Journal: Facing prison for filming US police

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence
Facing prison for filming US police
By Chris Arsenault

When police arrested Anthony Graber for speeding on his motorbike, the 25-year-old probably did not see himself as an advocate for police accountability in the age of new media.

But Graber, a sergeant with the Maryland Air National Guard, is now facing 16 years in prison, not for dangerous driving, but for a Youtube video he posted after receiving a speeding ticket.

FULL STORY at Al Jazeera Not in USA

Phi Beta Iota: A society with a sense of humor would establish a monthly “film the police” day.  Such lunacy.  When the law gets really stupid it is time to change the law, e.g. it used to be legal to abuse women and people of color.

Tip of the Hat to Steve Kirby at Facebook.

Reference: Data Is the New Dirt–Visualization

Analysis, Augmented Reality, Blog Wisdom, Briefings (Core), Collective Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence
Full Short Video Brief Online

About this talk

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.

About David McCandless

David McCandless draws beautiful conclusions from complex datasets — thus revealing unexpected insights into our world. Full bio and more links

Phi Beta Iota: “Mining” the soil does not go far.  Actually planting, tilling, watering, and growing is much more powerful.  This is one of the most compelling TED briefs we have seen.  “Language of the eye” combined with “language of the mind.”  All about “relative” numbers and relationships.  “Let the data set change your mindset.”  Art of knowledge compression.  Living data in a Google document.  If you visit his books at Amazon, take the time to check out the related books on data visualization that Amazon clusters for around these.

Tip of the Hat to Magnus Hultberg at LinkedIn.  Also see these resources.

David McCandless' two books:

Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Journal: Denmark Ceases on Afghanistan

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Military, Peace Intelligence

Afghanistan-Denmark-NATO: Today the Danish Foreign Minister said Denmark has turned down a NATO request to send F-16 fighters to Afghanistan because it believes it has done enough for the international military mission there.

“We are one of the countries that contributes the most to Afghanistan,” Foreign Minister Lene Espersen told the media after a meeting of parliament's foreign affairs committee. “This is why we rejected the NATO request” which was also made to other member countries, she said.

Espersen said the committee “has a strong desire to scale down engagement” in Afghanistan as the Danish defense budget was “under pressure” and the government “is under no obligation to do more” there. Denmark “can be proud” of its role in Afghanistan, she said, adding that “it's up to other countries to play a role and meet demands”.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: Denmark has 750 soldiers in Afghanistan serving in the International Security Assistance Force force, primarily in Helmand province. Its small contingent has sustained, proportionally, the heaviest losses of any ISAF nation with 34 combat deaths. The fight in Afghanistan is not popular in NATO. More countries may be expected to decline further involvement and pursue early withdrawal in 2011.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Denmark spends more than most on waging peace, and its government is vastly more intelligent and holistic than the US Government (USG).  The raw truth is that the US made a huge mistake in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Denmark felt obliged to honor its NATO commitment when NATO compounded the mistake by making Afghanistan a NATO mission (equivalent to asking Mexico to declare Cuba a threat to national security–we all die laughing).  The USG is incapable of demonstrating any return on investment for its foreign and national security policies, and the US public is among the losers for this lack of intellectual integrity.

Journal: Return on Investment Missing from IT World

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process
Full Blog Online

BI implementations fail because they are sold to the IT departments and not to the business users. The use case and ROI needs to be built with the business users. If that is not done, it results in:

  • high probability of self-ware
  • lack of ROI for the business user
  • a pure IT project not driven by the needs of the business

Phi Beta Iota: For decades we have been railing against the substitution of technology for thinking; the absence of processing power and analytic desk-top tool-kits, and so on.  We have also pointed out that “BI” is nothing more than data mining, that competitive intelligence ignores context, and that only commercial intelligence with a 360 view as well as historical and future forecast aspects will do.  Peter Drucker said in Forbes ASAP on 28 August 1998 that we have spent the past 50 years focused on the T in IT, and need to spend the next 50 focused on the I.  That is what this web site and the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 seeking donors, are focused upon.  The World Brain and Global Game, connecting all minds to all information in all languages all the time, is achievable.   Paul Strassmann was the first to point out in a very credible documented way that the ROI for most IT investments in the Fortune 500 is negative to neutral.  IT is not pulling its weight because IT has no strategy and no intellectual frame of reference, e.g. connecting dots to dots, dots to people, and people to people so as to achieve specified outcomes.

See Also:

Steele Brief to NSA in Vegas 2000

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Our Friends, our Enemies

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

Iraq: Insurgents conducted at least 34 coordinated attacks in 16 cities 0n 25 August. The bombings and other attacks killed 77 people and wounded nearly 400 more. Baghdad experienced five attacks.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The attacks showed the breadth of the insurgents' operational area. They appear to be the work of a single group, apparently Sunni Arabs or secular Arabs.

The attacks also establish a baseline of the insurgents' ability to coordinate attacks over space and time. This was not a trivial display of the capability to coordinate attacks over long distances. They appear to be a test of the feasibility of taking the next escalation step in the insurgency.

Some outside entity is funding a new, most likely Sunni Arab, insurgency and has afforded its leadership the command and control capability for today's attacks.   Look to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added above.  The US Government (not America the Beautiful or the big-hearted American public) is called a “useful idiot” in most of the world precisely because it mixes hubris and naivete with vast amounts of money spent without a strategy and without accountability.  It took too long to understand the Saudi funding behind the global spread of virulent Wahhabism, while the equivalent funding to the Bush family and others assured that at the political and policy level, our enemies the Saudis would remain conveniently and unethically our friends.

See Also:

Journal: Nuclear War Against Iran…Again
23 Worst Tyrants/Dictators (Yes, there’s more than 23) and Oops, there’s Saudi Arabia..
NIGHTWATCH Extract: Dictators vs Iran in Middle East
Review: Breaking the Real Axis of Evil–How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025
Review: The CIA in Iran–The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the US-Iran Divide
Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State
Review: Threshold–The Crisis of Western Culture
Review: Wars of Blood and Faith–The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

20 Things Learned From Traveling Around the World for Three Years

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Media

Gary Arndt, Author of Everything-Everywhere.com
August 23, 2010

On March 13, 2007, I handed over the keys to my house, put my possessions in storage and headed out to travel around the world with nothing but a backpack, my laptop and a camera.

Three and a half years and 70 countries later, I've gotten the equivalent of a Ph.D in general knowledge about the people and places of Planet Earth.

Here are some of the things I've learned:

1) People are generally good

2) The media lies

3) The world is boring

4) People don't hate Americans

5) Americans aren't as ignorant as you might think

6) Americans don't travel

7) The rest of the world isn't full of germs

8 ) You don't need a lot stuff

9) Traveling doesn't have to be expensive

10) Culture matters

12) Everyone is proud of where they are from

13) America and Canada share a common culture

14) Most people have a deep desire to travel around the world

15) You can find the internet almost everywhere

16) In developing countries, government is usually the problem

17) English is becoming universal

18) Modernization is not Westernization

19) We view other nations by a different set of criteria than we view ourselves

20) Everyone should travel

Full article here to see elaborations for each of the twenty entries

Reference: Citation Analytics 201

About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Augmented Reality, Balance, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, History, ICT-IT, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Maps, Methods & Process, Multinational Plus, Policies, Policies-Harmonization, Policy, Political, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Processing, Real Time, Research resources, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy-Holistic Coherence, Threats, Tools, Tribes

Phi Beta Iota: Most serious analysts now understand Citation Analytics 101.  It's time to move to Citation Analytics 202, and there is no better way to introduce the art of the possible than by pointing to Kevin W. Boyack, Katy Borner, and Richard Klavans (2007), “Mapping the Structure and Evolution of Chemistry Research (11th International Conference of Scientometrics and Infometrics, pp. 112-123.

Full Article with Color Graphics
Graphic as Printable Single Page PPT

There are several take-aways from this article, which is more or less the “coming out” of the Klavens-inspired infometrics field now that he has won his law-suit and has unchallenged access to all Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) access [this was one of the sources we used to win the Burundi Exercise before the Aspin-Brown Commission in 1995].

Continue reading “Reference: Citation Analytics 201”