwan is going to follow Hong Kong into mainland control. Sadly, we cannot rely on the US Navy or the US Government to be open with its own public on what is known about this matter.
Complete Madsen reprint below the line so our military colleagues do not have to visit the other site.
Here’s a press release for a performance I’m co-producing with Scoop Sweeney:
AUSTIN – Catherine Braslavsky and Joseph Rowe will bring their musical performance, “From Jerusalem to Cordoba,” from Paris to Austin on December 3, 7pm at St. David’s Episcopal Church, Bethell Hall, 301 E. 8th St., Austin, 78701-3280. The performance is a celebration of the musical and mystical traditions in and around the Mediterranean, from ancient Judaism and Paganism, to medieval Christianity and Islam. It features ancient and original music sung in Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek, Medieval Spanish, Occitan, and Arabic. Instrumental accompaniment includes Middle Eastern percussion, oud, dulcimer, Tibetan bowls, Indian tampura, and African mbira.
The performance is built on short poetic and narrative texts that include both original material and quotations from Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Ibn ‘Arabi, Yehuda Halevi, etc. The narrative thread woven through the performance evokes a rarely-perceived common ground, and an alternative view of sacred traditions which have so often been in conflict. Braslavsky and Rowe have presented this performance at venues throughout Europe.
The Italian newspaper La Republicca describes the performance as “fascinating… with great spiritual power.” Author Jacques Attali describes it as “A remarkably successful voyage in sound, depicting those rare times when Jews, Christians and Muslims have lived together in peace and dialogue.” Rev. Lauren Artress, Canon at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, calls it “uplifting and inspiring,” and notes that “Catherine and Joseph are truly gifted musicians. Allow them to enrich your life.” Jon Lebkowsky in Wired Magazine described the music as “…at once new, traditional, and transcendent. … chants and chant-like original compositions powerfully realized as invocations of the human essence — whether it be the soul, spirit, or consciousness — in its ascent.
Phi Beta Iota: This makes the cut for three reasons. First, Jon is selective about what he sends out. Second, holistic analysis and understanding must of necessity include music and art–the Western tradition has destroyed the role of the humanities and in so doing, committed sacrilige with science. Finally, faith is also a part of conscious evolution, and absent its full integration into any intellectual traditional, you end up with fundamentalist idiots doing grave damage within and among communities. Religion is at its most gifted when it is a vibrant part of the cultural tradition and used to transfer the lessons of civilization from one generation to the next–starting with the Golden Rule.
Some people say Gandhi was about nonviolence. And he was.
But he is significant for something else that I believe is far more important:
He changed the game.
With no one's permission, he reconfigured the playing field of colonialism to a higher Game in which everything the British did in their smaller, narrower game backfired on them. Prisons, guns, threats and bureaucracies of control not only ceased to work like they used to, but actually generated more power for Gandhi's world-changing Game.
Gandhi's Game involved, in his words, “experiments in Truth” — a search for Truth, a bigger Truth, a common inclusive Truth, a win-win Truth in every situation. The British — and even many of Gandhi's compatriots — were not aligned to that Truth. They wanted victory, control, and righteousness. These things trapped them in their smaller game until, one by one, and sometimes wholesale, Gandhi's commitment to Truth won their hearts and minds — and Shift happened.
How Voters Can Unrig the 2012 Elections with Transpartisan Voting Blocs and Electoral Coalitions
Voters did not get what they said they wanted from the 2010 elections. In fact, they got the opposite because the two major parties rigged the elections.
The parties have been rigging elections for decades by gerrymandering election districts and passing campaign financing and election laws that prevent third party candidates from beating major party candidates.
These rigged elections give voters no choice but to vote for one of the two major parties. So voters do the only thing they can do, which is to routinely kick out the major party incumbents in the futile hope that the new major party candidates they elect will not flout their will to the same degree. But regardless of which party candidates they vote for, they get roughly the same policies. These typically sacrifice voters' interests to the special interests that fund lawmakers' electoral campaigns.
Unless voters are empowered to put an end to rigged elections before the 2012 elections, using mechanisms like the one proposed below, the middle class and working Americans will be ruined financially by the lawmakers and special interests that are enabling the business and financial sector to take more than their fair share of national income.
