Category: 04 Education

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Journal: US Government Seizures without Due Process

04 Education, 09 Justice, Civil Society, Law Enforcement
DefDog Recommends...

The U.S. government’s crackdown on file sharing and counterfeiting has
taken a new and disturbing turn.

Yesterday, we reported that the Department of Homeland Security’s
Immigration and Customs Enforcement office had seized Torrent-Finder.com,
a site that linked to other sites that hosted and shared torrent files of
copyrighted material. The news itself was not too unusual; what struck us
as out of order was that the site had been shut down without the owner
being notified and without a court conviction or, to our knowledge, any
other legal proceedings.

MORE @  http://mashable.com/2010/11/27/homeland-security-website-seized/

Phi Beta Iota: In addition, we wonder what this has to do with Homeland Security.  The incoherence and lack of holistic integrity of US plans, programs, policies, and spending continue to astound.

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“Public Insight Network”

04 Education, Collective Intelligence, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media

http://www.publicinsightnetwork.org

Partners:

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Journal: Cyber-Heist 2nd Generation

03 Economy, 04 Education, 10 Security, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Computer/online security, Cultural Intelligence, Cyberscams, malware, spam, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Law Enforcement, Mobile, Standards
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

The Great Cyber-Heist

New York Times

By JAMES VERINI

November 10, 2010

Full Story Online

Mid-1990s: Gonzalez, 14, is visited by F.B.I. agents at his high school for hacking into NASA.

Gonzalez,  law-enforcement officials would discover, was more than just a casher. He was a moderator and rising star on Shadowcrew.com, an archetypal criminal cyberbazaar that sprang up during the Internet-commerce boom in the early 2000s. Its users trafficked in databases of stolen card accounts and devices like magnetic strip-encoders and card-embossers; they posted tips on vulnerable banks and stores and effective e-mail scams. Created by a part-time student in Arizona and a former mortgage broker in New Jersey, Shadowcrew had hundreds of members across the United States, Europe and Asia. It was, as one federal prosecutor put it to me, “an eBay, Monster.com and MySpace for cybercrime.”

Read rest of article….

Phi Beta Iota: We opened Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in 1994, making the observation that when the Israeli's captured a hacker they gave him a job, while the US simply kicked them in the teeth and sent them to jail.  We tried to keep Phiber Optic out of jail, and we have for decades been on record comparing hackers to astronauts–full of the right stuff and pushing the edge of the envelope.  No one, including Marty Harris then in charge of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) wanted to listen.  Today the US Government is again ignoring the warnings on the urgency of getting a grip on all information in all languages all the time, and roughly 20 years behind in creating “root” cyber-security.  This article by James Verini is a phenomenal update on what we all knew in the mid-1990's that the US Government is still oblivious to–this is not a problem technology or wanton spending can solve–this is a problem that demands discipline, integrity, intelligence, and sharing.  It is neither possible nor desireable to secure government or military computers in isolation–this is an “all in” smart safe nation challenge.

See Also:

1994 Sounding the Alarm on Cyber-Security

Search: smart nation intelligence reform electoral reform national security reform

Continue reading “Journal: Cyber-Heist 2nd Generation”

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Journal: Newspaper Extinction Timeline

04 Education, 11 Society, Augmented Reality, Collective Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Tools
DefDog Recommends...

« Keynote on the Future of Global Media in New York | Main | The role of BRIC in the future of global media »

Launch of Newspaper Extinction Timeline for every country in the world.
Ross Dawson, October 31, 2010 10:47 PM US PT

Back in August I predicted that newspapers in their current form will be irrelevant in Australia in 2022. That received significant international attention including from The Australian, The Guardian, Editor & Publisher (which called me the ‘Wizard of Aussie') and many others.

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.

The Australian has again covered this in a story title Deadline for newspapers as digital publications rise. There may be some more coverage in coming days.

Two Graphics and More

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.

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Poverty Is Not a Game (PING) – A game about poverty

01 Poverty, 04 Education, Technologies
link

PING is an online game made for secondary schools, forming a starting point to discuss the subject ‘poverty’ and what it means to be poor. Ping is aimed at the students of the secondary and third degree. The students become the main characters in the game. They can choose between Jim or Sofia, who, due to certain circumstances, end up on the street and need to find their own path.

PING shows that games can help to introduce complex social subjects like poverty in the class room.

The partners of the PING project want to contribute to the social debate encouraging the use of games at school as a tool to open the difficult discussion about poverty.

PING was made possible with the help of The King Baudouin Foundation (Belgium), IBBT (Belgium), with The Network of European Foundations, the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Germany) , the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Portugal/UK) and Fondation Bernheim (Belgium).

Play the game on line or download PING.

For the development of the game there was an intensive collaboration with the European Schoolnet (umbrella organization consisting of 31 ministries of education from the European member states) and the European Poverty Network (umbrella organization of poverty organizations from the European member states) to make games discussable in an educational context. The manual and game will be distributed in all secondary schools in Belgium with the support of the Belgian government.

PING was internationally launched on October 20th 2010 at the European convention “Poverty is not a game. Serious Games as a mean to discuss complex societal issues” in Brussels.

The game and manual are now available on the website.

Also available in Nederlands,  Français, and Deutsch

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Reference: Obama, Populism, and 2012

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Lawrence Goodwyn: The Great Predicament Facing Obama

An interview with legendary historian Lawrence Goodwyn on Obama, the larger currents in our political life, and the possibility of a rebirth in our democratic culture.

October 30, 2010

What happened to the dream of Barack Obama's transformational politics? There's been very little deviation from the disastrous Bush years on the key issues of war, empire and the distribution of wealth in the country.

I turned to Lawrence Goodwyn, historian of social movements whose books and methods of explaining history have had a profound influence on many of the best known authors, activists and social theorists of our time. Goodwyn's account of the Populist movement, Democratic Promise, is quoted extensively by Howard Zinn in People's History of the United States, and also in William Greider's masterpiece on the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple. You can find Goodwyn quoted in the first paragraph of Bill Moyers' recent book, On Democracy, and cited in just the same way in countless other books and essays.

I interviewed Goodwyn from his home in Durham, North Carolina about the pitfalls of recording American history, Obama's presidency in light of previous presidents, and portents of change in our political culture.

Read Full Long Interview Online….

Contributor John Steiner says:

This is a remarkable, long, worth reading every word interview, in which Goodwyn compares Obama favorably with Lincoln and recounts the history of the financial elites in America. His concluding sentences: ³Strap on your
seat belts, Jan (Frel). The election in 2012 is going to define the meaning of the American idea.

Phi Beta Iota: There are two major flaws with this Democratic Party love-fest: 1) the Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans, just more inept; and 2) Obama will not get a second term because he sold out–anyone who had Rahm Emanuel as his “enforcer” and that still has Axelrod as his advisor,while also installing a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as “national security advisor,” is part of the existing system, not its antithesis.  Independents and Electoral Reform (13 Steps) will produce the outcome Goodwyn posits, not Obama and not the Democratic Party.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

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Journal: College True Costs versus True Ignorance

04 Education

Seth Godin Home

Pushing back on mediocre professors

College costs a fortune. It takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of money.

When a professor assigns you to send a blogger a list of vague and inane interview questions (“1. How did you get started in this field? 2. What type of training (education) does this field require? 3. What do you like best about your job? 4. what do you like least about your job?”) I think you have an obligation to say, “Sir, I'm going to be in debt for ten years because of this degree. Perhaps you could give us an assignment that actually pushes us to solve interesting problems, overcome our fear or learn something that I could learn in no other way…”

When a professor spends hours in class going over concepts that are clearly covered in the textbook, I think you have an obligation to repeat the part about the debt and say, “perhaps you could assign this as homework and we could have an actual conversation in class…”

When you discover that one class after another has so many people in a giant room watching a tenured professor far far in the distance, perhaps you could mention the debt part to the dean and ask if the class could be on video so you could spend your money on interactions that actually changed your life.

The vast majority of email I get from college students is filled with disgust, disdain and frustration at how backwards the system is. Professors who neither read nor write blogs or current books in their field. Professors who rely on marketing textbooks that are advertising-based, despite the fact that virtually no professional marketers build their careers solely around advertising any longer. And most of all, about professors who treat new ideas or innovative ways of teaching with contempt.

“This is costing me a fortune, prof! Push us! Push yourself!”

Phi Beta Iota: Virtually everything we have been “sold” as essential (e.g. university credentialing, sub-zero fridges) comes with time-energy costs that are not known to the public.  Now, increasingly, the true cost versus true worth of alternative time-energy expenditures (e.g. two years spent traveling around the world versus four years listening to tenured professors pretend to teach), is “visible.”  2012 could be the year of great convergence-emergence in which all of the pent-up possibilities of the Information Era begin to visibly drown all of the drawn-out losers of the Industrial Era.