Academia – Page 42 – Public Intelligence Blog

The following pieces are from June 2010 and 2001. They were found separately within the same day and provide inter-connected insights. Link to the full version..below is an extremely shortened version:

PSYCHOPATHS AMONG US

Dr. Robert Hare claims there are 300,000 psychopaths in Canada, but that only a tiny fraction are violent offenders like Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olsen. Who are the rest? Take a look around.
By Robert Hercz (2001)

(three highlights from the article)

+ Hare has said that if he couldn't study psychopaths in prisons, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice (Forbes magazine called the Vancouver Stock Exchange the scam capital of the world). This brings a whole other meaning to “psycho-geography.”

+ Soon after he delivered a keynote speech at a conference for homicide detectives and prosecuting attorneys in Seattle three years ago, Hare got a letter thanking him for helping solve a series of homicides. The police had a suspect nailed for a couple of murders, but believed he was responsible for others. They were using the usual strategy to get a confession, telling him, ‘Think how much better you'll feel, think of the families left behind,' and so on. After they'd heard Hare speak they realized they were dealing with a psychopath, someone who could feel neither guilt nor sorrow. They changed their interrogation tactic to, “So you murdered a couple of prostitutes. That's minor-league compared to Bundy or Gacy.” The appeal to the psychopath's grandiosity worked. He didn't just confess to his other crimes, he bragged about them.

+ Know your own weaknesses, they advise, because the psychopath will find and use them. Learn to recognize the psychopath, they tell us, before adding that even experts are regularly taken in.

How to keep someone with you forever (common enslavement tactics)

Jun. 9th, 2010

Rule 1: Keep them too busy to think. Thinking is dangerous. If people can stop and think about their situation logically, they might realize how crazy things are.

Rule 2: Keep them tired. Exhaustion is the perfect defense against any good thinking that might slip through. Fixing the system requires change, and change requires effort, and effort requires energy that just isn't there. No energy, and your lover's dangerous epiphany is converted into nothing but a couple of boring fights.

Continue reading “Sick Systems on a Micro to Macro Level; Not All Vampires Suck Blood; Psychopaths Among Us”

2010/09/03

Journal: Libertarian Perspective on Intelligence

Academia, Civil Society, Government

Michael Ostrolenk Recommends

September 2, 2010

Remind Me Again Why We Pay the Intelligence Bureaucracy?

Posted by Karen Kwiatkowski on September 2, 2010 06:48 PM

This detailed geo-statistical analysis entitled “The Fog of War: The Geography of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Logs 2004-2009″ has been published, not much more than a month after Wikileaks made available to the world six years of Afghanistan records and reports. The study was honestly, scientifically, and nimbly completed and published at no direct cost to the intelligence community. It was made possible by the decentralization, fluidity, and constant sharing and shifting of roles and responsibilities that comprise the Internet. As I read through this lucid analysis, I recalled the recently published Washington Post project, Top Secret America. Both the Post and the researchers in “Fog of War” tried to be careful not to step on government toes, but the very process and existence of these kinds of analyses are cause for great optimism, and provide a strong justification to radically slash government spending on intelligence that the state has proven to be unable to use effectively.

Phi Beta Iota: Michael Ostrolenk, our newest contributing editor, is a Libertarian with a very broad range of policy interests and an innate desire to use the taxpayer dollar wisely. The cited item leads to two different pdf files, each with multiple color-coded maps.

2010/09/02

Journal: Mathematicians Get it Wrong…Again

04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Health, 11 Society, Academia, Cultural Intelligence, Officers Call

Monday, August 30, 2010

Mathematicians Create Objective Quality of Life Index

The US comes second in a new quality of life index designed to be mathematically objective

Phi Beta Iota: The explanation of this is wrong. There is nothing “objective” about it, and nothing “subjective” about the other indexes. What is useful here is “elastic mapping”. A linear model makes things seem clear, but it introduces distortions. A non-linear modeling technique, while confusing in one sense because you don't know exactly how it works, it still sensible if you use an image, as they do here, of relaxing springs among all the nodes. And the result is less distortion, less to criticize, and more opportunity to consider the meaning, as they do here. GDP gets you something, but health gets you something else, and it would be nice to have a mathematical rule that doesn't make it completely arbitrary how you balance the two, or the many contrastive factors that you choose.

2010/07/302010/07/30

Event: 10-12 Sept 2010, Berlin, Interdependence Day

02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Event page

Berlin, Germany 2010

In 2010 Interdependence Day will be celebrated in a dynamic global city and cultural melting pot at the heart of Europe.

> INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

In a world where global interdependence is not simply an aspiration of idealists, but a brute fact of the forces that bind us together— global warming, financial capital, AIDS, telecommunications, crime, migration, and terrorism—many people still think in narrow, insular terms.

Reality is global, but consciousness too often remains local — constrained by town and nation.

In the year 2000, a small group of scholars, civic and political leaders, and artists from a dozen nations met to design a program that might help raise consciousness around the realities and possibilities of interdependence. Their efforts were given impetus by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the group created a project that would:

> Make September 12, the day following the memorial of 9/11, an international celebration of interdependence “Interdependence Day”

> Draw up a “Declaration of Interdependence”, making clear that both liberty and security require cooperation among peoples and nations and can no longer be secured by sovereign nations working unilaterally;

> Develop a Civic Interdependence Curriculum that would make interdependence a central concept in Civics and Social Studies programs in middle and high schools in as many schools around the world as possible.

2010/07/232010/07/23

Building an Audio Collection for All the World’s Languages

04 Education, Academia, Audio, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Languages-Translation

The Rosetta Project is pleased to announce the Parallel Speech Corpus Project, a year-long volunteer-based effort to collect parallel recordings in languages representing at least 95% of the world’s speakers. The resulting corpus will include audio recordings in hundreds of languages of the same set of texts, each accompanied by a transcription. This will provide a platform for creating new educational and preservation-oriented tools as well as technologies that may one day allow artificial systems to comprehend, translate, and generate them.

Continue reading “Building an Audio Collection for All the World’s Languages”

2010/07/202010/07/20

Event: 7-30 July 2010, Ft. Collins CO, International Development Design Summit

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Health, 12 Water, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Strategy, Technologies

Event link

The International Development Design Summit is an intense, hands-on design experience that brings together people from all over the world and all walks of life to create technologies and enterprises that improve the lives of people living in poverty. Unlike most academic conferences, we emphasize the development of prototypes, not papers and proceedings. In moving the technologies on the path from idea to implementation to impact we aim to create real ventures, not just business plans. IDDS is part of the revolution in design that aims to encourage, promote, and build more research and development resources that focus on the needs of the world’s poor. We draw inspiration from several current models of innovation, design and community empowerment: co-creation, cross-disciplinary collaborations and crowd sourcing.

IDDS is a diverse group of people. We come from more than 20 countries around the world—from Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and Central America. We are students and teachers, professors and pastors, economists and engineers, masons and mechanics, doctors, welders, farmers, and community organizers. One of the things that makes IDDS a special conference is this richness of backgrounds. It is a conference about innovation, and we believe that innovation thrives in the intersections of disciplines that come from bringing together such an eclectic group.

We believe very strongly in the idea of co-creation: the concept that it is better to provide communities with the skills and tools to become innovators and develop new technologies themselves rather than to simply providing the technologies. We believe that developing the capacity for innovation and creativity is critical for long-term sustainable improvements in the quality of life in a community. It is our goal to demonstrate a model where a user-based community of active, creative designers can invent, innovate and inspire each other to create new technologies.

But not all of our participants are from communities in the developing world. Nearly half of the our participants are students, and we hope to inspire them with the opportunity to interact with field practitioners and to see that inventiveness is not restricted to those with formal education. IDDS also provides a forum where they can meet with like-minded people who are driven by the same desire to make an impact in the world. It is our hope that by creating a diverse global network we can empower individuals and their communities to tackle the tough problems that reside in the developing world.

For this year’s event, the focus has shifted from the creation of technologies to their dissemination. Co-sponsors MIT, Franklin W. Olin College, and Cooper Perkins will be joined by the 2010 host institution, Colorado State University, in developing and implementing the curriculum. IDDS 2010 aims to guide project teams through the process of becoming viable ventures. Curriculum includes key principles from the Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise program at CSU, the D-Lab program at MIT and the Design Stream at Olin College.

Event Link

2010/07/122010/07/12

Unhealthy “Aid” fr Industrial Food Giant’s Ship (a store on an actual ship) Peddled to Brazil’s Poor + Project Peanut Butter & Nutrients fr Moringa

01 Brazil, 01 Poverty, 07 Health, Academia, Corporations, Gift Intelligence, Government, International Aid, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Link to article (ship of junkfood to feed poor, helping them become more susceptible to illness?) Photo Credit: Marie Hippenmeyer, Nestle

AlterNet / By Michele Simon

Nestle Stoops to New Low, Launches Barge to Peddle Junk Food on the Amazon River to Brazil's Poor

Has Big Food already run out of customers in cities and other locales that are more readily accessible by land?

July 8, 2010 |

Last month Nestlé announced that it, the world's largest food company, would soon start delivering its products to the far reaches of Brazil. But not in the usual way, through a distributor, which in turn delivers products for sale in actual stores. Rather, the plan is to sell to customers directly from its own ship. Full article here

Comment: Although more related to malnutrition and not general eating habits of the poor, Project Peanut Butter's Ready to Use Therapeutic Foods (RUTFs) are of worthy mention. They work with USAID, Doctors Without Borders, The Clinton Foundation, UNICEF, Save the Children, and Concern Worldwide (all listed here). However, it is surprising how much of a somewhat low profile they have when they are associated with such a major global need. In 2009, the Earth Intelligence Network identified the connection-need between Project Peanut Butter and the Malnutrition Surveillance Project (plus the Moringa Tree leaves to be used in food aid) and contacted UNICEF and those associated with the Malnutrition Surveillance Project team but did not receive any clear feedback about these ideas. Another inquiry was sent to UNICEF today.

Related:
+ Report: The 2008 Copenhagen Consensus ranked micronutrient supplements as the top development priority out of more than 40 interventions considered.
+ Moringa tree leave nutrients and this recent report on its water filtration qualities
+ Review (Guest): The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick – And What We Can Do About It

How to keep someone with you forever (common enslavement tactics)

Michael Ostrolenk Recommends September 2, 2010

Mathematicians Create Objective Quality of Life Index

Michael Ostrolenk Recommends

September 2, 2010