Category: Communities of Practice

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Twitter & SMS Used to Help Election in Kenya

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Geospatial, Mobile, Peace Intelligence, Technologies
source article

How Twitter saved Kenya's election

Thu Aug 5, 2010

New York – Once again, social media has played a central role in a national election. During Kenya's recent ballot initiative to adopt a new constitution, citizens used Twitter, along with Facebook and a new breed of monitoring technology, to help eliminate the voter intimidation, bombings, and deadly violence that marred the struggling African country's disastrous 2008 election. Here, a quick guide:

How was social media used to monitor the election?
Voters reported any intimidation issues at the polls by posting Twitter messages with the hashtag #uchaguzi (the Kiswahili word for “election”), or sending SMS messages to a specially designated number. A group of volunteers tracked the messages and alerted local officials when necessary.

Besides Twitter, what other technologies were used?
A Kenyan-developed platform called Uchaguzi helped aggregate all reported problems, documenting incidents by location and type (security issues, hate speech, ballot issues) so that anyone with Internet access could get a quick overview on the Uchaguzi site. It's very new for Kenyans, Uchaguzi's Charles Kithika tells The Christian Science Monitor, to see that problems are being reported and investigated, effectively “discouraging” troublemakers.

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Event: 3-5 Nov 2010, Barcelona Spain, Drumbeat Festival 2010: Learning, freedom and the web

04 Education, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Open Government, Technologies
Main event link

The web is changing how we learn. It surrounds us with a massive and remixable tapestry of perspectives, facts and data. It gives us the freedom to learn whatever we want at our own speed and in our own way. It lets us become our own teachers. Fundamentally: the free and open nature of the internet is revolutionizing learning.

Who among us has not fallen into a long journey across the web on a surprising topic? Or learned a new skill by making, building or creating something online? Or, for that matter, found a new mentor or apprentice in a forum or on a social network? More and more, this is how we learn.

The open technology and culture of the internet are at the heart of this revolution. They give us raw material to take control of our own learning. Teachers and learners around the world are experimenting, inventing, creating, exploring and building in wonderful ways with this raw material. Mozilla's 2010 Drumbeat Festival is a gathering of these people.

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Journal: Over $1 trillion Wasted on Wars, Veterans and Families of Veterans Vocal Against Both Elective Wars

02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 10 Security, Civil Society, Government, Military
source article

$1 trillion wasted on wars

By KEVIN RAFFERTY
Aug 4, 2010
Special to The Japan Times

HONG KONG — The calculator busily counting out how much money the United States has spent on wars since 2001 has raced past $1 trillion — $1,024 billion plus at the start of August. There is little point in trying to give a more refined figure since the clock ticks remorselessly on, mesmerizingly faster than you can write the sum down, about $260,000 blown away in each passing minute.*

Meanwhile, the wars are being lost rather than won, U.S. and allied soldiers are dying and being maimed every day, tens and sometimes hundreds of innocent civilians are killed daily, and billions of dollars are being wasted and millions of lives being destroyed for no good reason apart from the overweening egos of politicians who are not prepared to admit that they are wrong.

Accompanying Veterans Today article (Obama burning with Bush)

The grim bottom line is that American military and foreign policy is bust and the greatest imperial power the world has ever known is failing. U.S. President Barack Obama promised to be different, but he has become trapped as a gear-lever in the same broken machine.

Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the stunning graphics, click on the photo of the two faces stitched together to get to a compelling article on veterans and families of veterans being against both elective wars, both wars of the rich of no benefit to the public.

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: India Wrong Force On Maoists

03 India, 05 Civil War, 10 Security, Civil Society, Law Enforcement

India: In eastern India, the Maoist insurgents have neutralized yet another large police contingent.  About 70 police personnel are missing on 4 August in the Chhattisgarh forests following a gunfight between heavily-armed Maoists and police in Dantewada area, India, The Times of India reported. Maoists reportedly attacked a search party of the state police in a heavily forested region of Gumiapal, near Kirandul.

The key point of the item is that the India state police forces seem incapable of learning. The location of the attack is the same set of forests where hundreds of police have been killed this year, almost in defiance of central government warnings and advisories. Counterinsurgency means something entirely different in India than it does at Fort Leavenworth.

The Indians continue to rely on policemen and law enforcement forces to handle people who break the law. They consider Army forces and other armed services not appropriate or trained for handling law breakers.

NIGHTWATCH KSG Home

Phi Beta Iota: No government has achieved “whole of government” intelligence, which is a precursor to whole of government planning, programming, and budgeting, and of course to whole of government policy, acquisition, and operations.  See the Graphics, especially on Intelligence (Im)Maturity and Whole of Government.  Collated graphics at Information Sharing and at Connecting the Dots.

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Video: “Twinkie Deconstructed” Author Shows Strange Origins & Nexus of Ingredients

07 Health, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Graphics, True Cost, True Cost, Videos/Movies/Documentaries
From TwinkieDeconstructed.com

In this fascinating exploration into the curious world of packaged foods, Twinkie, Deconstructed takes us from phosphate mines in Idaho to corn fields in Iowa, from gypsum mines in Oklahoma to oil fields in China, to demystify some of America’s most common processed food ingredients—where they come from, how they are made, how they are used—and why. Beginning at the source (hint: they’re often more closely linked to rocks and petroleum than any of the four food groups), Steve Ettlinger reveals how each Twinkie ingredient goes through the process of being crushed, baked, fermented, refined, and/or reacted into a totally unrecognizable goo or powder with a strange name—all for the sake of creating a simple snack cake.

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Who is Aware, Talking, & Testing Receipts for Bisphenol-A, not just Food & Beverages?

07 Health, Civil Society, Commerce, Government, True Cost

Paper receipts also seen as source of BPA exposure
July 27, 2010 By LYNDSEY LAYTON. The Washington Post
WASHINGTON – As lawmakers and health experts wrestle over whether a controversial chemical, bisphenol-A, should be banned from food and beverage containers, a new analysis by an environmental group suggests Americans are being exposed to BPA through another, surprising route: paper receipts.  The Environmental Working Group found BPA on 40 percent of the receipts it collected from supermarkets, automated teller machines, gas stations and chain stores. In some cases, the total amount of BPA on the receipt was 1,000 times the amount found in the epoxy lining of a can of food, another controversial use of the chemical. Sonya Lunder, a senior analyst with the environmental group, says BPA's prevalence on receipts could help explain why the chemical can be detected in the urine of an estimated 93 percent of Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Full article here

Concerned about BPA: Check your receipts
By Janet Raloff, Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Some — but not all — cash-register and credit-card receipts can be rich sources of exposure to BPA, a hormone-mimicking pollutant.

While working at Polaroid Corp. for more than a decade, John C. Warner learned about the chemistry behind some carbonless copy papers (now used for most credit card receipts) and the thermal imaging papers that are spit out by most modern cash registers. Both relied on bisphenol-A.

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