On Need to Know, we do a lot of reporting about the world’s problems. But we’re premiering a new series about people coming up with creative solutions — it’s called “Agents of Change.”
Social entrepreneur challenging conventional wisdom
Samasource–microwork (small digital tasks that can be done on an inexpensive computers).
Building 21st Century assembly line that can break down massive tasks (e.g. updating addresses for Google maps, or translating emergency messages from Creole to English). Won contracts with Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft.
15% premium for socially-conscious companies, AND competitive on cost, quality, and turnaround time.
Small scale digital tasks did not exist before.
Transforming lives, especially women, young men, and refugees. $5 a day is very much better than local norms, and buys an active English-speaking brain with hands able to do quality work.
IMPORTANT: Developing world is out-pacing USA and West generally in extending Internet infrastructure to the poor–centers created, humans come in, also doing viewing (Gorgon Stare, take note!), creating logs of store videos on shopper buying habits, anything that can be noticed and logged by a human–$5 a day.
Phi Beta Iota: We could not, in a million years, have found a better “off-set” to the USAF Gorgon Stare program. This micro-tasking, combining human brains and hands with Internet access, is one of the most profoundly intelligent and socio-economically useful ideas we have seen in our lifetimes (there are 800 of us here). BRAVO.
The American Way of War: If You Can See Everything, Can You Know Anything?
With Air Force's new drone, ‘we can see everything,'in today's Washington Post (attached below) is a good example of how the high-cost addiction to techno war is running amok. One thing ought to be clear in Afghanistan: A tiny adversary armed with the most primitive weapons, and a command and control system made up of prayer rugs and cell phones, has brought the high tech US military to a stalemate … or even worse, the looming specter a grand-strategic defeat, because we are becoming economically and morally exhausted by the futility of this war. It does not matter whether it is President Obama presiding over a vapid strategic review or a low ranking grunt on point in Afghanistan — the central problem facing the United States in Afghanistan is the absence of what the Germans call fingerspitzengefühlor the feeling in the fingerprints needed for an intuitive feel for or connection with one's environment.
As the American strategist Colonel John Boyd (USAF Ret.) showed, fingerspitzengefühl is absolutely essential to the kind of synthetic (as opposed to analytic) thinking that is necessary for quick, relevant, and ultimately successful decision making in war, where quick decisions and sharp actions at all levels must be made and harmonized in an ever-present atmosphere of menace, uncertainty, mistrust, fear, and chaos that impedes decisive action.[1]
Article About Grogon Stare
To paraphrase Clausewitz, these difficulties multiply to produce a kind of friction, and therefore, even though everything in war is simple, the simplest thing is difficult. Clausewitz considered friction is the atmosphere of war. Nevertheless, according to the Post, the Air Force is about to deploy to Afghanistan a “revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.”
Quoting Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything.” Nirvana. While the Post dutifully reports a smattering of opposing views, it misses the ramifications of the central idea epitomized by General Poss's confident assertion: namely, how the American ideology of techno war assumes it can negate the human need for fingerspitzengefühl on a battlefield.
General Poss's confidence suggests quite clearly he believes seeing everything enables one to know everything. This a stunning theory of knowledge. It is also a classic example of the American military's unquestioned belief that complex technologies coupled to step-by-step analytical procedures can negate the friction of combat to solve any problem in war. Lifting the fog of war is, in fact, a phrase frequently used in contractor brochures touting the efficacy of these technologies. This reflects theory of knowledge — really an unquestioned ideology — that views war as fundamentally a procedural problem of methodical analytical thinking, as opposed to its messy reality of being in large part an art of synthetic thinking.
The media are telling us that the economic “crisis” is over, and that the world-economy is once more back to its normal mode of growth and profit. On December 30, Le Monde summed up this mood in one of its usual brilliant headlines: “The United States wants to believe in an economic upturn.” Exactly, they “want to believe” it, and not only people in the United States. But is it so?
First of all, as I have been saying repeatedly, we are not in a recession but in a depression. Most economists tend to have formal definitions of these terms, based primarily on rising prices in stock markets. They use these criteria to demonstrate growth and profit. And politicians in power are happy to exploit this nonsense. But neither growth nor profit is the appropriate measures.
Officer won't sign order for troop indoctrination, asks to be relieved of command over repeal of ‘gay' ban in military
Worldnet.com,Posted: December 24, 2010
An Army lieutenant colonel has asked to be relieved of command rather than order his troops to go through pro-homosexual indoctrination following the repeal of the policy, which required homosexuals to keep silent about their sexual preference.
This year will see the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan and, according to current plans, the beginning of British troop withdrawal. A decade into the military campaign, there is no longer even discussion of winning. The initial objective to release the country from the despotic grip of the Taliban and prevent its use as a safe haven for al-Qaida was achieved within months. Since then, it has only ever become harder to discern what victory might look like.
There is some clarity on what would count as defeat. If Nato withdrawal leads to the total collapse of Hamid Karzai's government and a return to Taliban rule, there would be no disguising the humiliation to western powers, nor the increased security threat from jihadi terrorism. Not that President Karzai is an attractive ruler. His administration is corrupt and repressive.
Summary: The author discusses the intellectual but not the ethical underpinings of the failure of US foreign policy and national security since the first Clinton Administration. He touches on alternative policies such as isolationalism, offshore balancing, selective engagement, global dominance, and then settles on offshore balancing as the way to go: pulling back the Army and Marines from overseas, sharply reducing their budgets, and restoring budget to the Air Force and the Navy.
In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America
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Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets. There is a formal beauty here too, though, reminiscent of Robert Polidori's images of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans. “It seems like Detroit has just been left to die,” says Marchand, “Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world – or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident.”
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The Ruins of Detroit tells the city's story so far in one starkly beautiful photograph after another, all of which add up to nothing less than an end-of-empire narrative. Or as Sugrue puts it: “The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present.”
Working for change: Samasource redefines international aid 
