Mr. Arno Reuser, Arno the Curious, is a Master Librarian who has done more for the practice of Open Source Inteligence (OSINT) in support of national security than anyone else in Europe. He has been a pioneer in the explotiation of badly-delivered OSINT from private sector vendors, writing original PERL programs to make sense of their feeds; he has known how to make the most of the Internet; and above all, he has known how to find and engage human intellects around the world, each capable of producing unique tailored knowledge not available online or in print. He is the Master Librarian of the OSINT world and all seven intelligence tribes.
The Ignite Show just posted episode 2, Kati’s Botanicalls Ignite NYC talk from back in September 2008 during Web 2.0 Expo. You may want to skip past the intro…and start at 1:33.
ScienceDaily (May 5, 2008) — Beginning this crop season, farmers will be able to receive text messages on their cell phones from their plants saying whether they are thirsty or not.
To communicate, probes in the soil emit electric waves. A voltage level based on the moisture content is sent through two wires to a circuit board that compares the optimum moisture level with the current one. A local network receives this data and allows the plant to send a message through the device.
Phi Beta Iota: We continue to believe that the US Government should integrate the totality of the federal budget under three Vice Presidents for, respectively, Commonwealth; Education, Intelligence & Research; and National Security. Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three, and the politicization of science and education, like the politicization of intelligence, has made us deaf, dumb, and blind to what really matters for the survival of humanity–the state of the Earth and the state of humanity on Earth.
More than a million Haitians are homeless, but a month after the massive quake, UN officials said only about 50,000 families, or an estimated 272,000 people, have received emergency materials to build their own shelters.
The complete American Red Cross Haiti one month report does not help because it fails to even mention the $175 million collected but not spent or committed to Haiti.
This is a major outrage. But more outrageous is the media's blind eye to the American Red Cross' activities. One would think a reporter would not be so lazy that they could avoid subtracting $80 million from $255 million, get $175 million, read the Red Cross' online documents, and start asking about the unallocated $175 million?
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are homeless, desperate for tents to stave off the upcoming rainy season. But eventually, they will need homes.
They are hungry, waiting for bags of rice to prevent starvation. But someday, Haiti will need to feed itself.
Many are still injured, needing wound care and follow-up surgery to fix their broken limbs. But they also suffer from chronic illnesses.
Phi Beta Iota: This just makes us sick. All of this was predictable from the minute we knew the magnitude of the dead, injured, and homeless. This is a failure of humanity on the scale of Rwanda-Burundi.
We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
Opponents of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tried strangling the IPCC in its cradle when the body was formed twenty-one years ago. Only hard-core climate change deniers are now sounding the death knell of their nemesis (as they have many times before), but support for the IPCC appears to ebbing, for a variety of reasons, and the future of the foremost science-based organization on climate change is in question.
To be sure, the IPCC has been forced to acknowledge errors and unsubstantiated statements in one of its landmark 2007 reports. The irregularities had to do with predictions of the expected effects of warming. None of them, however, undermined the report's consensus that the planet has warmed and that man's activities have contributed to the warming.
“It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries “uncle,”” Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., wrote Wednesday on Twitter.
Phi Beta Iota: The media is not doing its homework. The IPCC represents the worst of UN corruption and ineptitude, while the High Level Panel and its report represents the UN at its best. In the latter, Environmental Degradation is threat #3 after Poverty and Infectious Disease. Climate Change is less than 10% of Environmental Degradation, and within Climate Change, carbon emissions are much, much less than 10% and far outweighed by sulfer and mercury. The media and the UN both gloss over the many acts of man, such as paving over the Mississippi wetlands and plowing deep roots into oblivion–the increasing frequency and severity of storms is most certainly man-made but NOT caused by exclusively global warning or carbon emissions. See also Strategic Analytic Model. It's all connected.
Attached is a very revealing BBC interview with Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. It should be read carefully with an eye to what is said and not said.
Note that Jones acknowledges that the time for debate over climate science is NOT over, particularly in the area of paleoclimate studies — which implies uncertainties in the calibration of the climate models used to predict the future, a item he addressed but did not discuss.
One item I found to be of particular interest is Jones' weak rationalization [see underlined text] for saying recent tree ring data (post 1960), which is used to deduce temperature in paeleoclimatology, is not reliable (because it showed a cooling trend while) but that earlier tree ring data is reliable … Jones is using this argument to justify splicing instrumental measurements of temperature to deduced measurements from tree rings (aka temperature proxies) after 1960. As a general matter, this kind of mixing apples and oranges violates every method of empirical calibration that I was taught in engineering school At the very least it requires a detailed explanation, yet Jones says nothing about the reasons he had for arguing the tree ring data before 1960, reaching back over 900 years, was reliable, but that the same data after 1960 was not “valid” [his word], and therefore, it was more appropriate to substitute direct instrumental measurements of temperature after 1960. But if temperature measurements between 1960 and 1999 don't match the deduction from proxies made from tree rings, what evidence is there that they do correlate for the preceding 900 years to be valid?
Note also, the total absence of any discussion of the 10,000 year history of ice cores, where recent, more precise methods of analysis suggest the periods of CO2 increase in atmosphere correlate with temperature increases but with a time lag of around 800 years, which seems at variance with the GW hypothesis that CO2 increases cause temperature increases. It is a question the interviewer should have asked, but was not, particularly given the uncertainties in paleoclimate research that were discussed, Chuck
Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which has been at the centre of the row over hacked e-mails.
The BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics. The questions were put to Professor Jones with the co-operation of UEA's press office.
As a way of dealing with cross-town crime and drug use, Scituate police have banded together with other local departments to pursue cases beyond individual town borders.
Marshfield Police Capt. Phil Tavares founded the coalition, formally known as the Old Colony Police Anti-Crime Task Force, or OcPac.
“The most logical approach to combating fiscal hardships and a surge in crime is to make available and consolidate our tangible and intangible resources, as well as real-time intelligence sharing,” said Tavares.
Invite your attention to attached — contains a couple of interesting observations about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT):
“…open source intelligence — catapulting it to primary place for new adversaries and increasingly for the U.S. military — and also rapid organizational learning and assembly of capabilities…” [page 9]
“…There are strong indications that Hezbollah made significant use of OSINT — gathering valuable intelligence from Israeli press and news broadcasts as well as websites. Reports suggest that Hezbollah used Israeli press reports to plot the location of its rocket strikes in Israel and may have used Google Earth to help re-calibrate the accuracy of its fire….” [page 56]
