Phi Beta Iota: This is one of the most balanced sensible white papers from a vendor it has been our pleasure to encounter. Taken in context of Microsoft thinking about buying Adobe after failing to see the value of Sun's Open Office, this white paper merits broad appreciation against the possibility that Adobe could become the Context & Content Division that Microsoft does not have and will not have under Steve Ballmer now that Ray Ozzie has given up on Microsoft and moved on.
The European and Asian powers have had it with being lectured by the
U.S.—and President Obama’s letter seeking to defuse the tension ahead of Thursday’s summit is likely to make things worse, says Zachary Karabell.
With the leaders of the world gathering for two days of economic points
and counterpoints under the aegis of the G-20, Seoul has become the scene of a showdown between a testy set of European and Asian powers and a rather flummoxed and flat-footed America represented by President Obama in
all his post-Nov. 2 glory and malaise.
Graphic Source
The agenda of the meeting has long been telegraphed by multiple mini-summits over the past few months, but with the announcement by the U.S. Federal Reserve this week of $600 billion in further “quantitative easing” (read: printing more money), the tenor has shifted. Two years after the uncorking of the global financial crisis, the United States faces a cohort of other wealthy nations that have had it with being told what to do by Americans, regardless of the merits. They are in a mood to lecture and berate, and recent statements by Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and Fed chief Ben Bernanke’s actions, have given them ample fodder.
The RSS feed of PhiBetaIota.net is now accessible by sending “re-configurepbi” (space before pbi) to 368-674. You will receive a menu listing of the headlines. To select a headline/article, reply with the menu number for what you want to see more of. For inquires, contact earthintelnet[at]gmail.com
Part of the point I wanted to make was that this date is different for every country. As such I have created a Newspaper Extinction Timeline that maps out the wide diversity in how quickly we can expect newspapers to remain significant around the world. First out is USA in 2017, followed by UK and Iceland in 2019 and Canada and Norway in 2020. In many countries newspapers will survive the year 2040.
Phi Beta Iota: Certainly worth reflecting on, this misses two big realities. First, newspapers could still convert themselves into honest citizen intelligence networks and focus on sense-making. Second, five billion poor people are not yet digital and while the dumb cell phone has a bright future, the smart phones and pads do not, in part because of raw earth shortfalls, in part because of embedded toxicity of materials, and in part because even with call centers, there is a very big space that “smart analog” newspapers could fill. The latter is particularly true if one factors in the fact that five billion poor people need alternatives to rote education including primers that can be passed around and do not need power sources.
Pacific Institute's Community Strategies for Sustainability and Justice (CSSJ) Program has produced Gearing Up for Action: A Curriculum Guide for Freight Transport Justice (pdf), an important advocacy tool to build the power and capacity of communities to participate in decision making around freight transport issues. The guide contains popular-education-style activities that CSSJ developed and piloted in partnership with community groups and coalitions including the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project and the “Ditching Dirty Diesel” Collaborative.This user-friendly curriculum guide is designed to help communities grappling with freight transport issues share their experiences, explore the root causes of freight transport impacts, identify those responsible for dealing with these causes, and develop a plan for advocacy to advance their solutions.
This paper is written in correlation with a project that aims to provide a distinctly new perspective to current trends in terrorism research by allowing for a new and more nuanced study of statements made by al-Qaeda. This project, the Al-Qaeda Statements Index (AQSI) database project at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, is one example of how new innovations can continue to provide new insight.
2010 Thesis Online
Unlike previous projects, the Al-Qaeda Statements Index project, when complete, will aid researches in developing a more thorough understanding of al- Qaeda's rhetoric by creating a searchable network to show complex connections among the web of various statements, keywords and ideas professed by al-Qaeda, spanning a period from the 1990s up to the present day. The AQSI will serve as both an advanced annotated bibliography for scholars seeking a starting point to study specific statements more in depth, while at the same time allowing for a quantitative analysis of the intricate connections and relationships among statements which would otherwise not be readily quantifiable or apparent.
Phi Beta Iota: A senior thesis within one of the more intelligent schools in America. Something to be proud of, and good indicator that the emerging generation can think.
In this Council Special Report, Robert K. Knake briefly examines the technological decisions that have enabled both the Internet's spectacular success and its troubling vulnerability to attack. Arguing that the United States can no longer cede the initiative on cyber issues to countries that do not share its interests, he outlines an agenda that the United States can pursue in concert with its allies on the international stage. This agenda, addressing cyber warfare, cyber crime, and state-sponsored espionage, should, he writes, be pursued through both technological and legal means. He urges first that the United States empower experts to confront the fundamental security issues at the heart of the Internet's design. Then he sketches the legal tools necessary to address both cyber crime and state-sponsored activities, including national prohibitions of cyber crime, multilateral mechanisms to prevent and prosecute cyberattacks, and peacetime norms protecting critical civilian systems, before describing the bureaucratic reforms the United States should make to implement effectively these changes.
Phi Beta Iota: This is an Epoch A report that is state-centric, does not demonstrate knowledge of the code-level and open-source challenges and opportunities, and lacks any sense of how a strategic analytic model with burden sharing among the varied stakeholders (e.g. eight clouds, twelve modalities) could resolve the problem at a fraction of the cost of the “traditionalist” “solutions” proposed here. This report is about doing the wrong things righter, not about doing the right things in the first place.
