Advanced Cyber/IO – Page 146 – Public Intelligence Blog

Elsevier Versus Wikipedia: Academics Revolt Against Giant Publisher

by Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch Blog

CorpWatch, May 11th, 2012

Over 11,000 academics have pledged to boycott Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant, for profiting off their work and making it unavailable to the general public. Now Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is about to turn the world of corporate academic publishing on its head, in the same way that his website effectively took down Encyclopedia Britannica.

Elsevier is part of the Anglo-Dutch company Reed Elsevier, which had 2010 revenues of $9.3 billion and annual profits of over $1.67 billion. It publishes over 250,000 articles in some 2,000 journals a year that range from global publications like the Lancet to more specific ones like the Journal of the Egyptian Mathematical Society.

Some of these journals are very expensive. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, for example, sells for $31,000 to Japanese subscribers and $25,000 a year to European and Iranian subscribers. (The rest of the world can buy it for a mere $20,930 a year!) There is a market: University libraries in the UK alone spend over $320 million to make these publications available to their students.

Publishers like Elsevier knew they were onto a good thing because before the arrival of the Internet, there was no other way for researchers to tell their peers about the important work they were doing, or vice versa. Plus getting published in a respectable journal was also the key to keeping academic jobs and getting promotions, so the researchers and professors – like rock musicians and best-selling writers – were leery about giving away their work for free.

“(P)ublishing companies became the de facto gatekeepers to scientific knowledge, restricting who could see the latest ideas rather than allowing ideas to spread as far as possible,” writes Aloke Jha in the Guardian.

Continue reading “David Isenberg: Death for Reed-Elsevier, Life for Knowledge”

2012/05/10

Sepp Hassleberger: Open Source Car Created in Three Months – Interview

03 Economy, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Future-Oriented, Hacking, Liberation Technology, Methods & Process

Interviewing Joe Justice from Team Wikispeed on the Future of Manufacturing (and Consumption)

Joe Justice is the ideator of Team Wikspeed: a team of volunteers distributed around the world who recently created a prototype car that is open source, modular and ultra-efficient in just three mo… …YES, in just three months compared with the years it takes traditional car manufacturers to bring out a new model.

Robert Steele: Clandestine Operations 101 + Personal Comment

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Government, Intelligence (government)

steele smiling final — Robert David STEELE Vivas

Clandestine Operations 101

Here's how to create a clandestine service that is not the laughing stock of the planet:

00 Stop confusing secure field operations with any need for access to official secrets. The primary reason CIA is such a mess is the ascendance of security ignorance and myopia combined with sedentary overly fearful managers unable to do anything from outside an official cover safety net.

01 Recruit mid-career US citizens who have unwittingly created their own cover and access. Do not assign them anything requiring more than 10% of their time.

02 Recruit mid-career non-US citizens, same as above, they never visit HQS or touch secrets not collected by themselves.

03 Get back in the business of Principal Agents (PA) from all countries, same selection concept as above (mid-career, have the cover and access desired).

04 Start doing multinational regional clandestine stations, using indigenous case officers (the Australians and Cambodians seem to have this down pat) while providing close-in technical, money, and leads from the constellation.

05 Be more aggressive (with appropriate caution) in doing what one of my mentors termed “it's just business.” One time offers based on outcomes, no polygraphs, no approvals from HQS people out of touch with reality, etcetera.

ON A PERSONAL NOTE

It has come to my attention that someone describing themselves as one of my classmates has said that I nearly killed people in El Salvador, had an accident, and was effectively non-operational from 1982 on. Since half my class quit within five years, by my calculation there should be no more than one or two of my graduating class (I skipped interims and jumped one class, I remember no one from my EOD class.

Below are the facts, without any grudges. What I learned from my experiences within CIA remains priceless and has informed my persistent efforts to reform US intelligence.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Clandestine Operations 101 + Personal Comment”

2012/05/09

Reference: CRS on the Concept of “Partnership” in National Security

Advanced Cyber/IO

In Brief: Clarifying the Concept of “Partnership” in National Security

Catherine Dale
Specialist in International Security

May 4, 2012

2012-05-09 CRS on Partnership

Phi Beta Iota: This 12 page document is hugely important at multiple levels. Strategically it makes clear that an important concept is not yet properly defined, understood, or leverages. Operationally it raises the vital–but unanswered–question of what any partnership implies or explicitly demands in relation to C4I: shared communications, computing, directive or voluntary command and control, and of course information-sharing, intelligence (decision-support) burden-sharing, and harmonization of spending and behavior through a shared view (shared information and intelligence) of the challenge and a shared role among the stakeholders in developing “commander's intent.” The concept of “going local” is fundamental, and also not properly defined–nor the information-sharing and intelligence-sharing implications addressed. Finally, the report–a truly articulate contribution–avoids (understandably) the really strategic question: if and when all of this can be made to work against a non-existent threat (terrorism, which is a tactic not a threat), imagine what it could do if we trained, equipped, and organized Whole of Government to actually address the public interest across the ten high-level threats by harmonizing how we manage the twelve core policies?

2012/05/09

Howard Rheingold: The Return of Liberal Arts and General Education

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO

Info Capacity 1 One in a million: Information vs. Attention

From a special section of the International Journal of Communication — Howard

“Aristotle could write that we ascribe “universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has a like ability merely in some special subject.” Today nobody can know about everything. The flow of information so far exceeds what anyone can observe, learn, or appreciate that we must look at methods of compression, summarization, and filtering. These methods must achieve reductions of a million to one to cope with what is now routine. Fortunately, technology is making this possible.”

Learn more.

2012/05/092012/05/09

Patrick Meier: Advice to Future PhDs from 2 Unusual Graduating PhDs – Blog Twitter Hybrid Teach-Consult Dissertation Focus

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Officers Call

Advice to Future PhDs from 2 Unusual Graduating PhDs

Next week I will be attending my official graduation from The Fletcher School to receive my PhD diploma. It is—in a word—surreal. I've been working on my PhD for almost as long as I've known my good friend and colleague Chris Albon, which is to say, a long time. Chris is also a newly minted political science PhD and recently joined the FrontlineSMS team as the director of their Governance Project. Needless to say, our paths have crossed on many occasions over the years and we've had many long conversations about the scholar-practitioner path that we've taken. With graduation just a few days away, we thought we'd write-up this joint post to share our pearls of wisdom with future PhDs.

First: blog, blog, blog! The blog is the new CV. If you don't exist dynamically online, then you're not indexable on the web. And if you're not indexable, then you're not searchable or discoverable. You don't exist! Blog-ergo-sum, simple as that. Chris and I have been blogging for years and this has enabled us to further our knowledge and credibility, not to mention our of network of contacts. The blog allows you to build your own independent brand, not your advisor’s and not your program’s. This is critical. We've received consulting gigs and keynote invitations based on blog posts that we've published over the years. Do not underestimate the power of blogging for your professional (and yes, academic) career. In many ways, blogging is about getting credit for your ideas and to signal to others what you know and what your interests are.

Second: get on Twitter! Malcolm Gladwell is wrong: social media can build strong-tie bonds. Heck, social media is how I originally met Chris. If the blog is the new CV, then consider your Twitter account the new business card. Use Twitter to meet everyone, everywhere. Let people know you'll be in London for a conference and don't underestimate the synergies and serendipity that is the twittersphere. Chris currently follows around 1,200 people on Twitter, and he estimates that over the years he has met around half of them in person. That is a lot of contacts and, frankly, potential employers. Moreover, like blogging, tweeting enables you to connect to others and stay abreast of interesting new developments. Once upon a time, people used to email you interesting articles, conferences, etc. I personally got on Twitter several years ago when I realized that said emails were no longer making it to my inbox. This information was now being shared via Twitter instead. Like the blog, Twitter allows you to create and manage your own personal brand.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Advice to Future PhDs from 2 Unusual Graduating PhDs – Blog Twitter Hybrid Teach-Consult Dissertation Focus”

2012/05/072012/05/07

Howard Rheingold: Online Learning About Google Search

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce

I'm glad to see Google providing more material about how to use search effectively — Howard

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GOOGLE SEZ:

Help your students become better searchers

Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners.

With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

Search Education / Education on Search