Category: Communities of Practice

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Worth a Look: Sick Fish in the Gulf of Mexico

03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Health, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Worth A Look
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Sick fish in Gulf are alarming scientists

Unusual number a ‘huge red flag' to scientists, fishermen

pnj.com, May 8, 2011

Red snapper with abnormal stripes caught by a local commercial fisherman. Scientists are seeing a growing number of Gulf fish with lesions and other health problems and are conducting tests to determine whether they are related to the BP oil spill. / Special to the News Journal

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: If we spent just half of the current US secret intelligence budget of $80 billion a year on monitoring the Earth and creating a real-time grid for establishing the true cost of all products, services, and events (such as the Gulf oil disaster), we would be much more likely to create a prosperous world at peace.  The militarization of “security” may well be–along with the industrialization of agriculture–two of the greatest crimes against humanity in modern times.

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Worth a Look: Soldiers Breathing Bioactive Metals

07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Earth Intelligence, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Worth A Look

What harmful element were found in war-zone dust

USA Today, 11 May 2011

Sand is made up of pure silica, but deserts also include minerals that have been deposited by long-gone lakes, ground water, wind and pollution. Navy Capt. Mark Lyles' research team found 37 elements in samples of dust from Iraq and Kuwait, including 15 bioactive metals that are known to cause or have been linked to serious health effects with short- and long-term exposure, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Lyle's team measured settled dust, which servicemembers breathe when it rises into the air during a dust storm. Though the government has standards for air pollution that can contain the following elements, there are no standards for exposures to toxic elements in settled dust. The metals Lyle's team found include:

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Secrecy News: ODNI Tools for Data Fusion & Analysis

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Officers Call, Policies

ODNI DESCRIBES EMERGING TOOLS FOR DATA FUSION, ANALYSIS

Several intelligence community initiatives to develop improved tools for data search, analysis and fusion were described in the latest report to Congress (pdf) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on data mining.

A new program called DataSphere is intended “to aid in the discovery of unknown terrorism relationships and the identification of previously undetected terrorist and terrorism information” through analysis of communication networks and travel patterns.

A continuing program called Catalyst seems to be a glorified search engine that “will enable data fusion/analytic programs to share disparate repositories with each other, to disambiguate and cross-correlate the different agencies' holdings, and to discover and visualize relationship/network links, geospatial patterns, temporal patterns and related correlations.”

Although these and other initiatives do not yet constitute or engage in “data mining,” they were described in the new report “in the interest of transparency,” ODNI said. See “2010 Data Mining Report,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, April 2011.

Comment and Two Complex Links Below the Line

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Ideological Underpinnings of the “Great Society”

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Robert Higgs

Ideological Underpinnings of the “Great Society”

By Robert Higgs

Campaign for Liberty, 05/10/11

[The Freeman (March 2011). An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Steven Ng, is available for download.]

The surge of federal economic interventions that occurred during Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency — the much-ballyhooed Great Society, whose centerpiece was the War on Poverty — differed from the four preceding surges, each of which had been sparked by war or economic depression. No national emergency prevailed when Johnson took office following John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963. The nation was not engaged in a major shooting war, and the economy was on the mend after the mild recession of 1960-61. For the most part, the Great Society represented simply the culmination of economic, political, and intellectual developments stretching back as far as the 19th century.

Read full article….

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WATER Central to Man Against Nature

Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, History, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Policies, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Research resources, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats

Headlines, Comment, and Lists of Book Reviews Below the Line…

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NATO Says AF Insurgency Weakened–Really?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Peace Intelligence
DefDog Recommends....

It is amazing that nowhere in this article does it mention the media coup that the Taliban scored.  I also am not sure that the information released by NATO is accurate.  If so, it contradicts previously reported Taliban strength levels.  Nor does NATO address the recent high profile security breaches…..

NATO says insurgency weakened

By PATRICK QUINN

The Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan — NATO said Monday that it has significantly weakened the Taliban insurgency, capturing or killing thousands of militants in Afghanistan during the past three months.

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4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Geospatial, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Maps, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Venessa Miemis

4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Venessa Miemis | May 9, 2011

This post originally appeared on CNN.com's Global Public Square.

Humanity and technology continue to co-evolve at an ever increasing pace, leaving traditional institutions (and mindsets) calcified and out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, where everything is increasingly connected and the nature of collaboration, business and work are all being reshaped. In turn, our ideas about society, culture, geographic boundaries and governance are being forced to adapt to a new reality.

While some fear the loss of control associated with these shifts, others are exhilarated by the new forms of connectivity and commerce that they imply. Transactions and interactions are growing faster and more frictionless, giving birth to what I call a “superfluid” economy.

Business will not return to usual. So let's discuss 4 key concepts to help us  better understand the shifts that are underway:

1. Quantifying and mapping everything
2. Everyone has access to the internet
3. Self-organizing expands
4. Peer-to-peer exchange changes the future of money

4 Trends discussed below the line with links

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