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Shilpa Phadnis

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Bangalore: Money transfer company Western Union believes in tapping fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.

The company is tying up with microfinance institutions (MFIs) and e-governance service providers to facilitate financial inclusion.

This marks a shift in its India game plan, to offer money transfer services through MFIs besides its current portfolio of India Post network, banks, retail and finance agents.

The Nasdaq-listed company has tied up with e-governance and IT solutions provider CMS Computers, which has government's mandate to roll out more than 17,000 e-governance locations across India.

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2009/10/302009/10/30

Search: Civitas Maxima

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Searches, Threats

Intriguing and illuminating. Thank you.

Amazon Page

Harold Laski: Problems of Democracy, the Sovereign State, and International Society

Laski's concerns turn out to have much in common with those of present-day social democratic commentators – in particular the capacity of a state to effect social justice in conditions of global interdependence.

Peter Lamb's study of this overly neglected thinker is a highly relevant recovery. This lucid, well-judged and sympathetic account of Laski's later thought on the ‘myth' of the sovereign state is highly pertinent for cosmopolitan democrats, students of normative international relations and seekers of a genuinely radical ‘third way'.

Continue reading “Search: Civitas Maxima”

2009/10/302009/10/30

Search: World-Wide Linguist Supply

Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time, Threats, Tools

Great search, thank you.

The OSS-EIN solution for this problem is as follows:

1. All World Language human linguist-interpreters

2. Telelanguage (an open source software) registration for in-house and for-fee linguists

3. Via InfoSphere AB in Sweden, European graduate students fluent in the target language and competent in English, French, or German also

It was the latter that allowd us to find, evaluate, and report on 396 terrorist, insurgent, and opposition web sites in 29 languages over the the course of 60 days for under $60,000 in 1997. We still do this today, using cover support plans as needed.

The solution requires that the client not be an idiot and demand US citizenship and any kind of US clearance for translations that can be handled in near real time. For example, captured Dari documents inthe field should be digitized within minutes and translated within hours. Anyone that cannot do this for our troops fighting in the field should be fired.

2009/10/282009/10/28

Journal: Afghanistan & America’s Loss of Integrity I

Government, Military

Foreign Service Office & Former Marine Resigns

Full Explanation Letter Available Online

This officer's letter is both extraordinary and common–it is extraordinary in its demonstration of integrity and common sense, and common in that we all feel this way less a few craven individuals so enamoured of power they have forgotten where they left their integrity.

2009/10/28

Journal: Afghanistan & America’s Loss of Integrity II

05 Civil War, Government, Military

Blood for nothing

GIs die while Taliban thrives

Ralph Peters

October 28, 2009

AFGHANISTAN isn't com pletely hopeless, just use less. It's a strategic joke with a bloody punch line. Even if everything went perfectly in Afghanistan — which it won't — the results would be virtually meaningless: Our mortal enemies (above all, al Qaeda) have dug in elsewhere, from Pakistan to Somalia. … From line doggies up to bird colonels (and even a few junior generals), there's a powerful sense that we're throwing away soldiers' lives for theories that just don't work. We enforce rules of engagement that kill our own troops to avoid alienating villagers who actively support the Taliban and celebrate our deaths. …

Iraq made sense to me. The stakes there were (and are) enormous. But Afghanistan's a strategic vacuum that sucks in resources and lives to no sensible purpose. By propping up President Karzai's government of thieves and attempting to force our vision on Afghanistan we've rescued a defeated Taliban from oblivion. So much for COIN theory.

Killing our nation's enemies always makes sense. Sacrificing our troops for the Pentagon's equivalent of Beanie Babies is despicable. Won't a single four-star general stand up and be counted?

2009/10/272009/10/27

Journal: Internet Language Shake-Out

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Key Players

Net set for ‘language shake-up'

By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News

The internet is on the brink of the “biggest change” to its working “since it was invented 40 years ago”, the net regulator Icann has said.

The body said it that it was finalising plans to introduce web addresses using non-Latin characters.

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2009/10/252009/10/25

Journal: Why Bail-Out Has Not Reduced Foreclosures

03 Economy, 06 Family, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement

Assuming there is no fraud among the buyers and sellers in a market exchange, Caveat Emptor — the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for determining the quality and suitablity of goods or services before a purchase is made — is the cornerstone of free market ideology. Implicit in this belief is the necessary albeit patently absurd condition in economic price theory that reliable information is freely available to the all the parties and potential parties to an economic exchange. After all, if information were truly free, the data processing and data-free manipulation industry of the post industrial society and its contemporary successor, the post-information era (an era synthesized by the petri dish of Pentagon, but now acculturated by the media and Wall Street), would be a non sequiturs. Today, for example, we have an economy where advertisers can profitably invest large sums of money in subliminally marketing their wares on reality TV, an invention to dumb down people, and make them more vulnerable to the subliminal marketing techniques they are being subjected to by conditioning viewers to substitute vicarious fantasy for realty.
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