Methods & Process – Page 85 – Public Intelligence Blog

BRUSSELS – There are already more than 100,000 international troops in Afghanistan working with 200,000 Afghan security forces and police. It adds up to a 12-1 numerical advantage over Taliban rebels, but it hasn't led to anything close to victory.

Transcripts Of Defeat

London — THE highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” he said. “Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.

Continue reading “Journal: US Naivete In Afghanistan, Neglecting Iraq”

2009/10/302009/10/30

Search: World-Wide Linguist Supply

Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time, Threats, Tools

Great search, thank you.

The OSS-EIN solution for this problem is as follows:

1. All World Language human linguist-interpreters

2. Telelanguage (an open source software) registration for in-house and for-fee linguists

3. Via InfoSphere AB in Sweden, European graduate students fluent in the target language and competent in English, French, or German also

It was the latter that allowd us to find, evaluate, and report on 396 terrorist, insurgent, and opposition web sites in 29 languages over the the course of 60 days for under $60,000 in 1997. We still do this today, using cover support plans as needed.

The solution requires that the client not be an idiot and demand US citizenship and any kind of US clearance for translations that can be handled in near real time. For example, captured Dari documents inthe field should be digitized within minutes and translated within hours. Anyone that cannot do this for our troops fighting in the field should be fired.

2009/10/242011/10/22

Journal: Citizen Wisdom in California

11 Society, Civil Society, Government, Methods & Process

THE STATES WE’RE IN

by Hendrik Hertzberg

The New Yorker

AUGUST 24, 2009

The states of the Union are supposed to be laboratories of democracy, but this summer they have been looking more like toxic-waste dumps of futility. From coast to coast, from tundra to coral reef, state governments are in an awful fix. Their budget gaps are on track to add up to at least a third of a trillion dollars. In half the states, education funding is being cut, which means bigger classes, shoddier facilities, and fewer frills like music, art, languages, and library
books. States are closing parks, draining rainy-day funds, and shrinking services for children, the elderly, and the disabled. . . . . . . .

California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual
budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.

Continue reading “Journal: Citizen Wisdom in California”

2009/10/23

Journal: Kroll as a Moral Agent

Commerce, Ethics, Methods & Process

William Finnegan, Profiles, “The Secret Keeper,” The New Yorker, October 19, 2009, p. 42

Read the full text of this article in the digital edition. (Subscription required.)

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF DETECTION about Jules Kroll and corporate intelligence. In 1972, Jules Kroll launched J. Kroll Associates, which eventually became Kroll, Inc., the world’s preëminent detective agency, with three thousand employees, countless subcontractors, and offices in sixty cities in more than thirty-five countries. Last October, Kroll, aged sixty-eight, spoke to a crowd of students and faculty at Cornell, his alma mater. According to the history professor who introduced Kroll that day, Kroll, Inc., specializes in “pursuing crime, particularly financial crime, across international borders.” And so Kroll told stories about recovering the wealth plundered by dictators, among them Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, and Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier. Kroll’s stories were nearly all morality tales. But breaking up extortion rings, nailing dictators—that’s the Marvel Comics version of Jules Kroll’s career. Kroll really made his living, and his name, on Wall Street.

2009/10/232009/10/23

Journal: Moody’s Loss of Integrity

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process

How Moody's sold its ratings – and sold out investors

Kevin G. Hall

McClatchy Newspapers

October 21, 2009

A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody's punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.
. . . . . . .

“The story at Moody's doesn't start in 2007; it starts in 2000,” said Mark Froeba, a Harvard-educated lawyer and senior vice president who joined Moody's structured finance group in 1997.

Continue reading “Journal: Moody's Loss of Integrity”

2009/10/222009/10/23

About: EarthGame and World Brain

About the Idea, Methods & Process

Medard Gabel, #2 to Buckminster Fuller in creating the analog World Game, is a founding member of the board of Earth Intelligence Network (EIN), a 501c3 Public Charity, and has devised the preliminary architecture and cost estimate for creating the EarthGame, which we trademarked in his name.

Click on the logo below to read his two-page estimate, subject to inflation adjustment, of what it would take to create an EarthGame with “true cost” information on all elements and universal participation by all humans. This is infinitely scalable.

EarthGame Pleliminary Plan

The complete concept, unrealized and lacking funding amidst the global financial meltdown, is centered on the creation of a World Brain in which the EarthGame is the primary public policy-budgteting dialog tool, and all individuals are able to use hand-hell cell phones to both access all information in all languages all the time; and to play themselves at all levels, local to global (panarchy is the opposite of anarchy).

Continue reading “About: EarthGame and World Brain”

2009/10/21

Journal: Electronic Voting Fraud, Failure, & Foolishness

11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Methods & Process

Full Story Online

Sequoia Voting Systems hacks self in foot

by Mokurai

Tue Oct 20, 2009

Sequoia Voting Systems has inadvertently released the SQL (Structured Query Language) code for its voting databases. The existence of such code appears to violate Federal voting law. Read the announcement after the jump, just as received on the Open Voting Consortium mailing list earlier today.

The Linux “strings” command was able to peel it apart. Nedit was able to digest 800meg text files. What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code.

I've got it all organized for commentary and download in wiki form at:

Continue reading “Journal: Electronic Voting Fraud, Failure, & Foolishness”