Category: Information Operations (IO)

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Jean Lievens: Dawn of System Leadership

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Officers Call
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

The Dawn of System Leadership

The deep changes necessary to accelerate progress against society's most intractable problems require a unique type of leader—the system leader, a person who catalyzes collective leadership.

At no time in history have we needed such system leaders more. We face a host of systemic challenges beyond the reach of existing institutions and their hierarchical authority structures. Problems like climate change, destruction of ecosystems, growing scarcity of water, youth unemployment, and embedded poverty and inequity require unprecedented collaboration among different organizations, sectors, and even countries. Sensing this need, countless collaborative initiatives have arisen in the past decade—locally, regionally, and even globally. Yet more often than not they have floundered—in part because they failed to foster collective leadership within and across the collaborating organizations.

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Howard Rheingold: Thinking Systematically

Advanced Cyber/IO
Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold

Thinking systematically about how you use information flows and your cognitive processes to gather, test, evaluate knowledge is key to the internal aspects of infotention.

A Student-Centred Conceptualisation of Critical Thinking

One of the defining features of human evolution is the emergent capacity of human beings to think about thinking. The ability to think about thinking is often described as a metacognitive skill.  Cultural evolution is itself a metacognitive process, as each new generation thinks about the thinking of previous generations – the contents of thinking, the process of thinking, and the products of thinking – and modifies the culture of thinking in multifarious ways.

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SchwartzReport: $14M an HOUR “War on Terror”

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
Stephan A. Schwartz
Stephan A. Schwartz

I don't know when I have been as angered by a story as I have been by this one. Fourteen million dollars an hour for 13 years. Imagine what could have been done with that money to ease the lives of the 17 million minor children who experience hunger each year, or the 2.5 million children who are homeless each year, or the destitute elderly living on dog food. What could have been done with that money to rebuild our failing infrastructure, or our crumbling schools, or to improve our poor healthcare system. And that money is independent of the over $400 billion spent on the grotesque F-35 project I reported on yesterday. All of this made possible by phony-patriot war criminals beginning with Bush and Cheney, and passed by a Congress of cretins, too weak and pusillanimous to serve the people who elected them. A government “by the people for the people,” not in anyway I can measure.

$14 Million an Hour for 13 Years: War on Terror's Astounding Cost

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Robert Steele: The End of Servers

Advanced Cyber/IO
Robert Steele
Robert Steele

Following is the best bit from a WIRE Magazine piece:

As bitcoin becomes increasingly tamed and regulated by mainstream financial institutions, Amir Taaki has fought to bring the cryptocurrency back to its roots: independent, uncontrollable and deeply subversive. With his partner in thoughtcrime Cody Wilson, Taaki has led the development of Dark Wallet, the program designed to allow bitcoins to be spent untraceably, ensuring their use in the Dark Web economy and other less-than-legal applications. Earlier this year, he also won a Toronto hackathon by coding DarkMarket, a prototype for an entirely peer-to-peer bitcoin market—like Silk Road but without any central server or administrator—that could make online black market commerce that’s practically immune from a law enforcement crackdown.  Source

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Stephen E. Arnold: Big Data Quality Not Happening

IO Impotency
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Mastering Data Quality Requires Change

Big data means big changes for data management and ensuring its quality. Computer users, especially those ingrained in their ways, have never been keen on changing their habits. Insert trainings and meetings, then you have a general idea of what it takes to install data acceptance. Dylan Jones at SAS’s Data Roundtable wrote an editorial, “Data Quality Mastery Depends On Change Management Essentials.”

Jones writes that data management is still viewed as a strict IT domain and data quality suffers from it. It required change management to make other departments understand about the necessity for the changes.

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