The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
United Nations says encryption and online anonymity are basic human rights
The ability to anonymize yourself online and encrypt your data and communications is fundamental to free expression and should be a protected human right, a United Nations report said Thursday. The agency added that the tools are “necessary for the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in the digital age.”
Foreign Funding of Think Tanks Is Corrupting Our Democracy
The New York Times has published over the weekend [9 Sep 14] an excellent study of how foreign governments are buying influence at Washington’s think tanks. According to the story, foreign governments are not only getting prominent think tanks to embrace their views of what is in America’s interest, but to lobby for these views with politicians and high officials.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Corruption of US Think Tanks”
Open Cooperativism for the P2P Age
Our recommendations for the new era of open cooperativism are:
1. That coops need to be statutorily (internally) oriented towards the common good
2. That coops need to have governance models including all stakeholders
Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Open Cooperativism for the P2P Age”
Transparify Will Begin Re-Rating All Think Tanks In December
Phi Beta Iota: A useful step. However, at least as critical is evaluating the sources and methods used or not used by “think tanks.” Most — such as the Brookings Institute — do not use citation analytics and do not do substantive foreign language research. “Multidisciplinary” is not a term in vogue among these largely pedestrian entities. Holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering are foreign concepts to all of them.
The United Nations has a population control policy. Are vaccines used in an underhand way to forward a secret program of pharmaceutical sterilisation?
‘A mass sterilization exercise’: Kenyan doctors find anti-fertility agent in UN tetanus vaccine
This WHO campaign is not about eradicating neonatal tetanus but a well-coordinated forceful population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility regulating vaccine.' Kenya’s Catholic bishops are charging two United Nations organizations with sterilizing millions of girls and women under cover of an anti-tetanus inoculation program sponsored by the Kenyan government. According to a statement released Tuesday by the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, the organization has found an antigen that causes miscarriages in a vaccine being administered to 2.3 million girls and women by the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Priests throughout Kenya reportedly are advising their congregations to refuse the vaccine.
Establishing Social Media Hashtag Standards for Disaster Response
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has just published an important, must-read report on the use of social media for disaster response. As noted by OCHA, this document was inspired by conversations with my team and I at QCRI. We jointly recognize that innovation in humanitarian technology is not enough. What is needed—and often lacking—is innovation in policymaking. Only then can humanitarian technology have widespread impact. This new think piece by OCHA seeks to catalyze enlightened policymaking.
Thinking, they are.
Towards a Data Revolution
This summer UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon established the Independent Expert Advisory Group (IAEG) to provide concrete recommendations on how to achieve a Data Revolution for sustainable development. The IEAG report – due in early November – will be a crucial opportunity to explain how better quality and more timely data can transform development. The group is also looking for innovative approaches to data collection, publication, and use.
To solicit input from all communities of practice – particularly academia – the IAEG is hosting a public consultation at undatarevolution.org to solicit input into its work until October 15, 2015. In spite of the short notice, we strongly encourage you to submit your ideas and suggestions for the data revolution. Please share this message widely and provide your comments on the IEAG website.
