The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Anonymous to RT: ‘Internet has power to bring down regimes’
Establishing Social Media Hashtag Standards for Disaster Response
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has just published an important, must-read report on the use of social media for disaster response. As noted by OCHA, this document was inspired by conversations with my team and I at QCRI. We jointly recognize that innovation in humanitarian technology is not enough. What is needed—and often lacking—is innovation in policymaking. Only then can humanitarian technology have widespread impact. This new think piece by OCHA seeks to catalyze enlightened policymaking.
Is the Internet broken, and can it even be fixed?
EXTRACT
While turning our home machines on and off is relatively low-risk, doing the same with a device that handles connections for thousands of users, and which may not have been rebooted for 20 years, is of much greater concern.
Noted with great regard.
From the Ushahidi team, an internet solution for remote areas
BRCK is built in Africa for Africa but just like Ushahidi, can be scaled across continents. The wireless modem allows up to 20 users connect to the internet by optimizing on available networks. “BRCK has mobility in mind, insert a 3G data enabled SIM card in over 140 countries and broadcast a WiFi signal that you can share. If you don’t have a SIM card, BRCK still has you covered, as we have BRCK vMNO for global connectivity with SIM cards,” explains Hersman.
Overreliance on Search Engines?
The Salon.com article titled Google Makes Us All Dumber: The Neuroscience of Search Engines probes the ever-increasing reliance on search engines and finds that the way we use them is problematic. This is due to the way our brains respond to this simplified question and answer process. The article stipulates that the harder we work for knowledge, the more likely we are to store it. When it is as simple as typing in a search query and reading a simple answer, we will forget the answer as easily as we found it. The article explains,
Why Clouds Give Me a Case of the Vapors
IEEE Computer, 1 November 2014
EXTRACT
In my personal life I build trusted relationships one tax-avoiding, jurisdiction-shopping multinational corporation at a time. Show me a company that engages in labor arbitraging and offshore production in third-world countries paying starvation wages3 and that avoids taxes through shadow companies in Ireland (Apple Operations International) so it can reap real profits in the US only to pay virtual taxes in invisible jurisdictions4—what The New York Times calls the “Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich”5—and I’ll show you a company that deserves my full faith and confidence. Passwords? Crypto keys? Security
questions? Not needed. Oh, corporate giants, have your digital way with me!
PDF (4 Pages): Hal on Cloud Insecurity 11-14
My Talk at “The Future of Text 2014″
EXTRACT
IEML is still at the stage of fundamental research but we now have an extensive dictionary – a set of paradigms – and some grammatical algorithmic rules that conform to the algebra. The result is a language where texts self-translate into natural language, manifest as semantic networks and compute collaboratively their relationships and differences. Any library of IEML texts then self-organizes into ecosystems of texts and data categorized in IEML will self-organize according to their semantic relationships and differences.
