The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Alleviating poverty is more guesswork than science, and lack of data on aid's impact raises questions about how to provide it. But Clark Medal-winner Esther Duflo says it's possible to know which development efforts help and which hurt — by testing solutions with randomized trials.
Esther Duflo takes economics out of the lab and into the field to discover the causes of poverty and means to eradicate it. Full bio and more links
Sometimes the old joke is true. Sometimes the government is just trying to help.
An open source consortium funded by military and civilian security agencies within the U.S. government has released a final version of Suricata, a new security framework.
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Unfortunately the timing of the release could not have been worse, coming as it did the same week the Washington Post launched its series Top Secret America, detailing just how immense and intrusive the nation’s national security apparatus has become, an economic boom for Washington seen as increasingly dangerous by many on both the left and right.
Jonkman acknowledged the help of “thousands of people” in delivering Version 1.0 of the software, which was immediately fisked by Martin Roesch, creator of Snort, who called it a cheap knock-off funded with taxpayer dollars.
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Continue reading “Journal: Who will trust open source security from the government? Any government?”
This is an audio presentation by David Harvey accompanied by an animation that shows an interesting series of recent historical and geographical connections in the global financial system. The speaker admits to not having any solutions, but only providing the overview of what has happened.
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The Rosetta Project is pleased to announce the Parallel Speech Corpus Project, a year-long volunteer-based effort to collect parallel recordings in languages representing at least 95% of the world’s speakers. The resulting corpus will include audio recordings in hundreds of languages of the same set of texts, each accompanied by a transcription. This will provide a platform for creating new educational and preservation-oriented tools as well as technologies that may one day allow artificial systems to comprehend, translate, and generate them.
Continue reading “Building an Audio Collection for All the World’s Languages”
Presented by Michael Ravnitzky & Phil Lapsley at The Next HOPE, July 2010 in NYC
(page 18 of the presentation)
The three exemptions most misused
• Exemption b(1) – currently and properly classified national security information
• Exemption b(2) – internal materials
• Exemption b(5) – legally privileged material; usually the “deliberative process privilege”
Be especially skeptical of these.
Audio version (mp3) of the above presentation 64 kbps | 16 kbps
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Continue reading “Rummaging in the Government's Attic: Lessons Learned from 1,000 FOIA Requests”
(clips from the synopsis about the Frontline video documentary)
Five years ago, Amy Costello reported a story for FRONTLINE/World. It was about the challenges of getting water in Africa, and a promising new technology called the PlayPump.
After years of covering “bad news” in Africa, she was happy to report a story that seemed to offer something to cheer about. Her story showed how simple it might be for children to pump fresh water just by playing. Behind it all, a South African entrepreneur named Trevor Field.
Field had made his career in advertising, but when he heard about this new device, he formed a company and started making PlayPumps himself.
To cover maintenance costs, he proposed selling ads on the sides of the water tower. He said the PlayPump model would be a big improvement over the hand pumps that Africans have struggled with for years.
Continue reading “U.S. Blunder in Africa: PlayPumps Not Play”
By TED BRIDIS (AP) – July 21, 2010
WASHINGTON — For at least a year, the Homeland Security Department detoured hundreds of requests for federal records to senior political advisers for highly unusual scrutiny, probing for information about the requesters and delaying disclosures deemed too politically sensitive, according to nearly 1,000 pages of internal e-mails obtained by The Associated Press.
The department abandoned the practice after AP investigated. Inspectors from the department's Office of Inspector General quietly conducted interviews last week to determine whether political advisers acted improperly.
The Freedom of Information Act, the main tool forcing the government to be more open, is designed to be insulated from political considerations. Anyone who seeks information through the law is supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose confidential decision-making in certain areas.
Continue reading “DHS: A Political Filter for FOIA Info Requests”
