Category: Communities of Practice

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Jon Rappoport: Every TV Newscast is Theater — Keeping Your Mind Small

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Idiocy, Media
Jon Rappoport
Jon Rappoport

Every television newscast is a staged event

by Jon Rappoport

May 9, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

EXTRACT

It would never occur to him to wonder: are the squabbling political legislators really two branches of the same Party?  Does government have the Constitutional right to incur this much debt?  Where is all that money coming from?  Taxes?  Other sources?  Who invents money?

Is the flu dangerous for most people?  If not, why not?  Do governments overstate case numbers?  How do they actually test patients for the flu?  Are the tests accurate?  Are they just trying to convince us to get vaccines?

What happens when the government has overwhelming force and citizens have no guns?

When the researchers keep saying “may” and “could,” does that mean they’ve actually discovered something useful about Autism, or are they just hyping their own work and trying to get funding for their next project?

These are only a few of the many questions the typical viewer never considers.

Therefore, every story on the news broadcast achieves the goal of keeping the context small and narrow—night after night, year after year.  The overall effect of this, yes, staging, is small viewer, small viewer’s mind, small viewer’s understanding.

Billions of dollars are spent by the networks to build a reality the size of a room in a cheap motel.

Read full article.

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Berto Jongman: Russian Special Oprations Expansion

Military
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Russia's New Tip of the Spear

What's got the Kremlin so worried that it created a Special Operations Command?

Dmitri Trenin

Foreign Policy, 8 May 2013

Addressing the Russian National Security Council meeting on May 8, President Vladimir Putin said that the forthcoming departure of U.S. and coalition forces from Afghanistan confronts Russia with a more precarious situation on its southern borders. Valery Gerasimov, Russia's chief of the General Staff since November 2012, who was also present at the meeting, had announced last month the formation of a Special Operations Command — Russia's version of SOCOM. According to Gen. Gerasimov, the new command will include a special forces brigade, a training center, and helicopter and air transportation squadrons. These forces will be used exclusively outside Russian territory, including in U.N.-mandated operations. Creation of a separate SOCOM is not a new idea; it had been presented to Anatoly Serdyukov, who retired last fall as defense minister amid allegations of corruption in the Ministry of Defense (MOD), and who rejected it. The new minister, Sergei Shoigu, decided differently. What's behind this about face?

As Russia proceeds with its defense modernization, it's following the general trend toward specialization and enhanced mobility. Conflicts that have erupted since the end of the Cold War have put a premium on operations by relatively small and agile forces capable of engaging the enemy at a considerable distance, with no warning and deadly effectiveness. Such units existed in the days of the Cold War, too, but their role in World War III scenarios (that the Russian military is still largely built for) was essentially auxiliary to the tactical nuclear strikes and armored forces operations. With the dramatic change of the enemy and of the combat environment, special forces can play a more central role, critical to achieving success.

Read full article.

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Mini-Me: Air Force Nuclear Rotten; Nuclear Budget Waste to Point of Treason — Where, We Ask, Does the Buck Stop on This Nonsense?

08 Proliferation, Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military
Who? Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

AP Exclusive: Air Force sidelines 17 nuclear missile officers; commander cites ‘rot’ in system

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel demanded more information Wednesday after the Air Force removed 17 launch officers from duty at a nuclear missile base in North Dakota over what a commander called “rot” in the force. The Air Force struggled to explain, acknowledging concern about an “attitude problem” but telling Congress the weapons were secure.

Huh, Huh?

Proponents of ‘First Strike’ Nuclear War against Iran ROB BILLIONS from Their Own Citizens: Multibillion War Budgets

While the Pentagon’s modernization budget for the pre-emptive nuclear option is a modest ten billion dollars (excluding the outlay by NATO countries). the budget for upgrading the US arsenal of “strategic nuclear offensive forces” is a staggering $352 billion over ten years. (See Russell Rumbaugh and Nathan Cohn,“Resolving Ambiguity: Costing Nuclear Weapons,” Stimson Center Report, June 2012).

These multi-billion military outlays allocated to develop“bigger and better nuclear bombs” are financed by the massive economic austerity measures currently applied in US and NATO countries.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Air Force Nuclear Rotten; Nuclear Budget Waste to Point of Treason — Where, We Ask, Does the Buck Stop on This Nonsense?”

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Stephen E. Arnold: A Fresh Look at Big Data & Big Data (-) Human Factor (+) Transformation (+) RECAP

Access, Advanced Cyber/IO, Architecture, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Design, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Strategy, Threats
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

A Fresh Look at Big Data

May 8, 2013

Next week I am doing an invited talk in London. My subject is search and Big Data. I will be digging into this notion in this month’s Honk newsletter and adding some business intelligence related comments at an Information Today conference in New York later this month. (I have chopped the number of talks I am giving this year because at my age air travel and the number of 20 somethings at certain programs makes me jumpy.)

I want to highlight one point in my upcoming London talk; namely, the financial challenge which companies face when they embrace Big Data and then want to search the information in the system and search the Big Data system’s outputs.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Notice that precision and recall has not improved significantly over the last 30 years. I anticipate that many search vendors will tell me that their systems deliver excellent precision and recall. I am not convinced. The data which I have reviewed show that over a period of 10 years most systems hit the 80 to 85 percent precision and recall level for content which is about a topic. Content collections composed of scientific, technical, and medical information where the terminology is reasonably constrained can do better. I have seen scores above 90 percent. However, for general collections, precision and recall has not been improving relative to the advances in other disciplines; for example, converting structured data outputs to fancy graphics.

 

I don’t want to squabble about precision and recall. The main point is that when an organization mashes Big Data with search, two curves must be considered. The first is the complexity curve. The idea is that search is a reasonably difficult system to implement in an effective manner. The addition of a Big Data system adds another complex task. When two complex tasks are undertaken at the same time, the costs go up.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: A Fresh Look at Big Data & Big Data (-) Human Factor (+) Transformation (+) RECAP”

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Marcus Aureleus: From 1 to 10 Camouflage Patterns – Study in Washington Redundancy & Waste — USAF Denies Spending $500M on Digital Cloak to Create Invisible Airmen

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius

With 10 patterns, U.S. military branches out on camouflage front

By ,

Washington Post, Published: May 8, 2013

In 2002, the U.S. military had just two kinds of camouflage uniforms. One was green, for the woods. The other was brown, for the desert.Then things got strange.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Today, there is one camouflage pattern just for Marines in the desert. There is another just for Navy personnel in the desert. The Army has its own “universal” camouflage pattern, which is designed to work anywhere. It also has another one just for Afghanistan, where the first one doesn’t work.

Even the Air Force has its own unique camouflage, used in a new Airman Battle Uniform. But it has flaws. So in Afghanistan, airmen are told not to wear it in battle.

In just 11 years, two kinds of camouflage have turned into 10. And a simple aspect of the U.S. government has emerged as a complicated and expensive case study in federal duplication.

Duplication is one of Washington’s most expensive traditions: Multiple agencies do the same job at the same time, and taxpayers pay billions for the government to repeat itself.

The habit remains stubbornly hard to break, even in an era of austerity. There are, for instance, at least 209 federal programs to improve science and math skills. There are 16 programs that teach personal finance.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The above do not include the range of uniforms in black, brown, green, blue, and white.  There is absolutely no truth to allegation that the USAF has spent $500M on an invisibility cloak for airmen.  That is a DARPA project, ranked slightly higher in priority than the automated dog.  Meanwhile, OmB (the Management is silent) continues to punch numbers without actually thinking about substance.

DuckDuckGo / DARPA invisibility cloak

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Berto Jongman: Former Department of State Top Lawyer on How to End the Forever War

Ethics, Government
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Three propositions:

(1)  Disengage from Afghanistan
(2) Close Guantanamo
(3) Discipline Drones

“How to End the Forever War?”
Harold Hongju Koh

Oxford Union, Oxford, UK
May 7, 2013

EXTRACT:

My former professor and former Legal Adviser Abram Chayes once said, after he had sued the United States government from the academy, “I have always thought there is nothing
wrong with an American lawyer holding the United States to its own best standards.”

It is in that spirit that tonight, from this important podium, I call my country to its own best values and principles.

noble gold