FAIRFAX, Virginia (AP) — Maybe you've got a hunch Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea has seen its final days, or that the Ebola virus will re-emerge somewhere in the world in the next year.
Your educated guess may be just as good as an expert's opinion. Statistics have long shown that large crowds of average people frequently make better predictions about unknown events, when their disparate guesses are averaged out, than any individual scholar — a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds.
Now the U.S. intelligence community, with the help of university researchers and regular folks around the country, is studying ways to harness and improve the wisdom of crowds. The research could one day arm policymakers with information gathered by some of the same methods that power Wikipedia and social media.
Phi Beta Iota: The idea is actually from George Mason University. IARPA is a mess, as is DARPA. If the DNI were serious about growing up, he would have distributed national intelligence councils for each of the ten high-level threats to humanity, each of the core policy domains, and state and local sub-councils, as well as a means of integrating humans, data, and assumptions in an EarthGame such as Medard Gabel is ready to build at a cost of no more than $3 million a year. US Intelligence lacks intelligence and integrity, and is not going to grow up under its current “leadership.”
The following four publications by Michael Vlahos were overlooked when they first came out. They continue his brilliant track record of deep cultural analysis of both the home front and the real world.
Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate. He observed that stringing “incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,” was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas behind yarns, but never quite master them.
The Pentagon’s freewheeling research arm is hoping to prove Twain wrong. Darpa is asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.” The idea is to detect terrorists who have been indoctrinated by propaganda. Then, the Pentagon can respond with some messages of its own.
The program is called “Narrative Networks.” By understanding how stories have shaped your mind, the Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas, a neuroscience researcher involved in the project tells Danger Room. With this knowledge, the military can also target groups vulnerable to terrorists’ recruiting tactics with its own counter-messaging.
Re the article below: This is terrible. It is bad enough on its face, but to realize that MIT's Malone is at the heart of this breaks my heart, devastates my soul and outrages my professional sensibilities. Now I am sorry that we didn't do a paper on pubic wisdom for his conference next year! Talk about the applications of collective intelligence unmonitored by collective wisdom!! This is NOT the power and capacity we sought to free by trying to pull together the field with our Collective Intelligence Convergence conference.
I see much more clearly now the distinction between my sense of “intelligence” and the use of that term by “intelligence” agencies. My sense of intelligence is that it means we are able to assess reality in a learning feedback loop where we've taken an action based on certain assumptions/mental models and seen how it works in real life. The results inform our reinforcement or revision of our assumptions and mental models. Collective intelligence is our ability to do that collectively, as whole communities and societies and humanity. The mere accumulation of data to inform official decision-makers – particularly in hierarchical power systems like ours – is a dangerous bastardization of the generic concept of CI. Notice that they aren't talking about using this system to find out how successful a particular government policy or program is – whether it actually served the public good or not – so that we could have a more evidence-based government. It is being used primarily to predict social unrest so it can be stifled or discharged so that the existing toxic power structures can remain as they are.
I notice it says the system will use “publicly accessible data”. I'm so dubious. They talk about traffic webcams and digital location trails from cell phones. Are these publicly accessible? And that begs the question of the fact that no one except giant institutions (governments, corporations) has the computing power to do those analyses. It's like freedom of the press when you can't afford a press.
They want to predict when the people will revolt. Ok. But where's the people's capacity to predict what the government and specific corporations are going to do? This is so one-sided. It empowers only half of Robert's vision of open source intelligence, and it feels like the same old crap is being given new capacities. This is collective intelligence?!!!? This is panopticism – the ability of the power center at the top to see everything going on the whole system. It has been brilliantly contrasted by Jean-Francois Noubel with holopticism – the ability of the whole and all its parts to view the whole. We don't need more panopticism. We need more holopticism, to help us navigate our collective destiny.
I am disgusted and horrified.
What can be done to reclaim the good name of collective intelligence? I do not feel drawn to or capable of organizing the kind of professional outrage that headed off Operation Camelot and Total Information Awareness (see the article). But I'll be damned if I will lend my good name to this so-called collective intelligence initiative. At the very least, I can blog my protest – and have it picked up at least by IARPA….
JOIN BLACK FARMERS AS THEY OCCUPY DC'S FRANKLIN PARK ON 10/24/11: BLACK FARMERS STILL AWAIT JUSTICE
Contrary to popular belief, Black farmers in the United States still have not received justice. Despite media reports to the contrary, not a single Pigford I farmer has received justice. Pigford I farmers are the original Black farmers who filed discrimination cases against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) resulting in the USDA acknowledgement of systemic and persistent intentional discrimination against Black farmers that had the result of the loss of approximately 13 million acres of Black-owned land. At stake today is approximately 1.5 million of the last remaining 3 million acres of Black-owned land. Continue reading “Event: 24 Oct 0900-1200 Franklin Park Washington DC Black Farmers”
Security researchers have detected a new Trojan, scarily similar to the infamous Stuxnet worm, which could disrupt computers controlling power plants, oil refineries and other critical infrastructure networks.
The Trojan, dubbed “Duqu” by the security firm Symantec, appears, based on its code, to have been written by the same authors as the Stuxnet worm, which last July was used to cripple an Iranian nuclear-fuel processing plant.
“Stuxnet source code is not out there,” wrote F-Secure cybersecurity expert Mikko Hyppönen on his firm's blog. “Only the original authors have it. So, this new backdoor was created by the same party that created Stuxnet.”
. . . . . . .
This new entry into the Stuxnet family comes just after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin warning that the notorious hacking group Anonymous may soon start looking to bring down or disrupt industrial control facilities. Posted yesterday (Oct. 18) to publicintelligence.net, the unclassified bulletin assesses Anonymous' ability to compromise SCADA systems that run power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries and other industrial facilities.
Government officials did not blame Anonymous for any such hacks, and the bulletin says that based on available information, Anonymous has “a limited ability to conduct attacks” on industrial control systems.
The group's agenda could change, however. The DHS document cites several recent actions, including Anonymous' cyberattack on the websites and servers of biotech seed company Monsanto, as proof that Anonymous could “develop capabilities to gain access and trespass on control system networks very quickly.”
Phi Beta Iota: We realize DHS will not be held responsible for being stupid or dishonest or both, but for the record:
1. Stuxnet is said to be an Israeli/US operation against Iran. If it is out within the USA, there are two possibilities, both equally viable; a) the Israelis are doing their usual mayhem against the US which they consider like a Christian girl, as in “shicksas don't count;” and b) it got away from NSA/Cyber-Command or NSA/Cyber-Command is setting the stage for a false flag attack to increase or protect its grossly excessive budget.
2. Anonymous is not after critical infrastructures–Anonymous, like Wikileaks and OccupyWallStreet (OWS) is after institutionalized secular corruption, in which context Monsanto makes perfect sense….along with the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
3. Robert Steele, Bill Caelli, Winn Schwartau, and Jim Anderson all told Marty Harris at the National Information Infrastructure (NII), in writing, in 1994, what needed to be done, and were ignored. The fact that the US Government has been both ignorant and dishonest all these years about the total vulnerability of all SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acqusition) systems is not something that can be blamed on Anonymous.
A recent happiness study from Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that the more our minds wander, the less happy we are. Summing the research, the New York Times wrote, “Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else.” In short, being mentally “present” and focused on the task at hand really does matter – quite a lot, in fact.
If only finding focus were so simple. With a tidal wave of information coming at us daily, focus is rapidly becoming the scarcest commodity of the 21st century. With this in mind, I’ve rounded up a handful of the best apps for fighting back against the constant distractions of our digital lives.
1. Self-Control – Block out distracting websites for a set amount of time.
2. TrackTime – Audit how you’re spending your time on your computer.
3. Concentrate – Maximize focus while shifting between different tasks.
5. FocusBooster – Focus on single tasks for 25 minutes apiece.
6. Think – Limit your attention to a single application at a time.
7. FocusWriter – Create a distraction-free environment for writing.
8. Anti-Social – Block the social websites that are killing your focus.
9. StayFocusd – Curb the time you spend browsing time-wasting sites.
10. Time Out – Take regular breaks to keep your focus sharp.
Phi Beta Iota: Read the original to see paragraphs for each of the above with excellent context. Both above and in the original, links lead to an application for those who need imposed discipline.
