Worth a Look: In The Know v1.30 HRXformation

Worth A Look
  • The Next Silicon Valley
    For more than 100 years, the San Francisco Baty area has been turning itself into a global model for innovation and technical development. When things go well, the world is envious. When there is a bust (like now) there’s not so much envy. The culture of innovation jas been built over that history. Developing a similar phenomenon requires a similar horizon. This is a great think piece about the intersection of technology, capital, education, culture and human capital.
  • Thousands of Workers are Standing By
    Why crowd sourcing may be the next outsourcing. Labor on Demand is like cloud computing for staffing agencies. This function, which would be run under purchasing in the current construct, is how organizations will interface with many of their people.
  • The Future of The Internet
    Save this one for a serious hour of your time over the weekend. The 45 page pdf is the product of a project between Cisco and the Global Business Network. The report offers four different potential futures. Underlying those scenarios are several simple and important ideas… the keyboard will disappear quickly; the Internet’s real growth will be in lower economic strata; digital natives will interact in ways beyond our imagining. The scenarios will give you a range of input with which to imagine your future.

Tip of the Hat to John Sumser at LinkedIn.

Journal: Google Real-Time Search

Tools

Full Story Online

Google Realtime Search Gets New Name, Its Own URL, And Kick In The Pants

by Alexia Tsotsis on Aug 26, 2010

In a move that emphasizes the increasing importance of realtime search, Google has just given their realtime search function a kick in the pants, moving it from the lowly “Updates” sidebar on regular Google search to it’s own URL http://google.com/realtime, which was broken this morning but now seems to be redirecting to http://www.google.com/realtime?esrch=RealtimeLaunch::Experiment.

Tip of the Hat to Magnus Hultberg at LinkedIn.

Reference: LinkedIn Selected Intelligence Groups

Blog Wisdom

LinkedIn (free to premium) seems to be reaching a new critical mass. Below are a few groups we will be following with the intent of pointing to them individually as warranted by new discussions.

Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling

Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling

Business Intelligence Group

Business Intelligence Group

Business Intelligence Professionals

Business Intelligence Professionals

Global Staffing Leaders

Global Staffing Leaders

Location Intelligence and Geospatial BI

Location Intelligence and Geospatial BI

Open Source Business Intelligence

Open Source Business Intelligence

Open Source Intelligence Gathering

Open Source Intelligence Gathering

Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP)

Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP)

The Intelligence Community (IC)

The Intelligence Community (IC)

United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation

United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation

Event: 16 Sept 2010, Wash DC, Miller-McCune-Live! Debate (Is Washington for Sale to Special Interests?)

Commerce, Corporations, Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Event link

September 16 @ 8:30am (breakfast will be served at 8:00am)

National Press Club
First Amendment Lounge
529 14th Street, NW
Washington, D.C.

Moderated by Miller-McCune Editor-in-Chief John Mecklin, the panelists are Rolf Lundberg, Jr., U.S. Chamber of Commerce; Craig Holman, Public Citizen; and Frank Baumgarter, co-author of Lobbying and Policy Change.

Continue reading “Event: 16 Sept 2010, Wash DC, Miller-McCune-Live! Debate (Is Washington for Sale to Special Interests?)”

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Our Friends, our Enemies

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

Iraq: Insurgents conducted at least 34 coordinated attacks in 16 cities 0n 25 August. The bombings and other attacks killed 77 people and wounded nearly 400 more. Baghdad experienced five attacks.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The attacks showed the breadth of the insurgents' operational area. They appear to be the work of a single group, apparently Sunni Arabs or secular Arabs.

The attacks also establish a baseline of the insurgents' ability to coordinate attacks over space and time. This was not a trivial display of the capability to coordinate attacks over long distances. They appear to be a test of the feasibility of taking the next escalation step in the insurgency.

Some outside entity is funding a new, most likely Sunni Arab, insurgency and has afforded its leadership the command and control capability for today's attacks.   Look to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added above.  The US Government (not America the Beautiful or the big-hearted American public) is called a “useful idiot” in most of the world precisely because it mixes hubris and naivete with vast amounts of money spent without a strategy and without accountability.  It took too long to understand the Saudi funding behind the global spread of virulent Wahhabism, while the equivalent funding to the Bush family and others assured that at the political and policy level, our enemies the Saudis would remain conveniently and unethically our friends.

See Also:

Journal: Nuclear War Against Iran…Again
23 Worst Tyrants/Dictators (Yes, there’s more than 23) and Oops, there’s Saudi Arabia..
NIGHTWATCH Extract: Dictators vs Iran in Middle East
Review: Breaking the Real Axis of Evil–How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025
Review: The CIA in Iran–The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the US-Iran Divide
Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State
Review: Threshold–The Crisis of Western Culture
Review: Wars of Blood and Faith–The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Journal: Brains Beat Algorithms….Again

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Citizen-Centered, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Tools
Full Story Online

Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is… an online gaming community.

Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game. (Also related, TED talk on how gaming can make a better world).

See Also:

Graphic: Jim Bamford on the Human Brain

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

Journal: Newsweek on SecDef Departure

10 Security
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Why Gates Seems Set on a 2011 Departure, by Jim Watson. So Robert Gates is set on retiring from government – for the second time. Or so he says. In an interview with ForeignPolicy.com, he has repeated more firmly than ever his desire to resign as secretary of defense sometime in 2011.

Why would he decide on 2011, and not 2010 or 2012? Strange but true: the arcane workings of the Pentagon budget process are one of the key factors behind his timing. Drawing up the annual defense budget – especially one now totaling $719 billion – is so complex that each exercise actually takes close to two years. Thus, the defense budget for 2012, the last year of President Obama's term in office, is already taking shape. Its unveiling in February of next year will place a capstone on Gates's extraordinary career.

Phi Beta Iota: The magazine appears poorly informed on several fronts, and most obviously, fails to recognize Senator Chuck Hagel as a possible successor to Gates.  Whoever it is, they are going to have to come in with a strategic analytic perspective that gives them a grip on reality, and an absolute non-negotiable mandate from Congress and the President to re-do Title 10 while also redirecting the CINCdoms into Whole of Government multinational information-sharing and sense-making networks.  Leon Panetta?  Why not Rahm Emanuel or David Axelrod?

noble gold