The Prediction Market Clusters founded in 2004 in Silicon Valley, are a global commons and open community for prediction markets and collective intelligence networks worldwide. The open and agnostic community is a focused action/research collaboration network of vendors, academia, traders, users, developers, markets, regulators and stakeholders. All are welcome. The goal is to provide Next Practices, awareness, diffusion, adoption and pull-through for enterprise, institutional and consumer prediction markets. PM Clusters conduct popular, distributed leadership retreats for enterprise prediction markets, Wisdom of Crowds, collective intelligence networks and collaborative forecasting worldwide.
Phi Beta Iota: David Pozen, JD Yale 2007, has provided advance access to the complete draft on his paper forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review, and we are both appreciative of this offering, and impressed–deeply impressed–by this seminal work. At a time when the U.S. “security clearance” system is so totally hosed up (and 70,000 clearances behind) that we might do better with with “spin the bottle,” the author is highlighting the reality that most of the secrecy we buy with $75 billion a year in taxpayer funds is not really that important–not only have others, such as Rodney McDaniel, made it clear that 809% to 90% of all “official” secrecy is about turf protection and budget share rather than national security, but it is administrative secrecy rather than “deep secrecy” that is leveraged by a very few with their own informal system for assigning trust, generally at the expense of the larger mass of uninformed individual who are treated as “collateral damage” that is of little consequence. The download options are at the top of the linked page
Fortunately, most librarians have gotten used to the fact that the Internet is a tremendous boon to researchers and that free information is a fantastic idea. Sure, we haven't yet reallocated our organizational resources to recognize this fact—our staff time is much more likely to be devoted to acquiring and messing about with purchased information than in making good information from our archives, our labs, or the web more easily available. [Emphasis added.]
Barbara Fister
We need to separate our value—the way we curate information, champion its availability in the face of intolerance of unpopular ideas and economic disparity, and create conditions for learning how to find and use good information—from the amount of money it takes to acquire stuff on the not-so-open market. We need to be quite clear that good information is good information, no matter how it's funded. And we need to find creative ways to partner with those who add value to information and find sustainable models for the editorial work that can make good academic work better.
Phi Beta Iota: We are NOT making this up. People from around the world are starting to send us this stuff, and we love it–this clearly demonstrates the power of public intelligence in the aggregate, and the importance of multiniational information-sharing and multinational sense-making, the bulk of which is not now and never will be “secret.” We would not be at all surprised to start seeing Goldman Sachs and Bank of New York executives dying like flies, with former Secretaries of the Treasury and Chairs (and NY Governors) of the Federal Reserve having pride of place on the hit list. The Russians and Chinese (and soon the Indians) all have a right to take “extreme exception” to the state-sponsored crimes the above document discusses.
BullionVault says: Accredited custodians only take in bars from other accredited vaults, and metal only enters the system from accredited refiners. Even when they bear the correct bar stamps, large gold bars are not usually accepted from people outside the Good Delivery circuit, which is why taking a Good Delivery bar into private possession seriously dents its value.
Phi Beta Iota: Hubris cannot be discounted, and since the Federal Reserve is part of the Good Delivery Circuit and its integrity has been severely impugned, this issue must join the matter of pre-9-11 gold evacuation from the World Trade Center as requiring further investigation.
WiserTongues: Help WiserEarth become multilingual!
Why speaking English isn't enough
Did you know that 60% of the WiserEarth Community comes from outside the United States? This is great news as we always wanted WiserEarth to be a global resource for the nonprofit environment and social justice community. However, most of the hundreds of thousands of people coming to the site each month are from English-speaking countries. This means that we are not reaching out enough to the billions of non-English speakers who could use WiserEarth to help them in their nonprofit and sustainability-focused work.
We want to enable members of the worldwide community to use WiserEarth in their own language. Only by doing this can we help to grow the connections among our international community and support their work.
ROME — The head of a U.N. food agency expressed regret Wednesday that an anti-hunger summit failed to result in precise promises of funding, and critics said the meeting had only thrown crumbs to the world's 1 billion people without enough to eat.
