Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Stephen E. Arnold: Free DoD Book about Ethical Behavior

Ethics, Military
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Free DoD Book about Ethical Behavior

Ethical behavior in the intelligence community is an important consideration. What does the Department of Defense do to assist its personnel in navigating the often-churning waters of day-to-day decision making?

The Department of Defense publishes in Microsoft Word format a compendium of stories about ethical lapses in the Department of Defense and other US government agencies. The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failures is a Department of Defense publication. The 2012 update is located at http://goo.gl/784oP. The case examples range from simple fraud to bizarre exchanges of inside information for “personal” (sexual) services. The Wall Street Journal makes a copy of the 2007 version of the document available at its Web site at http://goo.gl/yJBcF.

You can find a compendium of related publications on the DoD Guidance page. An interesting summary of the “rules” for ethical conduct may be found in Cindy Van Rassen’s Ethics/Professional Responsibility” delivered at the 2012 40th Annual Symposium on Government Acquisition. At the time, Ms. Van Rassen was the Associate General Counsel for the Missile Defense Agency. The PowerPoint presentation was available online on July 22, 2013.

Does the Encyclopedia of Ethical Failures help minimize lapses in judgment? One hopes that the information programs provide a useful function.

Stephen E Arnold, July 22, 2013

You can sign up for a free monthly newsletter about online and content processing at http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/honk/.

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Tom Atlee: Corporations and the Sharing Economy

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence
Tom Atlee
Tom Atlee

Corporations meeting the challenge of the sharing economy…?

Corporate business plans and market control are being challenged by the expansion of the sharing economy and its “collaborative consumption”. Some corporations are ignoring the challenge. Some are fighting it. Some are creatively joining it. All these responses add up to a complex and rapidly evolving economic landscape that’s not well recognized by the general population.

Co-Intelligence Institute board member Heather Tischbein sent me a remarkable article, “Corporations must join the collaborative economy” by Jeremiah Owyang.  It claims that the growth of what it calls the collaborative economy – the peer-to-peer dynamics increasingly known as “the sharing economy” in my circles – is an inevitable challenge that corporations will have to respond to whether they want to or not.

FORCES DRIVING THE EXPANDING “SHARING ECONOMY”

The article describes a number of societal, economic, and technical developments that are driving the emergence of the collaborative economy. These include supports for connectivity – including increasing population density and people’s desire for community accompanied by the rise of social networking and multi-function mobile devices. Also people’s attitude are shifting: More of them are more altruistic and motivated by a desire for sustainability and for more flexible livelihoods. They feel less need to own things as long as they have access to the services those things provide. Finally, both corporations and citizens are trying to monetize their idle resources, an effort that becomes easier as new payment systems are developed.

I was surprised that this list of forces driving the development of the sharing economy does not include “reduced purchasing power caused by economic downturns, inequity, and unemployment”. It seems obvious to me that when people don’t have enough money, many of them start sharing and working creatively to survive together. The article also does not particularly note that more people are satisfying their needs through doing things themselves – building, fixing, gardening, and so on – both individually and together. Nevertheless, the article’s analysis is quite interesting for the factors it does cover.

Read full post.

 

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Howard Rheingold: Teaching Metacognition

Cultural Intelligence
Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold

I teach metacognition to my Stanford students by starting with exercises that help them develop an awareness of how, where, and why they are directing their attention online (“self-monitoring strategies”). This presentation, summarized here (with a link to the slides and podcast of the original) talks about the importance of teaching metacognition to improve learning.

Teaching Metacognition

This webpage is a summary, written by Carol Ormand, of Marsha Lovett's presentation at the 2008 Educause Learning Initiative conference. Dr. Lovett's slides and a podcast of her presentation can be accessed via the conference website. (more info)

“Metacognition is a critically important, yet often overlooked component of learning. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills – all of which can be learned – we can improve student learning. There are three critical steps to teaching metacognition:

  1. Teaching students that their ability to learn is mutable
  2. Teaching planning and goal-setting
  3. Giving students ample opportunities to practice monitoring their learning and adapting as necessary”

Learn more.

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Robin Good: Where to Find Hot Trending Fluff Online

Advanced Cyber/IO
Robin Good
Robin Good

SEOMomma provides some really useful pointers for finding “trending content” online:

  1. http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends takes you to where Google curates the trending queries, if you can find something here that you can spin and link to your niche you could get a nice bump in traffic.
  2. http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts everyone loves ‘top tens’ and at this links Google curates the most popular ‘top ten charts’ song to space objects. Children’s TV to Politicians, whisky to coffee and lots I between. It may inspire you to produce your own ‘top ten’.
  3. http://www.hashtags.org/ will give you a list of trending hashtags and http://www.hashtags.org/trending-on-twitter/ will give you what’s trending on Twitter.
  4. http://whatthetrend.com/ has general subjects and if you investigate you’ll see how sites like Huffington Post use the hashtag to create content that could pull in visitors.

If you want more of these, just head on to: http://seomomma.com/content-creation-curated-content/ for the full list.

Useful. Resourceful. 8/10

Original article: http://seomomma.com/content-creation-curated-content/

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Stephen E. Arnold: IBM Makes Hadoop Quick and Easy with BigInsight

Advanced Cyber/IO

Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

IBM Makes Hadoop Quick and Easy with BigInsight

The article titled InfoSphere BigInsights on IBM promotes the use of Apache Hadoop, an open source software framework, with IBM’s BigInsight. Not only is the product free to download, but IBM offers BigInsight to simplify Hadoop for users. To begin, visit the Quick Start Edition page, with video tutorials that walk you through each step toward collecting insights from Big Data. The article explains,

“InfoSphere BigInsights can help you increase operational efficiency by augmenting your data warehouse environment. It can be used as a query-able archive, allowing you to store and analyze large volumes of multi-structured data without straining the data warehouse. It can be used as a pre-processing hub, helping you to explore your data, determine what is the most valuable, and extract that data cost-effectively. It can also allow for ad hoc analysis, giving you the ability to perform analysis on all of your data.”

IBM has managed to turn Hadoop into something resembling user-friendly. The complexity of Big Data scares many people, but IBM hopes to change that bias by allowing users a hands-on learning experience without any data capacity or time limits. The ability to explore large data sets and how to extract information from them is enabled through features including Text analytics, BigSheets, Development Tools and Management Capabilities.

Chelsea Kerwin, July 22, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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David Swanson: Deep Dissection of Trans-Pacific Partnership — The Most Evil Reprehensible Impeachable Act To Come Out of Washington in Recent Memory

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
David Swanson
David Swanson

TPP: The Terrible Plutocratic Plan

By David Swanson

Remarks July 21, 2013 at an Occupy Harrisonburg (Va.) Event.
Make your voice heard here.

Thanks to Michael Feikema and Doug Hendren for inviting me.  Like most of you I do not spend my life studying trade agreements, but the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is disturbing enough to make me devote a little time to it, and I hope you will do the same and get your neighbors to do the same and get them to get their friends to do the same — as soon as possible.

I spend most of my time reading and writing about war and peace.  I'm in the middle of writing a book about the possibility and need to abolish war and militarism.  I hate to take a break from that.  But if we think trade and militarism are separate topics we're fooling ourselves.

New York Timescolumnist Thomas Friedman, a big fan of the supposed wonders of the hidden hand of the market economy says, “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15.  And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Continue reading “David Swanson: Deep Dissection of Trans-Pacific Partnership — The Most Evil Reprehensible Impeachable Act To Come Out of Washington in Recent Memory”

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Ray McGovern: General Hayden’s Glass House

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military
Ray McGovern
Ray McGovern

Gen. Hayden’s Glass House

By Ray McGovern

July 21, 2013

Editor Note: Official Washington’s national security/mainstream media incest was on scandalous display when ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden posed as a CNN analyst to denounce Edward Snowden for exposing surveillance excesses that Hayden had a hand in creating.

Mike Hayden
Mike Hayden

Former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden should not throw any more stones, lest his own glass house be shattered. His barrage Friday against truth-teller Edward Snowden and London Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald invited a return rain of boulders for Hayden committing the same violations of constitutional protections that he is now excusing.

Writing as “CNN Terrorism Analyst,” Hayden read from the unctuous script previously used by “Meet the Press” host David Gregory on June 23 when he questioned Greenwald’s status as a journalist. Hayden claimed Greenwald deserves “the Justice Department’s characterization of a co-conspirator.”

But the principal target of Hayden’s ire was Snowden. After lumping him together with despicable characters like CIA’s Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen of the FBI, and others who spied for the U.S.S.R. – and then disparaging “leakers” like Bradley Manning – Hayden wrote, “Snowden is in a class by himself.”

But it is Michael Hayden who is in a class by himself. He was the first NSA director to betray the country’s trust by ordering wholesale violation of what was once the First Commandment at NSA: “Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans Without a Court Warrant.” Not to mention playing fast and loose with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

Continue reading “Ray McGovern: General Hayden's Glass House”