Today’s educational system is all about standardization. We treat every kid the same. But not every kid learns the same. Some need the microscopic first, others the macroscopic. Some people are tangential learners, some prefer their facts in a linear fashion. Some are quick, others slow. Thankfully, this is changing.
. . . . . . .
Microscopic learning doesn’t really harness this system. It builds the patterns up slowly, one block at a time, but rarely does it require the kind of intuitive BIG PATTERN RECOGNITION that macroscopic learning demands. By keeping things microscopic, we’re keeping things boring. Sure, kids learn this way, but not all kids and, anyway, it’s not much fun.
UN member states have historically been hesitant to provide the UN with an intelligence-collection mandate at either strategic (headquarters) or operational (field) levels. However, the increased size, length and complexity of peacekeeping operations, compounded by severe security threats to UN personnel, make a stronger UN intelligence capability in the field increasingly necessary.
I had occasion to look at the Report of the Secretary General on the Work of the Organization, and thought this would be a good time to integrate some of what I have learned from working directly with the United Nations (UN), and what I believe could be helpful to the UN as it contemplates “next steps” into the 21st Century. My thoughts are deeply rooted in my perception of how badly governments have failed at governance, and how dysfunctional the Industrial Era approach to bureaucracy and information channeling has become. As the world prepares to migrate to hybrid forms of public governance, the UN's Industrial Era forms of organization and delivery are an impediment to its future viability. That is a challenge I would like to address, treating the UN as the logical hub for my emergent theory and practice of Public Governance (a mosaic) replacing Public Administration (a stovepipe) in the 21st Century.
Below the line is the document I have drafted in full text, followed by a number of links that are not in the document.
“It is my conviction that the global problems we face today are simply too complex to be solved by Governments alone. They require collective and coordinated action by Government, by the private sector, by civil society, by academia, and by international organizations and multilateral development banks. Over the next year, I will develop a comprehensive proposal which seeks to harness the power of partnership.”
Priority areas for support should be targeted, better matching these areas with goals and targets, and specific means and tools to reach them should be identified.
EXTRACT from today's HONG (email only, not online or indexed by intent):
The big news is the emergence of open source search options. Until recently, open source search was not main stream. Today, open source search solutions are main stream. IBM relies on Lucene/Solr for some of its search functions. IBM also owns Web Fountain, STAIRS, iPhrase, Vivisimo, and the SPSS Clementine technology, among others. IBM is interesting because it has used open source search technology to reduce costs and tap into a source of developer talent. Attivio, a company which just raised $42 million in additional venture funding, relies on open source search.
We have completed an analysis of a dozen of the most interesting open source search vendors for a big time consulting firm. What struck the ArnoldIT research team was:
One of the advantages of working at QCRI is that I’m regularly exposed to peer-reviewed papers presented at top computing conferences. This is how I came across an initiative called “Seriously Rapid Source Review” or SRSR. As many iRevolution readers know, I’m very interested in information forensics as applied to crisis situations. So SRSR certainly caught my attention.
The team behind SRSR took a human centered design approach in order to integrate journalistic practices within the platform. There are four features worth noting in this respect. The first feature to note in the figure below is the automated filter function, which allows one to view tweets generated by “Ordinary People,” “Journalists/Bloggers,” “Organizations,” “Eyewitnesses” and “Uncategorized.”
The second feature, Location, “shows a set of pie charts indica-ting the top three locations where the user’s Twitter contacts are located. This cue provides more location information and indicates whether the source has a ‘tie’ or other personal interest in the location of the event, an aspect of sourcing exposed through our preliminary interviews and suggested by related work.”
In 2012, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached the National Research Council's TIGER standing committee and asked it to develop a list of workshop topics to explore the impact of emerging science and technology. From the list of topics given to DIA, three were chosen to be developed by the Committee for Science and Technology Challenges to U.S. National Security Interests. The first in a series of three workshops was held on April 23-24, 2012. This report summarizes that first workshop which explored the phenomenon known as big data.
The objective for the first workshop is given in the statement of task, which explains that that workshop will review emerging capabilities in large computational data to include speed, data fusion, use, and commodification of data used in decision making. The workshop will also review the subsequent increase in vulnerabilities over the capabilities gained and the significance to national security. The committee devised an agenda that helped the committee, sponsors, and workshop attendees probe issues of national security related to so-called big data, as well as gain understanding of potential related vulnerabilities. The workshop was used to gather data that is described in this report, which presents views expressed by individual workshop participants.
Big Data: A Workshop Report is the first in a series of three workshops, held in early 2012 to further the ongoing engagement among the National Research Council's (NRC's) Technology Insight-Gauge, Evaluate, and Review (TIGER) Standing Committee, the scientific and technical intelligence (S&TI) community, and the consumers of S&TI products.
Improving United Nations Intelligence
