The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Phi Beta Iota: We cannot say enough good things about these folks. This is righteous good stuff–eight times cheaper than industrial offerings, virtually no “true cost” externalities, interchangeable parts, human scale, the whole enchilada.
Tip of the Hat to Brandin Watson at Facebook.
OAKLAND, CA — Building information modeling can be a valuable tool for architects, engineers and contractors that allows them to explore different design options, see what projects will look like and understand how a structure will perform long before it's built.
BIM, as it's known in the industry, also can help building owners and operators throughout a structure's lifecycle by providing visual context to performance-related data, retrofit plans and other projects intended increase energy efficiency.
In a webcast on Tuesday moderated by GreenBiz.com Executive Editor Joel Makower, representatives for design software giant Autodesk, DPR Construction and the consulting engineering firm Glumac talked about “How Building Information Modeling Solutions Transform Sustainable Design.”
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Increased costs of energy, ongoing challenges posed by the economy and concerns about sustainability, market demands, occupany and eventual regulation of carbon output combine to make building owners, operators and managers increasingly aware of how their properties perform — and compare with others.
Those issues and the availability of state and federal incentives are powerful drivers to improve portfolios. “Not surprisingly, large multinational companies are getting their buildings in order,” Deodhar said.
Examples include Walmart, which will retrofit 500 buildings this year, Marriott, whose hotel chain includes 275 hotels that bear the Energy Star label, and Starbucks, which by the close of the year will begin to seek LEED certification for all new company-owned stores around the world.
Globally, buildings account for about 40 percent of energy consumption and more than 200 million buildings are candidates for efficiency improvements, Deodhar said. But optimizing a building's environmental performance requires incorporating interrelated factors, such as location, orientation, internal systems, how the building is used and other variables, into design.
Read full article (long and valuable)
Phi Beta Iota: This is the kind of project we had in mind for DIA/DO (Directorate of Open Sources & Methods). Apart from DoD being the biggest gorilla on the planet where any improvement can be measured in billions of dollars, this is the tip of the “true cost” iceberg and a success here could be immediately extended to every aspect of acquisition across all mobility, weapons, and other systems, over to the rest of the federal government, down to state and local, and out to the world. In the 21st Century design is intelligence, intelligence is design, and intelligent design, not weapons, is the influencer most likely to achieve the desired outcome.
This op-ed is consistent with what I have learned about and experienced in Turkey. Chuck
October 25, 2010
By ROGER COHEN
ANKARA — Davutogluism is a mouthful. It’s not going to make Fox News any time soon. But if I could escort Sarah Palin, Tea Partiers and a few bigoted anti-Muslim Europeans to a single country illustrating how the world has changed, it would be the home of the D-word, Turkey.
Ahmet Davutoglu, who birthed a foreign policy doctrine and has been Turkey’s foreign minister since May 2009, has irked a lot of Americans. He’s seen as the man behind Turkey’s “turning East,” as Iran’s friend, as Israel’s foe, as a fickle NATO ally wary of a proposed new missile shield, and as the wily architect of Turkey’s new darling status with Arab states. The Obama administration has said it is “disappointed” in Turkey’s no vote on Iran sanctions last June; Congress is not pleased, holding up an ambassadorial appointment and huffing over arms sales.
Nostalgia is running high in Washington for the pliant Turkey of Cold-War days. Davutoglu is having none of it. “We don’t want to be a frontier country like in the Cold War,” he told me. “We don’t want problems with any neighbor” — and that, of course, would include Iran.
Zero problems with neighbors lay at the core of Davutoglu’s influential book Strategic Depth, published in 2001. Annual trade with Russia has since soared to $40 billion. Syrian-Turkish relations have never been better. Turkey’s commercial sway over northern Iraq is overwhelming. It has signed a free trade agreement with Jordan. And now Turkey says it aims — United Nations sanctions notwithstanding — to triple trade with Iran over the next five years.
All this makes the anemic West edgy: The policy has produced 7 percent growth this year. There’s also something deeper at work: The idea of economic interdependence as a basis for regional peace and stability sounds awfully familiar. Wasn’t that the genius of the European Union idea?
Read rest of this very serious article….
Phi Beta Iota: The author produced Alternative Paradigms in 1993, this book is available in English. At the time he was Professor of Political Science at the International Islamic University in Malaysia. Turkey is a world power, as is Iran, anyone who cannot get a grip on that reality will be flattened by reality. The axis between Malaysia and Indonesia, and between Muslims in Asia and Muslims centered on Dubai, is going to strengthen.
From Fire Dog Lake No Logo Available
By: Nancy Bordier Friday October 15, 2010 2:25 pm
Eleven-Page 1997-2003 Paginated Word Document of Entire Piece
Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent New York Times article, “Third Party Rising“, that he is “astounded” by the level of disgust with Washington D.C. and the two party system he has found among industry leaders in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. He says he knows of “at least two serious groups” on the East and West coasts “’developing third parties’ to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.”
He predicts that “barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome”.
Friedman cites the harsh indictment of the two major parties by Stanford political scientist Larry Diamond: “We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country”. Diamond published similar views back in 2008 in a Huffington Post article, Can American Democracy Recover? He cited “a broad and deepening sense among Americans not only that the country is moving in the wrong direction, but that there is something seriously wrong and corrupt with our democracy”. He provides the following specifics:
Phi Beta Iota: We learned this when we went across America for the American Committee on Foreign Relations (ACFR) in the years following 9/11 delivering our lecture, “9/11, U.S. Intelligence, and the Real World.” Americans are not stupid–mainstream media personalities like Friedman are not stupid either, just oblivious. They live in their own world with the Kissingers and CNN faces so bent on being polite they cannot muster a tough question or get a grip on the whole. As we said years ago, Washington may not be interested in reality but reality is assuredly interested in Washington. It's game time.
Reference: Diversity of Voices & Values
Reference: Citizenship Versus Transpartisanship
Reference: Cyber-Intelligence–Restore the Republic Of, By, and For…
Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Save Democracy
Safety copy below the line.
Continue reading “Reference: Best Piece on Democracy in a Decade”
This one book will explain more history than any other I have ever read. South Pole Sends.
Phi Beta Iota: The public is starting to do to the Rothschilds, Central Banks, and the Federal Reserve what plane spotters did to CIA rendition flights. We support truth & reconciliation; we do NOT support revenge or expropriation of illicit assets. The ill-gotten gains of the Rothschilds and the banks that front for them, notably the Federal Reserve, are a drop in the bucket compared to the infinite wealth that the five billion poor can create if these parasitic “elites” will just get out of the way. So that is the deal: stay out of the way and keep what you have. Interfere with the emergence of the global community of informed participatory democracy, and the deal is off.
USA Specific:
Journal: Five Myths Debunked–Treasury Run by Crooks
Journal: $750 Billion Wall Street Scam, Russian Anger, Chinese Intent, We are NOT Making This Up!
Reference: US Intelligence & Global Banking
Information Overload – Too Much Of A Good Thing?
October 11, 2010 – Everyone has seen the commercial on television. Someone asks a simple question, and then everyone in the crowd starts spewing forth all these facts that have been found via the Internet. This makes for some very clever and funny advertising, but let’s face it. Information overload is a real problem. The magic formula is to deliver the right information to the right people who are searching, at the right time. Sound simple enough, but how many avenues have you been down yourself just because you are looking for a certain recipe for brownies? In a closer look found here, some of the problems that contribute to information overload are discussed.
These include defining findability, an object-centric perspective, an actor-centric perspective, and filters that promote findability. Interesting read.
From the source:
The question is however, is it the abundance of the information that is the problem, or a general lack of maturity in approaches to designing effective organization and access mechanisms? In his presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, Clay Shirky referred to this idea as “Filter Failure”. He describes information overload as the normal case and that it’s not necessarily the quantity of information that’s the problem, it’s our ability to filter through what’s there that’s the real issue.
Tip of the Hat to Marjorie M K Hlava at LinkedIn.
Phi Beta Iota: It is not a filter failure. It is a leadership failure…leadership lacking integrity in the holistic sense of the word, too eager to rush to pay for technical collection solutions that increase the size of their firehose but ignore both the fact that the fires we need to put out are small scattered ones, and the people we need to support require both back office and desktop tools. All this was well known in 1985 and the solutions fully articulated by 1989.
Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents
About 3 hours ago Sarah Kessler 9
The argument that social media fosters feel-good clicking rather than actual change, began long before Malcolm Gladwell brought it up in the New Yorker — long enough to generate its own derogatory term. “Slacktivism,” as defined by Urban Dictionary, is “the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.”
If you only measure donations, social media is no champion. The national chapter of the Red Cross, for instance, has 208,500 “likes” on Facebook, more than 200,000 followers on Twitter, and a thriving blog. But according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, online donations accounted for just 3.6% of private donations made to the organization in 2009.
But social good is a movement still in its infancy. Facebook launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. Let’s give the tools a little while to grow up before we start judging them.
All of that virtual liking, following, joining, signing, forwarding, and, yes, clicking, has a lot of potential to grow into big change. Here’s why:
Phi Beta Iota: Complementary observations are made by Steven Denning in his featured post, Reference: The Revolution IS Being Tweeted.
See Also:
Continue reading “Journal: The Activist Power of the Internet”
