Journal: Social Capital–Doing Good AND Making Money

03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, Methods & Process, Non-Governmental

DuckDuckGo on Social Capital

UpTake Institute October 11, 2010

There are some problems that neither pure capitalism nor charity can solve. Social capital is a new way of looking at solving those problems. This month, people from all over the world came to SOCAP10 in San Francisco to talk about social capital, and put their money where their mouths are.

Over the next several days we’ll be posting stories about companies that have what is called a “triple bottom line” — where they measure results not just in profit, but also in the business impact on people and the planet.

Our first video focuses on just what the social capital movement is about. We talk with people who run social capital companies such as Firefox maker Mozilla, people who are seeking funding for their businesses, and journalists who are covering the social capital movement.

Link to story and video

Tip of the Hat to Leif Utne at LinkedIn.

Review (Guest): Cognitive Surplus–Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

Review: Nonzero–The Logic of Human Destiny

Review: The Hidden Wealth of Nations

Review: The Monk and the Riddle–The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living

2010/10/112010/10/11

Journal: RYP thinks news is the killer app

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Media, Methods & Process, Real Time

RYP Recommends

The Media Equation

A Vanishing Journalistic Divide

By DAVID CARR

Published: October 10, 2010

If you were going to pick an epicenter for mainstream media, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz would not be a bad place to land. With his running scorecard on Beltway journalists, his interviews of other scorekeepers on his “Reliable Sources” show on CNN, and his ceaseless fascination with network news, Mr. Kurtz embodied the folkways of the traditional press.

Until last week, when he announced he was leaving his privileged perch to become the Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast, a two-year-old toddler of the new digital press conceived by Tina Brown and owned by IAC, run by Barry Diller. Mr. Kurtz’s lane change evinced gasps reminiscent of when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

On the heels of decisions by Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Peter Goodman of The New York Times to go to The Huffington Post, it would seem like a bit of a tipping point.

Read balance of this thorough article…

Phi Beta Iota: Robert has it half right–news you can use. The value has shifted from the T in IT to the I in IT. We told NSA this in Las Vegas in 2000, but the money is in the T not the I, so they ignored us. Public Intelligence about everything is about to emerge as the new arbiter of value. True cost will be known, transparency will expose corruption as well as waste, and there will be, as our friend and mentor Alvin Toffler has written, a PowerShift.

2010/10/112010/10/14

Journal: Five Myths Debunked–Treasury Run by Crooks

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends

I asked my good friend Marshall Auerback, an investment advisor and lawyer by training and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, to evaluate Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s claim that TARP has been a stunning success. Geithner made this claim in a 10 October op-ed in the Washington Post, entitled, “Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tackles five myths about TARP,” which is contained below as Attachment 2 beneath Auerback’s critique [Attachment 1]. To those of you who would sanitize these loose ends as a lingering “moral hazard,” I would urge you to think again.

Chuck Spinney
Carloforte, Sardinia
——–[Attachment 1]——–

The Auerback Critque:Four Realities Debunk Geithner’s Five Myths

Marshall Auerback

We have left frauds in charge of failed banks and covered up their losses.
Continue reading “Journal: Five Myths Debunked–Treasury Run by Crooks”

2010/10/112010/10/11

Journal: Information Overload & Leadership Failure

IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Standards, Strategy

Information Overload – Too Much Of A Good Thing?

October 11, 2010 – Everyone has seen the commercial on television. Someone asks a simple question, and then everyone in the crowd starts spewing forth all these facts that have been found via the Internet. This makes for some very clever and funny advertising, but let’s face it. Information overload is a real problem. The magic formula is to deliver the right information to the right people who are searching, at the right time. Sound simple enough, but how many avenues have you been down yourself just because you are looking for a certain recipe for brownies? In a closer look found here, some of the problems that contribute to information overload are discussed.

These include defining findability, an object-centric perspective, an actor-centric perspective, and filters that promote findability. Interesting read.

From the source:

The question is however, is it the abundance of the information that is the problem, or a general lack of maturity in approaches to designing effective organization and access mechanisms? In his presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City, Clay Shirky referred to this idea as “Filter Failure”. He describes information overload as the normal case and that it’s not necessarily the quantity of information that’s the problem, it’s our ability to filter through what’s there that’s the real issue.

Tip of the Hat to Marjorie M K Hlava at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: It is not a filter failure. It is a leadership failure…leadership lacking integrity in the holistic sense of the word, too eager to rush to pay for technical collection solutions that increase the size of their firehose but ignore both the fact that the fires we need to put out are small scattered ones, and the people we need to support require both back office and desktop tools. All this was well known in 1985 and the solutions fully articulated by 1989.

See Also:

Graphic: Balance Matters

Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents

2010/10/102010/10/10

Journal: Post-Partisan Encounters–Huckabee & Huffington

Collective Intelligence, Media, Open Government, Policy

Beyond Left And Right: Arianna And Mike Huckabee On Fox News (VIDEO)

Arianna visited Mike Huckabee's eponymous show this weekend, finding plenty of common ground with the Fox News host and former Republican governor from Arkansas.

“Basically we went from a country that made things to a country that made things up: CDOs, credit default swaps, toxic derivatives,” said Arianna. “Wall Street became a casino. And we the taxpayers bailed them out. That's where you and I agree.”

The pair also agreed on the problems with Fannie and Freddie, the need to improve America's crumbling infrastructure, and even shared some quips about their accents.

Phi Beta Iota: This is the first sign we have seen of intelligent life in broadcasting–if these two decent people can extend the dialog and maintain the focus on reality-based affordable holistic policy, they could be game-changers.

2010/10/092010/10/09

Journal: Who Controls (and Secures) the Internet?

10 Security, Computer/online security, Cyberscams, malware, spam, IO Secrets, Military, Officers Call

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Who controls the internet?

By Misha Glenny

Published: October 8 2010 23:40 | Last updated: October 8 2010 23:40

Squared-jawed, with four stars decorating each shoulder, General Keith Alexander looks like a character straight out of an old American war movie. But his old-fashioned appearance belies the fact that the general has a new job that is so 21st-century it could have been dreamed up by a computer games designer. Alexander is the first boss of USCybercom, the United States Cyber Command, in charge of the Pentagon’s sprawling cyber networks and tasked with battling unknown enemies in a virtual world.

Last year, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared cyberspace to be the “fifth domain” of military operations, alongside land, sea, air and space. It is the first man-made military domain, requiring an entirely new Pentagon command. That went fully operational a week ago, marking a new chapter in the history of both warfare and the world wide web.

In his confirmation hearing, General Alexander sounded the alarm, declaring that the Pentagon’s computer systems “are probed 250,000 times an hour, up to six million per day”, and that among those attempting to break in were “more than 140 foreign spy organisations trying to infiltrate US networks”. Congress was left with a dark prophecy ringing in its ears: “It’s only a small step from disrupting to destroying parts of the network.”

Phi Beta Iota: Of the $12 billion a year to be spent, roughly 90% if not more will be spent on “vapor-ware.” To understand the gap between the 67 people who actually know what needs to be done, and the hundreds of thousands who will be employed in cyber-theater (pun intended), see below. There are multiple sucking chest wounds in this enterprise, the two largest are a) the DoD Grid is a mess with no integrity in the fullest sense of the word, trying to “secure” that mess is next to impossible; and b) the only way to make Pentagon information operations safe is to make ALL operations safe, but this is not how the US Government and especially not how the Pentagon thinks–hence, another decade will be wasted. The upside is that OpenBTS and all sorts of other opens are emergent, and we may all end up going to Web 4.0 while the Pentagon stays at Web 2.0.

See Also:

2010: OPINION–America’s Cyber Scam

1994 Sounding the Alarm on Cyber-Security

Continue reading “Journal: Who Controls (and Secures) the Internet?”

2010/10/082010/10/08

NIGHTWATCH Extract: East Prepares for Big War

02 China, 03 India, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 06 Russia, 10 Security, Government, Military, Officers Call, Strategy

India-Russia: India will buy 250 to 300 advanced stealth fighter aircraft from Russian, according to Defence Minister A.K. Antony, as he announced the deal worth nearly $30 billion. Antony and Russian Defense Minister Serdyukov said Russia would supply the Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) as well as 45 transport aircraft. India also will jointly manufacture the fighters under license for ten years.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: The future of the Indian Air Force appears to be linked primarily to Russian rather than US firms. This agreement thinly hides an Indian strategic judgment about the threats it faces from China and Pakistan, about the US as a supplier for coping with those threats compared to the Russians.

India is making long term preparations to be ready for a major war after ten years that will require fifth generation fighters because the most likely enemy – presumably China – also will have those air capabilities. The Russians are willing to sell India the aircraft and to license the technology. The US is not building significant numbers of fifth generation fighters and will not sell them even to Israel.

The Indians, Russians and Chinese do not share the US strategic outlook favoring small wars and counterinsurgency forces.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Since the mid-1990's, when the best minds associated with the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute turned decisively away from the two-major theater war model, and we presented the 1+iii (One Plus Triple Eye) strategy, the US has been incoherent with respect to strategic policy, acquisition, and operations. Ideology is not a substitute for intelligence, and technology is not a substitute for thinking.

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

2001 Threats, Strategy, and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security

2000 Presidential Leadership and National Security Policy Making

1998 JFQ The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate

1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information

1993 On Defense & Intelligence–The Grand Vision

and some graphics….

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extract: East Prepares for Big War”