Policies – Page 452 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/03/122012/03/12

Mini-Me: PriceWaterHouseCoopers to Go Down?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

Robert Steele has for some time been saying that “The truth at any cost lowers all others costs.” He has also been focusing on the importance of intelligence with integrity. Among all governments, only Iceland appears to be serious about dealing with the financial crisis as it should be dealt with: as a criminal conspiracy enabled by all of the parties in both public and private sectors who sacrificed their integrity and betrayed the public trust.

Corporations operate under public charters. It is difficult to police the corporations when the governments have themselves become criminalized, but the tide is turning — the public is beginning to recognize that governments lack integrity and intelligence and cannot be trusted — in their present form — to manage the public interest.

When Goldman Sachs goes out of business the healing can begin. Slamming PWC is a good start.

Old Landsbanki to sue PriceWaterhouseCoopers for ‘deliberate’ auditing errors

The resolution committee of the failed Icelandic bank Old Landsbanki has subpoenaed the international auditing firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, accusing the company of creating wrong annual accounts which misled the markets. The committee’s damages claim runs to hundreds of millions of krónur.

2012/03/112012/03/11

Yoda: Big Data Tough Love, Everyone Fails

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Key Players, Officers Call, Policies, Serious Games, Standards, Strategy, Threats

yoda with light saber — Got Crowd? BE the Force!

The Three Things You Need to Know About Big Data, Right Now

Patrick Tucker

World Future Society March 11, 2012

Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies

Okay. You got me. I can’t really tell you everything you need to know about big data. The one thing I discovered last week – as I joined more than 2,500 data junkies from around the world for the O’Reilly Strata conference in rainy Santa Clara California—is that nobody can, not Google, not Intel, not even IBM. All I can guarantee you is that you’ll be hearing a lot more about it.

What is big data? Roughly defined, it refers to massive data sets that can be used to predict or model future events. That can include everything from the online purchase history of millions of Americans (to predict what they’re about to buy) to where people in San Francisco are most likely to jog (according to GPS) to Facebook posts and Twitter trends and 100 year storm records.

Phi Beta Iota: Big data is most important for what it can tell you about true cost and whole system cause and effect, inclusive of political corruption and organizational fraud. These are past and present issues, not future issues. We design the future based on the integrity present today. This is why “open everything” matters.

With that in mind, here’s the three most important things you need to know about big data right now:

Continue reading “Yoda: Big Data Tough Love, Everyone Fails”

2012/03/10

Yoda: The Extended School – Obstacles & Possibilities

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Ethics

Digital Education

Antonio M. Battro and Percival J. Denham

Digital Education is clearly a labor of love. At the same time it is a thoughtful and sophisticated discussion of the shape of education in the future.

Howard Gardner

The purpose of this book is to provide a panorama of the application of new digital technologies in education as the century comes to an end. In some cases we have described instances where this technology has already been implemented with great success, in others we discuss promises that have still to be confirmed. We also hope to awaken “critical enthusiasm” for an effective and beneficial implementation of the best technology in the service of education and the individual.

. . . . . . .

This book is also the product of permanent collaboration with many teams of professionals in various disciplines. To all of them we convey our sincere acknowledgement and our wishes for success, as the seeds planted with so much effort have now begun to bear fruit. In addition, this grounding in our personal, generational and regional experience has enabled us to process a wide range of information from countries where this technology is more developed, with which we have maintained close and rewarding links during all these years.

CONTENTS

Continue reading “Yoda: The Extended School – Obstacles & Possibilities”

2012/03/10

Paul Craig Roberts: No Jobs for Citizens – Death Spiral

03 Economy, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Government

No Jobs For Americans

Today (March 9, 2012) the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true?

No. Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that 44,000 of these jobs or 19% consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS’s estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS’s estimate comes from the bureau’s “birth-death model,” which works better during normal times, but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the past four years.

Taking out the 44,000 added-on jobs reduces the February jobs number to 183,000, but does not provide a full correction. In an economy as troubled as the US economy is, most likely the deaths exceeded the births, but we don’t know what the number is. Was it 20,000? 50,000? What number do we deduct from the 183,000? We simply do not know.

Williams reports that seasonal adjustment factors do not work properly during troubled economic times and add their own overstatement to the jobs figure. If anyone could estimate the overestimate of new jobs that results from malfunctioning seasonal adjustments, it is John Williams, but he doesn’t provide an estimate.

Most likely, the new jobs did not exceed 150,000, a figure that would merely keep even with population growth and thus not reduce the rate of unemployment, which, consistent with this deduction, remained constant.

Let’s look now at the kind of jobs that were created. Of the new jobs reported by BLS,
92% are in services. Of this 92%, only 7% could possibly relate to exportable services–architectural, engineering, and computer systems services.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: No Jobs for Citizens – Death Spiral”

2012/03/102012/03/10

Eagle: Extremist Groups Grow Fast – While Angry Often Armed Non-Extremists Ponder Their Options

01 Poverty, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence

Southern Poverty Law Center Report: As Election Season Heats Up, Extremist Groups at Record Levels

The American radical right grew explosively in 2011, a third consecutive year of extraordinary growth that has swelled the ranks of extremist groups to record levels, according to a report issued today by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The rise was led by a stunning expansion of the antigovernment “Patriot” movement.

“The dramatic expansion of the radical right is the result of our country's changing racial demographics, the increased pace of globalization, and our economic woes,” said Mark Potok, senior fellow at the SPLC and editor of the new report.

“For many extremists, President Obama is the new symbol of all that's wrong with the country – the Kenyan president, the secret Muslim who is causing our country's decline,” Potok said. “The election season's overheated political rhetoric is adding fuel to the fire. The more polarized the political scene, the more people at the extremes.”

Many Americans are enraged by what they see as America's decline, and opportunistic politicians have done their best to stoke those fears and demonize President Obama in the process. For some, the prospect of four more years under the country's first black president also is an infuriating reminder that non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority in this country by 2050.

Continue reading “Eagle: Extremist Groups Grow Fast – While Angry Often Armed Non-Extremists Ponder Their Options”

2012/03/102012/03/10

John Robb: USG – Corporate Cyber Scam II

10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

You Don't Need a Cyber Attack to Take Down The North American Power Grid

The Obama administration simulated a cyber attack on New York City's power supply in a Senate demonstration aimed at winning support for legislation to boost the nation's computer defenses. Senators from both parties gathered behind closed doors in the Capitol Wednesday for the classified briefing attended by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and other administration officials. The mock attack on the city during a summer heat wave was “very compelling,” said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who is co-sponsoring a cybersecurity bill supported by President Barack Obama. “It illustrated the problem and why legislation is desperately needed,” she said as she left the briefing. Bloomberg.

The US defense industry is in a full court press to get tens of billions in funding for cyberwarfare.

To get that funding, they need to dramatize the potential threat of cyberwarfare. Here's how. The central method of attack in cyberwarfare is systems disruption. Systems disruption is a way to break networks to achieve extremely high levels of damage (or, in financial terms, high ROIs). One of the best ways to demonstrate that type of attack is through a disruption of the power supply (usually with NYC as a target).

Two John Robb posts, comment, and see also — university grants at risk.

Continue reading “John Robb: USG – Corporate Cyber Scam II”

2012/03/09

John Steiner: Neuro-Economics – Convergence + RECAP

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

The brain science behind economics

Paul Zak, a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, talks about the genes
that can make or break a Wall Street trader, and about the chemical that
helps us all get along.

Eryn Brown

Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2012

Neuroscience might seem to have little to do with economics, but over the last decade researchers have begun combining these disparate fields, mining the latest advances in brain imaging and genetics to get a better understanding of the biological basis for human behavior.

Paul Zak is a pioneer in this nascent field of neuroeconomics. In a recent paper published in the journal PLoS One, he examined genes that may predict success among traders on Wall Street. His forthcoming book, “The Moral Molecule,” will explore how a chemical in the brain called oxytocin compels cooperation in society.

Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University, discussed this work with The Times.

Read full interview.

Phi Beta Iota: Convergence is upon us. Most universities do not get this, but a couple are struggling to change recalcitrant faculty and force the break-down of silos and the reconstitution of unified knowledge. We are at the very beginning of most interesting times.