Widgets, maps and an API make World Bank data sing
The new data.worldbank.org looks to improve data-driven decisions.
The new data.worldbank.org website that's launching today is designed to make the vast wealth of open data easier to use. The Bank is increasing the number of indicators available on the site from 339 to more than 1,200, and it has substantially improved its API. Four different languages are supported on the site, along with an improved data browser, feedback buttons, instant search, and embeddable widgets.
Right now the Categories include, in this order: Video Games, Television, Commercials, Current Events, Sports, Movies, Music.
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine this in all languages, available on the cell phone, as an educational tool that also harnesses the cognitive surplus–the distributed intelligence–of the Whole Earth. Our view of YouTube is now such that we consider it more important than Google.
Lieutenant Colonel Hans F. Palaoro, USAF, wrote this essay while a student at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. It won the Strategy Article category of the 2010 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategic Essay Competition.
EXTRACT: While information power is well accepted as one of the four elements of national power, neither the term nor the concept appeared in the 2006 National Security Strategy. It is strangely absent from the “full array of political, economic, diplomatic, and other tools at our disposal” that is the basis of the document.4 Nor does information power appear in the 2008 National Defense Strategy.5 Moreover, although there is no vetted definition of information power, the concept is understood and the link to how the military should exercise it is obvious: information operations. Considerable attention has already been given to the “defensive” side of the information domain.6 What is still lacking is the offense.
The problem with the current IO model is that it fails to orchestrate the tools of information power toward a common goal. One reason is that the legal and bureaucratic limits on who can do certain things have caused an almost irrational phobia against integrated efforts. For example, fear of crosscontamination of public affairs (PA), public diplomacy (PD), and strategic communication with psychological operations (PSYOP) actively opposes effective coordination of these obviously interdependent tools of information strategy.
Army Times, By Andrew Tilghman – Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Sep 9, 2010 8:29:12 EDT
Army Reserve Col. Lawrence Sellin has no regrets about publishing a rant about the military’s overreliance on PowerPoint presentations — despite the fact it got him fired from his job at joint command headquarters in Afghanistan.
. . . . . . .
Sellin said his controversial article was the last of several efforts to find something meaningful to do at ISAF headquarters.
. . . . . .
Sellin’s screed highlights a long-simmering controversy inside the military bureaucracy.
Marine Gen. James Mattis, currently chief of U.S. Central Command, told a military conference earlier this year that “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”
And Army Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster banned PowerPoint presentations as a brigade commander during his successful efforts to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005.
Sellin said his complaint is not solely about PowerPoint, the presentation software created in 1987.
“I don’t hate PowerPoint. It’s a useful tool,” he said. “But it can be a crutch as a substitute for thinking. It’s too easy to produce a lot of slides and create volume, not quality. You really think that with a lot of detailed slides that you’re making progress, when you are actually not.”
Army Times article, second below, reports what the beginning of what I expect will be a major decline in functionality of Army computer systems. While some sort of institutional response to the alleged Wikileaks traitor, Specialist Bradley Manning, is appropriate, I don't think this is it. This is a simplistic approach, the sort of thing the KGB did and presumably the sort of the SVR continues to do.
By the way, IMHO, 91K classified documents on the Internet is not some sort of an inadvertent security violation. It's almost certainly one of the national security crimes; I think it's treason. Better to concentrate on the perpetrator — try him, convict him, and then, maybe, violate in some significant ways his Constitutional protection against “cruel and unusual punishment” as a highly visible deterrent against espionage.
NOTE: Image links to source generally as persistent link not available.
Below the line: PBI comment and cyber-security recap (34).
Beyond belief, but here it is: the “official” explanation of why we are going to waste 12 billion dollars a year on contractors without a clue (vapor-ware). There is zero return on investment here for the taxpayer, only for the contractors and Congress, neither of which will be held accountable for fraud, waste, and abuse.
William J. Lynn III WILLIAM J. LYNN III is U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense.
In 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense suffered a significant compromise of its classified military computer networks. It began when an infected flash drive was inserted into a U.S. military laptop at a base in the Middle East. The flash drive's malicious computer code, placed there by a foreign intelligence agency, uploaded itself onto a network run by the U.S. Central Command. That code spread undetected on both classified and unclassified systems, establishing what amounted to a digital beachhead, from which data could be transferred to servers under foreign control. It was a network administrator's worst fear: a rogue program operating silently, poised to deliver operational plans into the hands of an unknown adversary.
Human-centered computing should be–but is not today–about connecting all humans with all information in near-real-time, while providing back office tools that elevate the human brain and more properly plan information and communications technologies in a support role. See for example our Citizen-Centered Graphics and all of the OSS/EIN Books. Where the emergent meme is off-target is in focusing on the relationship of the computer to the individual, rather than the whole. Hacking Humanity is the new meme.
