Category: IO Sense-Making

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Future of the Library versus Future of the Librarian

Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Policies, Threats
Seth Godin Home

The future of the library

What is a public library for?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn't have to own. The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn't a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books  got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed. The library is a house for the librarian.

Continue reading “Future of the Library versus Future of the Librarian”

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Economic Complexity Visualized–A New Mind Tool

03 Economy, Academia, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Key Players
Michael Ostrolenk

The Art of Economic Complexity

A new way to visualize a country’s development.

By TIM HARFORD

Graphic by CÉSAR A. HIDALGO and ALEX SIMOES

New York Times, 11 May 2011

EXTRACT: Strip away the mathematical language of economists, and conventional theories of economic growth are rather crude. Economies produce “stuff,” and if you want more stuff to come out of the process, put more stuff in (like human capital, say). Yet economies do not produce stuff so much as billions of distinct types of goods — perhaps 10 billion, according to Eric Beinhocker of the McKinsey Global Institute — ranging from size 34 dark stonewash bootcut jeans to beauty therapies involving avocado. The difference between China's economy and that of the United States is not simply that China's is smaller; it has a different structure entirely.

Read article, see graphs

Visit the MIT Economic Complexity Observatory

Phi Beta Iota: This is a very promising line of inquiry.  It does not include the vital but poorly understood interactions among political-legal (integrity), socio-economic (fairness), ideo-cultural (education), and techno-demographic (balance), and natural-geographic (true cost, sustainability).  As with most intellectual work these days, it is a thin slice across one dimension of very complex sphere–the world is NOT flat.

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Is ‘Arab Spring’ Coming To Kabul?

08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Mobile
DefDog Recommends....

Is ‘Arab Spring' Coming To Kabul?

Radio Free Europe, 13 May 2011

The recent emergence of the first, large-scale Facebook movement among Afghan university students calling for reform can't help but raise the question — will the wave of antigovernment dissent in the Middle East reach Afghanistan?

Since March, some 1,500 university students in Kabul, and another 3,000 elsewhere around the country, have “friended” the Facebook page “Reformists.” There, they meet daily for discussions about how to exert grassroots pressure on the government — pressure that barely exists in Afghanistan today.

In some ways, the movement is very much like similar Facebook groups in the Arab world.

Read more….

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Psychology of Human Incompetence: New Metrics

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Waste (materials, food, etc)
John Steiner

“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”

—George Eliot
We're losing!  Here's a playbook, see especially the focus on new metrics that have more meaning.

Posted by nate hagens on May 11, 2011 – 10:50am
Topic: Demand/Consumption
Tags: evolutionary psychology, human psychology, overconsumption [list all tags]

The essay below is an updated and edited version of a post I wrote here a few years ago, I'm Human, I'm American and I'm Addicted to Oil. Richard Douthwaite, Irish economist and activist, (and a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute), invited me to contribute it as a chapter in the just released book Fleeing Vesuvius, which is a collection of articles generally addressing “how can we bring the world out of the mess it finds itself in”? My article dealt with the evolutionary underpinnings of our aggregate behavior – neural habituation to increasingly available stimuli, and our evolved penchant to compete for status given the environmental cues of our day. And how, after we make it through the likely upcoming currency/claims bottleneck, we would be wise to adhere to an evolutionary perspective in considering a future (more) sustainable society.

Click here for the table of contents from Fleeing Vesuvius, followed by my article.

Phi Beta Iota: Will and Ariel Durant, in Lessons of History, state that the only real revolution is in the mind of man.  We strongly believe that strategic analytics is the next revolution, and that strategic analytics will make possible transparency, truth, and truth leading to compassionate non-zero evolution–a world that works for all.
See Also:
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Engineers of India-Afghanistan vs China-Pakistan

02 China, 03 India, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 08 Wild Cards, 12 Water, Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence, Strategy

India-China-Pakistan: Indian intelligence agencies say they have credible evidence that several hundred Chinese working in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir are People's Liberation Army engineers, the Times of India reported 12 May.

According to the report, Indian intelligence agencies are verifying that the engineers are engaged with military construction projects, such as bunkers, and said the presence of military engineers in civilian construction activities carried out by China in other countries is “unusual,” an intelligence source said. The information about the engineers was part of an assessment presented by the Indian Army to the Indian prime minister, defense minister and other senior officials weeks ago.

Comment: This is the first press report of Chinese military engineers in Pakistan's portion of Kashmir. Chinese engineers are working on road construction in far northern Pakistan which borders China, but no engineering agreements are known that cover Pakistani Kashmir.

India-Afghanistan: India has committed about $1.5 billion to Afghanistan for developmental assistance and plans to commit another $500 million over the next five years, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on 12 May. Priority areas for the aid will be social programs, agriculture and infrastructure, according to Singh

India strongly supports Afghanistan's peace and reconciliation efforts with the Taliban, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Afghan President Hamid Karzai during Singh's two-day visit to Kabul. Singh told Karzai and senior Afghan officials that New Delhi is Kabul's “neighbor and partner in development.” He expressed support for Afghanistan's “unity, integrity and prosperity

Comment: The two news stores above help explain Pakistan's dogged support for the Taliban and other anti-Kabul movements and its anxiety about India. India supported the Northern Alliance of Uzbek and Tajik tribes against the Pashtun Taliban when Karzai still was working for the Taliban, before he switched sides.

The presence of Indian advisors and influence west of Pakistan confronts Pakistani strategists with the prospect of fighting on two fronts in a putative future war, with no strategic depth because Pakistan is so narrow. More importantly, the Indian Border Roads Organization (BRO) has thousands of workers and Indian Army engineers working on the “infrastructure” projects in Afghanistan about which Prime Minister Singh spoke. BRO seems to concentrate on improving the roads in Afghan provinces that border Pakistan.

Indian motives in helping Afghanistan are far from altruistic, just as are those of Iran. Both states have provided aid to the Northern Alliance and the Afghan government, based on their strategic calculations to restrain Pakistan and especially prevent it from annexing the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

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Uniting the Left–With the Wrong Question As Usual

11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making
John Steiner

Politics

The big question: What story about America’s future can unite the U.S. left?

David Roberts, 9 May 2011

grist: a beacon in the smog

U.S. politics is at an interesting inflection point.

On one side, the American right grows ever more homogeneous: ethnically, socioculturally, and ideologically. On the other, the American left is an unwieldy coalition of minorities, unions, single working mothers, Blue Dogs, feminists, young people, knowledge workers, culture and entertainment elites, scientists, GLBT folks, environmentalists, social justice groups, Jews, Muslims, atheists, moderates, socialists … even Joe Lieberman for a while.

Precisely because it is homogeneous, the right is intense. There is no political force more potent than a privileged class in the process of losing its privilege. The right base sees itself as an Us beset on all sides by Thems; cries Michele Bachmann, “are we going to take our country back?” The status quo does not go gentle into that good night. The right speaks with a common voice, around a core set of narratives: small government, big military, low taxes, family values. Most importantly, they organize, vote, and donate.

The left, by contrast, is a contentious coalition of Thems, speaking with a cacophony of voices, often at cross purposes, perpetually less than the sum of its parts. Make no mistake: if that coalition can hold together, it will win in the end. It's demographic destiny: The U.S. is becoming more diverse, less religious, more socially liberal, less nuclear-family, and more urban. And it's happening faster than predicted. We're on our way to an America with more Thems than Us's.

Read complete article and call for inputs….

Phi Beta Iota: The author misses the incoherence of the right on substance.  And this is, for the left, the wrong question, as usual.  The correct question is:   America the Beautiful is the original vision, the vision lost.  What narrative can bring us all back together and restore the Republic, Of, By, and For all of the people all of the time?

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4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Geospatial, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Maps, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Venessa Miemis

4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Venessa Miemis | May 9, 2011

This post originally appeared on CNN.com's Global Public Square.

Humanity and technology continue to co-evolve at an ever increasing pace, leaving traditional institutions (and mindsets) calcified and out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, where everything is increasingly connected and the nature of collaboration, business and work are all being reshaped. In turn, our ideas about society, culture, geographic boundaries and governance are being forced to adapt to a new reality.

While some fear the loss of control associated with these shifts, others are exhilarated by the new forms of connectivity and commerce that they imply. Transactions and interactions are growing faster and more frictionless, giving birth to what I call a “superfluid” economy.

Business will not return to usual. So let's discuss 4 key concepts to help us  better understand the shifts that are underway:

1. Quantifying and mapping everything
2. Everyone has access to the internet
3. Self-organizing expands
4. Peer-to-peer exchange changes the future of money

4 Trends discussed below the line with links

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