I received a cryptic note from a colleague earlier tonight:
“This one has time AND location data.”
The email contained a link to the Global Terrorism Database, which is maintained at the University of Maryland at College Park, which is an easy walk from a green line stop on the D.C. Metro. I poked around the site a bit and discovered that everything from 1970 through 2011 is available for download if you just fill out a form.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The total content is large so I pulled out the 5,066 events from 2011. There are an amazing 127 attributes for each event, but it’s a sparse row setup, very easy to process. I unrolled just a few key items – city, country, and region. This resulted in over 15,000 lines indexed with their twelve digit event IDs. The first rough visualization I did was immediately exciting in terms of what was visible.
Here is an excellent essay that addresses an issue that has come to concern me more and more: the apathy of Americans, our passive acceptance of what is happening to our country.
The last four decades have witnessed the first-ever generalized stagnation of wages and benefits for working people in this country, as well as the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world, from middle and low income Americans to the billionaire gamblers, bankers, industrialists, and their hirelings. According to Mother Jones, from 1979 to the present, the productivity of American capitalism grew over 80 percent, while US wages only grew around 12 percent.
The share of US wealth held by half of American households plummeted in 2010 to 1.1 percent, while the top 10 percent's share was 74.5 percent. And according to the British aid agency Oxfam, the 2012 income alone of the 100 wealthiest families in the world was enough to end global poverty four times over!
EXTRACT (List Only):
1. Lack of class consciousness.
2. The bad taste left in the collective mouth by the Stalinist experiment.
A recent piece in Uzbekistan's state-sanctioned media has advocated joining NATO and taking over the territory of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and most of the rest of Eurasia. The piece, published on 12news.uz, was taken down shortly after being published, but was preserved on inoSMI.ru. [PBI: English translation below the line.]
The piece, at nearly 9,000 words, offers a number of controversial (to put it kindly) claims: that Tajiks are merely Persian-speaking Uzbeks, that Uzbekistan is the successor state to the Mongol Golden Horde, that the agreement between Russia and Kyrgyzstan to develop hydropower plants is invalid because it misspells “Kyrgyzstan,” among many others. Its main thesis, however, is that the “threats of a natural-technical character” — namely proposed hydropower plants in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — are the gravest security threats facing Uzbekistan, comparable to a nuclear bomb. And the solution is that Uzbekistan should join NATO.
The piece is a bit out there, but Uzbek analysts point out that it must have been officially sanctioned. “This site [12news.uz] is not just semi-official, it’s official,” dissident political analyst Tashpulat Yuldashev told uznews.net. “It's curated by Dilshod Nurullaev, former Security Commission chairman and advisor to the President,” he said. “There is total censorship in Uzbekistan, and such a politically charged article would not have been allowed to be published without permission from the very top.” That assertion was backed up by another Uzbek analyst to The Bug Pit.
On June 24th the “Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev” passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute “the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s,” expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.
The Plan’s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as ‘unrecognized’ by the Israeli government must be moved.
The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems. Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens—usually referred to by the government as mere “structures”—were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.
OHM2013 – Observe. Hack. Make. is a 5-day international outdoor technology and security conference. OHM2013 is currently requesting proposals for content.
A motley bunch of around 3000 hackers, free-thinkers, philosophers, activists, geeks, scientists, artists, creative minds and others will convene from all over the world for this informal meeting of minds to contemplate, reflect, share, criticize, look ahead, code, build, and more.
An otherwise unassuming stretch of land, just 30km (20mi) North of Amsterdam, will be transformed into a colourful oasis of light providing a backdrop for this unique event. It is an immersive experience, with an emphasis on interaction.
The four-yearly Dutch hacker camps provide a very open, friendly and relaxed atmosphere, with a high level of knowledge. The campsite is buzzing with energy, ideas and projects, not least because people from various backgrounds are interacting. It is a non-commercial community event where every visitor is also a volunteer.
ROBERT STEELE: This is legitimate hacking's third wind (ham radio was the first, cyber and social engineering the second). This takes hacking to a new level, with an emphasis on “Do It Yourself” and thus fullfils the guidance from Buckminster Fuller: do not seek to repair a pathologically damaged system, instead create a new system to replace it, and route around the old system. I have proposed a lecture and a workshop (originally commissioned for the Wales Intelligence Conference in 2013), and am seeking donations to cover travel — estimated $1,500. I particularly solicit donations for pre-conference and post-conference sessions, in person or via Skype, anywhere in Europe including the UK that will help cover travel including side trips, and perhaps a bit more to support the work of our 501c3. I am on stand-by for Afghanistan and believe they won't move on replacing the KIA/WIA until September for a 1 October start date.
Hashtag footprints can be revealing. The map below, for example, displays the top 200 locations in the world with the most Twitter hashtags. The top 5 are Sao Paolo, London, Jakarta, Los Angeles and New York.
A recent study (PDF) of 2 billion geo-tagged tweets and 27 million unique hashtags found that “hashtags are essentially a local phenomenon with long-tailed life spans.” The analysis also revealed that hashtags triggered by external events like disasters “spread faster than hashtags that originate purely within the Twitter network itself.” Like other metadata, hashtags can be informative in and of themselves. For example, they can provide early warning signals of social tensions in Egypt, as demonstrated in this study. So might they also reveal interesting patterns during and after major disasters?
Below is a translation from As-Safir, a Lebanese newspaper, July 6, 2013, by Arabic-English translator Eric Mueller. As the translator was not present at the Group of Eight meeting, he cannot vouch for the accuracy of the report, only for the accuracy of the translation. The report by Dawud Rimal does reflect Putin's no-nonsense manner of speaking. The report from As-Safir contrasts with the US coverage.
Diplomatic sources: Putin tells G8 “You want Asad to resign. Look at the leaders you've made in the Middle East.”
