The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
In earlier posts towards the tail end of last year and early this year, I committed to writing a number of posts on filtering. The background is simple:
Continue reading “Howard Rheingold: Seven Principles of Information Filtering”
Fast Company published “IBM’s Watson For Business: The $1 Billion Siri Slayer.” The write offers some nuggets of information that convert Watson from search system into the next Apple or Google. Frankly I find this notion somewhat amusing.
The story reports this interesting assertion, “IBM wants to transform Watson into a Siri for business.” Quite an analogy.
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: IBM Watson Dreams of Beating Google and Apple — Without a Clue”
Charter schools, another privatization program by profit first business interests occasionally produce good results, kind of show villages, but, as in all profit first operations –prisons, libraries, schools — all too often become a racket. Until we decide as a people that national wellness, arising from! individual wellness is our social priority all of this will only get worse. As this report makes clear it is time we went back to creating high quality public schools.
The Truth About Charter Schools: Padded Cells, Corruption, Lousy Instruction and Worse Results
JEFF BRYANT, Director of the Education Opportunity Network – Salon
In a kind of backhanded way this is good news of a sort. I have seen a number of these stories and discounted them, because the government denied that Fukushima played any role, but this one is well sourced and must be taken seriously. It's good news in that the system to get these doses out exists, and now they have the doses. But very bad news if it comes to pass that they are needed. ! That's the reality of the Fukushima disaster. We don't know… only that as long as radioactive waste pours in the sea, no good thing will arise. And that it will become increasingly planetary.
Pentagon Agency Admits It Began Stockpiling Potassium Iodide Due to Fukushima
Sheeple
Here is the latest on the Bee Trend. It is not good news. Click through to see the chart and map that help make this story clear.
Something Else for Europe to Worry About: the Disastrous Consequences of a Huge Bee Deficit
TODD WOODY – Quartz
This report describes a probationary positive development on Climate Change. This may come to nothing; it's certain the Republicans in the Senate will largely try to block it. But this effort by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) to get the Senate to engage seriously with climate change may happen. It's too early to tell whether this is mostly just an epiphenomenon, or the next importa! nt positive step in the Climate Change Trend. If the Senate seriously takes up climate change it will stimulate an extended national debate. The media won't be able to avoid it. I think the result of such a debate, where data and real life will converge, will result in a clear national mandate to become pro-active in climate change remediation.
Climate-change Push Launched by Senators
CAROLYN LOCHHEAD – San Francisco Chronicle
Huh?
Target data breach total rises to up to 110 million
The massive data breach at Target over the holiday season is potentially much worse than the retailer first reported — as many as 110 million people may have had their identity and financial information compromised, the retailer says.
CHINA RISING: DVN (Holdings) Limited Announces Appointment of Erik Prince as Chairman
CULTURE: American morality shifting substantially
2013 was the year that big data became big business, says Alex Handy in his San Diego Times article, “Big Data 2013: Another Big Year.” Handy explains that big data made the transformation when enterprises deployed Hadoop in production environments and NoSQL people spread data around on servers. These two combined situations resulted in disseminating massive amounts of data and employing enterprise systems to manage the information.
Editor's Note: It's hard to know the right reaction to Israel's latest craziness (mishugas)—its attempts to block Obama's deal with Iran to stop the potential militarization of Iran's nuclear capacity. Israel is trying to block the deal by using its American allies to push the Senate to vote on new sanctions against Iran now, instead of allowing the process toward a possible accommodation to be explored. Israel's goal is transparent: create conditions that Iran cannot accept, then argue that this proves Iran is really after the militarization of its nuclear capacities, then attack Iran with U.S. backing, and then use Iran's military response as proof that it was seeking nuclear capacity to attack Israel. Should one respond with sadness (see MJ Rosenberg’s article below) or with outrage?
Below I am also sharing a piece in which Israeli peace movement (Gush Shalom) leader Uri Avnery shows the craziness of Netanyahu's latest attempt to block an agreement with the Palestinians, this time by demanding that the Palestinians recognize Israel not just as a state the way all other parties recognize Israel, but as a JEWISH state (presumably meaning its right to discriminate against non-Jews or something of the sort).
Israel: The Dream Dies by MJ Rosenberg
Bibi & Libie by Uri Avnery
