Category: Information Operations (IO)

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NIGHTWATCH: China Manages North Korea

02 China, 08 Wild Cards, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of Peace, Peace Intelligence
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

North Korea-China: Xinhua published remarks of Chinese State Councilor and former Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, who held discussions today, 21 June.

“Yang said: Positive results have been achieved in the strategic dialogue between foreign affairs departments of the two countries. China is willing to work with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to promote the sound and stable development of relations between the two countries. China insists on actualizing non-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, insists on maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula, and insists on resolving issues through dialogue and consultation. Currently, an easing momentum has emerged in the situation on the peninsula, which is nevertheless still complex and sensitive. It is hoped that all parties will actively engage in dialogue and contact, push for the situation to continue to turn better, and seek an early resumption of the six-party talks.”

“Kim said: Friendship between the DPRK and China has a long history. It is hoped that the two sides will inherit it and carry it forward. Non-nuclearization of the peninsula is the instruction left behind by President Kim Il-song and General Secretary Kim Chong-il. The DPRK hopes the situation on the peninsula will ease, insists on resolving issues through dialogue, and is willing to take part in various forms of dialogue including the six-party talks.”

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Patrick Meier: 4G Humanitarian Technology Briefing (99 Slides with Words in Notes Format)

Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

ROBERT STEELE:  I had the pleasure of listening to Dr. Patrick Meier speak at the National Defense University (NDU) this past Thursday.  He is based in Qatar because the US Government is not very good at spotting, assessing, recruiting, and respecting world-class individual talents.  Patrick is a global asset.  What he knows about humanitarian technology is priceless.  Below is Patrick's “long” briefing, 99 slides, with words in Notes format.

4G Humanitarian Technology

During the Q&A one of the NDU staff asked Dr. Meier if he had considered asking NSA for help [I don't make this stuff up.]  In the ensuing discussion what was really clear to me is  that the the pioneers in humanitarian technology not only do not need anything NSA has to offer, but they are far advanced — vastly advanced — beyond anything the US secret intelligence community is capable of doing.  CLARIFICATION BY DR. MEIER:  Point is we don't need half as advanced tech/methods to do what we currently need to do, much of this commercially available already and slowly coming to open source world as well.

meier-smarmie-2013-v41-1Among the highlights for me personally:

01  Every image taken by a cell phone is capable of having the geospatial coordinates and the time and date stamped within the image.  This feature is turned off on most cell phones.  We need to find a way for individuals to be able to easily activate the feature.  If we can ever get The Virgin Truth off the ground, I'd like to see the OpenBTS cell phones given out free pre-set to this function — its value in relation to early warning on crop or animal disease as well as very rapid situational awareness when many images are coming is, cannot be exaggerated.

02  When humanitarian technologist talk about geo-tagging, they are talking about hash-tags and words added by the sender they are NOT talking about embedded geospatial code.  Some in the audience did not appear to understand this distinction, at least one clearly did.

03  Some — at least as represented in this room by the most talkative among a small handful — are spectacularly ignorant about what NSA cannot and does not do, and about the limitations of big data (legacy) versus big data (real time).  They are particularly limited in understanding that one human brain is vastly more powerful than any single NSA computer, and that a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand human minds, organized voluntarily and coherently

There are very few people that I consider spectacularly gifted and relevant to the creation of a World Brain and Global Game.  Medard Gabel is one of them.  Patrick Meier is another.

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Stephen E. Arnold: As Different Types of Thinkers Emerge Collaboration Is Key

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

As Different Types of Thinkers Emerge Collaboration Is Key

June 21, 2013

The article titled How an Entirely New, Autistic Way of Thinking Powers Silicon Valley on Wired discusses the possibility of a new way of thinking. “Pattern thinkers”, those who think in patterns, whether consciously or unconsciously, are separated from “picture thinkers”, who are more aware of aesthetics. The article cites such famous examples from history as Van Gogh, whose paintings of the stormy night sky matches the formula later discovered for turbulence in liquid and Jackson Pollock, whose abstract painting style involved flinging streaks of paint onto massive canvases which were later found to be coherent fractal patterns. The article explains,

“Michael Shermer, a psychologist, historian of science, and professional skeptic  – he founded Skepticmagazine — called this property of the human mind patternicity. He defined patternicity as “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data.” …The three kinds of minds — visual, verbal, pattern thinkers — naturally complement one another. When I recall collaborations in which I’ve successfully participated, I can see how different kinds of thinkers worked together to create a product that was greater than the sum of its parts.”

The article argues that it is finding the balance of these three types that has made for the great innovations, such as Pixar– and the lack of balance that has spelled out disaster for other projects, (the article cites the IPhone 4 antennae). We are not sure if this is a positive or a negative approach.

Chelsea Kerwin, June 21, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.

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Berto Jongman: Data visualisation aims to change view of global health

Advanced Cyber/IO
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Data visualisation aims to change view of global health

By creating a new and innovative way to look at massive amounts of patient data worldwide, one man hopes he can change the way public health crises are managed, as Cynthia Graber reports.

Imagine you are a foreign aid worker trying to persuade a senior politician in a developing world country to introduce a pneumococcus vaccination programme. It’s not just a case of stressing how the bacterium causes diseases including pneumonia, meningitis, and sinusitis, and kills over a million children under the age of five every year worldwide. The politician has to decide how to allocate scant resources. How does the death toll compare with malaria and AIDS? Aren't road traffic accidents a bigger problem? Has vaccination been a success in neighbouring countries?

These statistics exist, but you don't have the relevant reports and academic papers to hand. And even when you do have the information, a list of numbers may not the best way to express the strength of your case.

By creating new and innovative visual displays out of oceans of data, Christopher Murray hopes his tool can change this situation for the better. Called GBD Compare, users can rapidly determine which diseases are most harmful to children in Africa, or view how the developing and developed worlds compare in terms of heart disease, all with a few clicks of a computer mouse.

The data viz tool processes data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report, which compiles statistics, charts and graphs on causes of death and disease. “The thing that’s really neat about the visualisations is they allow people to see the problem in context – in the context of all the other problems, how it’s changing over time, how it compares to other countries,” says Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IMHE), based in Seattle.

When Murray shows this tool to people outside the academic world of public health, Murray says, they immediately get it. “That just totally changes who you can engage in a thoughtful discussion about what are the key health problems and where they’re going,” he says.

The new tool has the enthusiastic backing of no less an advocate than Bill Gates, and, just three months after its launch, it's already leading to changes in health policies.

Read full article (2 more screens).

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Berto Jongman: Millimeter Waves May be the Future of 5G Phones

Advanced Cyber/IO
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Millimeter Waves May Be the Future of 5G Phones

Samsung’s millimeter-wave transceiver technology could enable ultrafast mobile broadband by 2020

By Ariel Bleicher

IEEE Spectrum, 13 Jun 2013

Clothes, cars, trains, tractors, body sensors, and tracking tags. By the end of this decade, analysts say, 50 billion things such as these will connect to mobile networks. They’ll consume 1000 times as much data as today’s mobile gadgets, at rates 10 to 100 times as fast as existing networks can support. So as carriers rush to roll out 4G equipment, engineers are already beginning to define a fifth generation of wireless standards.

What will these “5G” technologies look like? It’s too early to know for sure, but engineers at Samsung and at New York University say they’re onto a promising solution. The South Korea–based electronics giant generated some buzz when it announced a new 5G beam-forming antenna that could send and receive mobile data faster than 1 gigabit per second over distances as great as 2 kilometers. Although the 5G label is premature, the technology could help pave the road to more-advanced mobile applications and faster data transfers.

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Jean Lievens: Social Media Killing Peer-to-Peer

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

deadSwap Artistic Statement

A major impact of the commercialization of the Internet has been the undermining of its peer-to-peer architecture. As Capital must always control the circulation of value in order to appropriate surplus, its champions view peer networks as a threat. The Web, although it sits on top of the Internet, is not a peer-to-peer technology but rather a client-server system where the interactions of the users are controlled and mediated by that site's operators.

With such centralization and control, the operators are in the position of capturing the value created by the users of these sites by way of selling this audience of users as a commodity to publishers of marketing and propaganda.

More importantly, the Capitalist-financed operators of such sites, can sell the data of the users, which often includes significant personal and demographic details, raw data for biometrics and detailed relationship graphs, to those that want to use this data to study, manipulate or control these users. These private, centralized services can also silence and lock out any user from participating or act to prevent any type of usage that is contrary to their own interests.

The new “Social Web” has fundamentally replaced the peer-to-peer Internet, and remaining peer communications technology has become marginal or even contraband as participants on peer networks face increasing legal attack and active sabotage from groups representing the interests of Capital.

The Internet is dead. In order to evade the flying monkeys of capitalist control, peer communication can only abandon the Internet for the dark alleys of covert operations. Peer-to-peer is now driven offline and can only survive in clandestine cells.

deadSwap is an offline file sharing system where participants covertly pass a USB stick from one to another. The route of the USB memory stick and the identity of the other participants is not known by the users but controlled by local, independently operated SMS gateways that are kept as a carefully shared secret by their users.