03 Economy – Page 209 – Public Intelligence Blog

Google Code wants to become a bigger source forge by Julie BortGoogle Code hosts more than 250,000 open source projects but until last week, only allowed projects that used a limited number of licenses. But on Friday, Google announced it would leave the license discrimination to the folks that do it best, the Open Source Initiative. It will now accept into its forge projects covered by any OSI license. Open source licenses are abundant because a developer that creates something has the right to choose the conditions on a project when sharing it. Phil… 2

2010/09/202010/09/20

MakerFaire Africa 2010 Project Showcase

03 Economy, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 08 Wild Cards, Mobile, Technologies

Maker Faire Africa is a celebration of African ingenuity, innovation and creation. Here you will find the Makers who showed their work at the 2010 event in Nairobi Kenya. Work ranges from time saving devices for agriculture to alternative energy sources from design with recycled objects to social media applications for mobile phones. Per maker you will find a short synopsis of their work, their contacts details plus a possibliity to collaborate with them.

Terra Weikel from Uganda came with briliant idea on how to improve the digitalization of rural Uganda, and they concluded that the best material would be to use a drum which is readily available. They then converted it into a digital tank (kiosk). He was here to create awareness of the digital drum and inspire its use in other African Villages! To inspire for a better Africa, in terms of digitalization.

The Village Telco is an initiative to build low-cost community telephone network hardware and software that can be set up in minutes anywhere in the world. No mobile phone towers or land lines are required. He was here to create awareness of the product and it entrepreneurial sense! To inspire for a better Africa, in terms of Tele-communication.

Continue reading “MakerFaire Africa 2010 Project Showcase”

2010/09/202010/09/20

Journal: US Research & Development in the Toilet

03 Economy, 05 Energy, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government

U.S. innovation: On the skids

Technologists look to a new White House to reverse decade-long slide in R&D

By Gary Anthes, ComputerWorld, October 21, 2008

By most measures, the U.S. is in a decade-long decline in global technological competitiveness. The reasons are many and complex, but central among them is the country's retreat from long-term basic research in science and technology, coupled with a surge in R&D by countries such as China.

Tip of the Hat to Lynn Wheeler at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: This ties in perfectly with US secret intelligence fraud, waste, and abuse (hand-outs to corporations for vapor-ware, see our quick study 2010: OPINION–America’s Cyber Scam); and also with Chuck Spinney's long-standing concerns about the plans-reality mismatch and the criminal insanity of raising two generations of engineers who know nothing but “government specification cost plus” production.

2010/09/18

Journal: U.S. Army Partially Criminal & Drugged Up

03 Economy, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Officers Call

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

I can't confirm all of what's in here because I don't currently work with those issues, but this reads like the Vietnam era…

McClatchy Newspapers (mcclatchydc.com)

September 17, 2010

As Iraq Winds Down, U.S. Army Confronts A Broken Force

By Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — When Lt. Col. Dave Wilson took command of a battalion of the 4th Brigade of the 1st Armored Division, the unit had just returned to Texas from 14 months traveling some of Iraq's most dangerous roads as part of a logistics mission.

What he found, he said, was a unit far more damaged than the single death it had suffered in its two deployments to Iraq.

Nearly 70 soldiers in his 1,163-member battalion had tested positive for drugs: methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana. Others were abusing prescription drugs. Troops were passing around a tape of a female lieutenant having sex with five soldiers from the unit. Seven soldiers in the brigade died from drug overdoses and traffic accidents when they returned to Fort Bliss, near El Paso, after their first deployment.

“The inmates were running the prison,” Wilson said.

Continue reading “Journal: U.S. Army Partially Criminal & Drugged Up”

2010/09/172010/09/17

NIGHTWATCH Extract: China-Sri Lanka

02 China, 03 Economy, 03 India, 10 Security

China-Sri Lanka: On 16 September, China and Sri Lanka agreed to enhance bilateral military cooperation. The announcement came during a meeting between General Chen Bingde, Chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army of China, and Sri Lankan Defense Minister Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The terms and value of the agreement are not yet known. Nevertheless, any new Chinese defense cooperation initiative with any South Asian country will draw the attention of the Indians. This reinforces China's defense connections with the country immediately south of India and in which India has strategic interests, albeit badly managed most of the time.

Following the near trebling of the armed forces to achieve victory over the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan Army requires a major overhaul, downsizing, retraining and re-equipment. It is significant about Sri Lankan leadership views of India that they turned to China. India, China and Pakistan all have helped Sri Lanka in fighting the Tigers.

For India, this will reinforce suspicions that China plans and intends to encircle India with client states.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

2010/09/142010/09/14

Journal: The Socialization of Products & Services

03 Economy, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, IO Mapping

The Socialization of Products & Services

After writing a piece on The Memetic Web & The Internet of Products several weeks ago, I started to think more about the implications products and services would have on the Attention Economy and why the notion of “social” seems to be so often misconstrued in the larger context of the marketing and media worlds.

We talk a lot about social in terms of things like corporate communications, CRM, content development and to a greater extent, sharing behaviors – all of which are great, mind you – but I think what we don’t talk about enough or even build into our subsequent strategies and executions is the very thread of what social is in an empathic and evolutionary sense… Which is to do and propagate good.

Tip of the Hat to Pierre Levy at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: This is a very–very–thoughtful and deep blog posting, and the fact that Pierre Levy, one of the twelve apostles of Collective Intelligence, recommends it, makes it doubly important. Written by Guenther Sonnenfeld, it includes a short video of Alex Bogusky sharing important ideas. It includes references to Ray Kurzweil, technology as an off-shoot of biology, and the emerging nature of socio-economic ecosystems in which trust is the blood. All the kind of stuff our leaders–if we had any–should be embracing.

2010/09/13

Journal: Internet Archive in Sun Portable Data Center

03 Economy, 04 Education, Collective Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process

Data Storage: Internet Archive Gets a Place in the Sun (Portable Data Center)

By Chris Preimesberger on 2009-03-26 eWeek.com

The Internet Archive, one of the fastest-growing digital libraries in the world, has migrated its massive amount of content into a new Sun Microsystems-built portable data center loaded with 60 Sun X4500 Thumper arrays that each have 48TB of storage capacity. Sun staged a launch event at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters on March 25.

“It's amazing to think that the whole Web collection, which is about 2PB compressed and from 4PB to 5PB uncompressed, can live in a 20-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot shipping container, which, from our standpoint, is a computer,” Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, told eWEEK.

The archive, which employs the equivalent of only three system administrators, goes back to 1996 and stores more than 150 billion Web pages, Kahle said. It is accessed 500 times per second. Archive.org also houses the Wayback Machine, 1 million books, 100,000 movies and about 200,000 audio recordings, Kahle said. “It is a full-on library. This technology we see as another step toward a manageable system for dealing with enormous amounts of information safely.”

Phi Beta Iota: Don't miss the eight-shot slide show above. Brewster spoke at OSS '92–we have wasted the past twenty years, he has not. Now imagine this combined with the C Drives of participating members of the Global Game, and all the insurance data, and true cost information overlain on all credit purchases…..

Category: 03 Economy

Journal: Google Expands Open Source Platform

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