The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
a symposium that seeks to understand and address propaganda and misinformation in the new media ecosystem
March 6: Symposium at Harvard University
March 7: Hack Day at MIT
Truthiness Wiki Page (Berkman, not Wikipedia)
Tip of the Hat to Patrick Meier.
Trails of Trustworthiness in Real-Time Streams
Real-time information channels like Twitter, Facebook and Google have created cascades of information that are becoming increasingly challenging to navigate. “Smart-filters” alone are not the solution since they won’t necessarily help us determine the quality and trustworthiness of the information we receive. I’ve been studying this challenge ever since the idea behind SwiftRiver first emerged several years ago now.
I was thus thrilled to come across a short paper on “Trails of Trustworthiness in Real-Time Streams” which describes a start-up project that aims to provide users with a “system that can maintain trails of trustworthiness propagated through real-time information channels,” which will “enable its educated users to evaluate its provenance, its credibility and the independence of the multiple sources that may provide this information.” The authors, Panagiotis Metaxas and Eni Mustafaraj, kindly cite my paper on “Information Forensics” and also reference SwiftRiver in their conclusion.
LAST PARAGRAPH BROUGHT FORWARD: A copy of the paper is available here (PDF). I hope to meet the authors at the Berkman Center’s “Truth in Digital Media Symposium” and highly recommend the wiki they’ve put together with additional resources. I’ve added the majority of my research on verification of crowdsourced information to that wiki, such as my 20-page study on “Information Forensics: Five Case Studies on How to Verify Crowdsourced Information from Social Media.”
Phi Beta Iota: The concept of trust reputations was discussed at Hackers in Silicon Valley in 1994. Computers deliver information to the lowest common denominator. Humans — human brains and human trust — remain the essence of humanity.
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Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Trails of Digital Trustworthness”
A May 2011 report from McKinsey, “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity,” is assuredly worth reading.
McKinsey Page with various download options
While current commentaries, such as this February 2012 overview from The New York Times, “The Age of Big Data, focus on McKinsey's emphasis on the explosion of data, the other focus of the report was on the Internet of things — a micro-manager's dream come true.
For myself, I see several perspectives lacking in the McKinsey report.
01) The report continues to think of big data in relation to specific companies and industries. It fails to recognize that the really big data is multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, and multidomain. A corollary of this failure of perspective is that it fails to emphasize the urgency of getting to open data access, to information sharing treaties and agreements, and to next big leap, hybrid intelligence, hybrid policy, hybrid budgets, and hybrid governance.
Bruce Sterling talk at ATX Hackerspace
I shot this video of Bruce at an EFF-Austin-sponsored event February 25 at ATX Hackespace. We were rallying the troops. “You will not have the Internet that you had 20 years ago, that’s not possible. But you don’t have to roll over at the site of bluster from the Internet’s increasingly desperate enemies…”
Re-Inventing Finance: An Emerging (Digital) Reformation
Several months ago, I was invited by Sean Park to be a Venture Partner with Anthemis Group, a new financial services group with an aim to totally reinvent finance from the ground up.
(Sean was a generous backer for the Future of Money Project I co-created for a SIBOS conference, and we’ve met up several times in the past few years for animated conversations about the changing nature of money, value and wealth.)
I was delighted to accept the offer, and be a part of this exciting initiative by bringing attention to financial startups that just might help change the world for the better. If this is you, let me know!
Check out the video above to hear more about the goals of Anthemis and an overview of our emerging global financial landscape – presented last week at the Lift12 conference. Below is a brief post Sean wrote up about his presentation, and a great prezi as well!
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Last Thursday I had the great privilege of having been invited by the remarkable Laurent Haug to present a snapshot of our vision of the new emerging universe of “digitally native finance” at the wonderful Lift12 conference in Geneva. Twenty minutes is not a long time (and thank goodness Laurent indulged me with a couple minutes more) to convey both the context and the substance of what we believe to be a fundamental shift in the paradigm of the financial services industry, but I hope I was able to give at least a good high-level overview. Most importantly, I hope I was able to convey the excitement we feel at the vastness of the opportunity and the win/win/win (for the customers/companies/economies) available to those who embrace the opportunity for technology-enabled disruption in financial services by introducing them – however superficially I’ll admit – to just a handful of companies who are at the vanguard of this wave of change.
For those that are interested, my presentation is below:
Code Across America ATX: A Civic Innovation Hackathon
Google-funded Code for America was in Austin Saturday for a codeathon using data accessible via the city’s data portal. I dropped by the geek chic coworking facility Conjunctured, where the codeathon was happening, and hung out long enough to get a sense of the projects the ~40 coders were tackling. Those included a Bike Accident and Route Safety app, an app for finding miscellaneous stuff around town, and a “garden dating” app (to help people who want a community garden find a space). What was missing? For at least one project (Find It), there were fewer sources of data than the developers would’ve liked. I realized that it’s not enough to bring coders together to create apps – we should also be cultivating data sources. A project to build databases and facilitate citizen input would be a logical complement to the various codeathons.
Phi Beta Iota: Google is much more predatory than people realize. Any serious long-term endeavor must be completely open source and avoid Google like the plague–it comes with harm built in. The most exciting initiatives, generally lacking even the most basic funding, seek to combine Open Data Access, Open Source Hardware, Open Source Software, and Open Spectrum. That will lead to an Autonomous Internet and to holistic public intelligence with integrity.
See Also:
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust
The acid test of any scientific theory is whether or not its predictions reasonably match up to reality. The attached paper by Dr. David Evans is important because it compares predictions of climate models predicting global warming to our most advanced temperature measurement technologies. This is a good example of the kind of information that should be shaping the global warming debate.
The task facing scientists who disagree with this analysis is simple, because this author is up front with his information. His data is sourced and logical descriptions of the models he is testing are clear. The prediction/reality mismatch information shown in this paper is can be replicated and tested for falsification. All one has to do is show why the data is wrong, misleading, or improperly interpreted, or why his logic is wrong — no name calling is needed in what is clearly grist for an honest scientific exchange.
Chuck Spinney
Who Are You Going To Believe – The Government Climate Scientists or The Data?
By Dr David M.W. Evans (republished here with permission, PDF link below)
We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message – here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.
What the Government Climate Scientists Say
Figure 1: The climate models. If the CO2 level doubles (as it is on course to do by about 2070 to 2100), the climate models estimate the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 3 = 3.3°C.i
The direct effect of CO2 is well-established physics, based on laboratory results, and known for over a century.ii
Feedbacks are due to the ways the Earth reacts to the direct warming effect of the CO2. The threefold amplification by feedbacks is based on the assumption, or guess, made around 1980, that more warming due to CO2 will cause more evaporation from the oceans and that this extra water vapor will in turn lead to even more heat trapping because water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. And extra heat will cause even more evaporation, and so on. This amplification is built into all the climate models.iii The amount of amplification is estimated by assuming that nearly all the industrial-age warming is due to our CO2.
The government climate scientists and the media often tell us about the direct effect of the CO2, but rarely admit that two thirds of their projected temperature increases are due to amplification by feedbacks.
What the Skeptics Say
Figure 2: The skeptic’s view. If the CO2 level doubles, skeptics estimates that the temperature increase due to that extra CO2 will be about 1.1°C × 0.5 ≈ 0.6°C.iv
The serious skeptical scientists have always agreed with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2. The argument is entirely about the feedbacks.
The feedbacks dampen or reduce the direct effect of the extra CO2, cutting it roughly in half.v The main feedbacks involve evaporation, water vapor, and clouds. In particular, water vapor condenses into clouds, so extra water vapor due to the direct warming effect of extra CO2 will cause extra clouds, which reflect sunlight back out to space and cool the earth, thereby reducing the overall warming.
There are literally thousands of feedbacks, each of which either reinforces or opposes the direct warming effect of the extra CO2. Almost every long-lived system is governed by net feedback that dampens its response to a perturbation. If a system instead reacts to a perturbation by amplifying it, the system is likely to reach a tipping point and become unstable (like the electronic squeal that erupts when a microphone gets too close to its speakers). The earth’s climate is long-lived and stable— it has never gone into runaway greenhouse, unlike Venus — which strongly suggests that the feedbacks dampen temperature perturbations such as that from extra CO2.
What the Data Says
The climate models have been essentially the same for 30 years now, maintaining roughly the same sensitivity to extra CO2even while they got more detailed with more computer power.
Air Temperatures
One of the earliest and most important predictions was presented to the US Congress in 1988 by Dr James Hansen, the “father of global warming”:
Figure 3: Hansen’s predictionsvi to the US Congress in 1988, compared to the subsequent temperatures as measured by NASA satellitesvii.
Phi Beta Iota: The New Craft of Intelligence restores integrity to the process of intelligence. There are no governments, corporations, or universities today actually committed to the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Everyone is isolated in little stove-pipes that allow good people to be doing good things, when in the aggregate they are simply perpetuating huge lies against the public interest. This is the challenge of our times.
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