Category: Technologies

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Event: 25-26 March 2011, Open Minds 2011 at the Wash DC National Museum of American History

03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Health, 12 Water, Academia, Civil Society, Gift Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Technologies
event link

Open Minds (formerly known as March Madness for the Mind) is the acclaimed annual exhibition of cutting-edge innovation from NCIIA's (National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance) best student teams. The exhibition takes place each year during NCIIA's annual conference, and is an opportunity for student teams to demonstrate their products and companies, and receive local and national media coverage. 10-15 teams are selected to participate in this high profile event, which involves an evening exhibition for NCIIA conference attendees as well as an exhibition open to the general public and an exciting video competition.

Open Minds 2011 will be held in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum of American History, March 25-26, 2011. Learn about participating 2010 teams here.

The Open Minds online application deadline has been EXTENDED until Friday, January 14, 2011.

Watch all the 2010 videos here.

Also see this list of events from Inventor's Digest

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Journal: GroupOn’s Potential Part II

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), International Aid, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, microfinancing, Mobile, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Technologies, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Not many know that GroupOn, Andrew Mason‘s initiative funded by Eric Lefkofsky, started as Policy Tree “Taking People Out of Politics”.  Citizens were not interested in Policy Tree back then for two reasons: the outrage at mortgage fraud, Wall Street derivatives fraud, and Federal Reserve fraud had not peaked yet, and the power of GroupOn to move markets and nations had not been demonstrated.  Now that GroupOn has turned down Google's offer of six billion, there is no doubt.

Put simply, GroupOn now has more power than George Soros, to take one example.  GroupOn can:

1)  Publish true costs for any product or service that is seriously harmful to all of us, and kill it.

2)  Publicize a product or service that is good for the community, and make it a standard.

3)  Organize micro-giving across an entire nation (e.g. Haiti) using a Global Range of Nano-Needs Table.

4)  Organize citizens to do participatory legislation and participatory policy and participatory budgeting and participatory regulatory and propriety oversight in relation to specific issue areas, zip codes, countries, or states, and empower them as a group that cannot be ignored.

GroupOn has done what all others have failed to do: harnessed citizens in the aggregate.  They have just begun.  When combined with the emergence of digital natives as a political force whose outrage is now maturing (see Jon Lebkowsky's “The Kids Are All Right“), GroupOn is the game changer–not MoveOn.org, not No Labels, not Americans Elect, not IndependentVoting.org–all “old” models dominated by apparatchicks and not at all open to the collective.  GroupOn.  As in Group ON, dude!

See Also:

Journal: GroupOn’s Potential Part I

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Could Rovio or CCP kill Microsoft or Google?

Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools
Ric Merrifield

When you think about who might topple a software giant like a Microsoft or a Google, you might be inclined to think of Goliaths like, well Google and Microsoft.  The same is true of any industry, you probably think of a company of similar size or larger as being the type of company that would win a battle, or a war.

Actual battles and wars end up being an interesting analogy.  If you think if big battles like World War I and World War II, that’s exactly what happened – giants fighting giants from big, knowable centralized points of command.  But there are some other wars that have been fought where the little guy won (or hasn’t lost in the case of one ongoing war) and there’s a common element in all of them.  No centralized physical location to “take out” to win.  When everything is dispersed and there isn’t any one thing to take out, it’s hard to really know how big or how small opposing force is, and they can be substantially more agile.  In this situation, an organization of any size can pose a major threat to an enormous organization.  The war on terror is an ongoing war that fits this profile – it’s virtually impossible to know how big or small the opposition is, or where they are at any given time, so it’s very hard to be ready for an attack from them.  Viet Nam was a tough one for the US to really stand a chance in because it was in unfamiliar territory and there was no central location to take out to declare victory.  One could even make the same argument (at a high level) for why the British lost the American revolution.

So if you don’t know who Rovio or CCP are, I have already made significant progress on the path of making my point.

Continue reading “Could Rovio or CCP kill Microsoft or Google?”

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Journal: Cyber-Idiocy Wipes Out Productivity

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Cyberscams, malware, spam, InfoOps (IO), Military, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Standards, Technologies
Chuck Spinney Recommends....

Information has never been so free. Even in authoritarian countries information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable. — US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, January 21, 2010

So much for that….

Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks

By Noah Shachtman, Wired, December 9, 2010  |  7:02 pm<

It’s too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon’s secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial.

Maj. Gen. Richard Webber, commander of Air Force Network Operations, issued the Dec. 3 “Cyber Control Order” — obtained by Danger Room — which directs airmen to “immediately cease use of removable media on all systems, servers, and stand alone machines residing on SIPRNET,” the Defense Department’s secret network. Similar directives have gone out to the military’s other branches.

Read the rest of this sorry tale….

See Also:

Graphic: Cyber-Threat 101

Journal: Army Industrial-Era Network Security + Cyber-Security RECAP (Links to Past Posts)

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Breeding Monsters: Forcing Living Systems to Conform to Our Tech Instead of Our Tech Conforming to Living Systems

07 Health, Technologies, Videos/Movies/Documentaries
view video clip and summary (video contains sick pig with human genes, pig w/cow skin, etc)

Film/documentary: Monster Salmon and Butterflies

We already eat GM crops and now GM Salmon, which grow faster and larger than ordinary Salmon, are soon to come onto the market. But does anyone know what effect they will have on us and our environment? This fascinating documentary follows the few independent researchers of genetic engineering as they investigate the dangers of “Monster Salmon”.

“At eighteen months old you see the enormous difference here … the Salmon as it exists now is not profitable enough”, says Andrew Kimbrell as he examines an enormous transgenic Salmon. It dwarfs its natural brother lying alongside it. His is one of the few voices questioning the fast-tracking of GM Salmon onto the marketplace.

While giant Salmon are about to land in our pots and frying pans, independent scientists are only now starting to examine the science behind it. It's a game of catch up and the early indications are worrying. “Certainly if DNA was not cleared from the organisms, if that happens, then it may be the start of a highly unwanted process with regard to health”. While researchers questions are ignored, humans are about to become guinea pigs for genetically engineered fish. There are worries that eating transgenic Salmon could weaken the immune system causing chronic illness, infertility, and even disrupt our own DNA. Yet these seem risks the pro-GM scientific community seems willing to take. However, it is not just the impact these Salmon could have on humans which is worrying scientists. There are suggestions transgenic Salmon could lead to the extinction of Salmon in the wild. While Aqua Bounty, the company looking to market transgenic Salmon, claims the Salmon will be sterile and unable to mate, scientists are contesting that their fertility will be impossible to regulate. If fertile transgenic Salmon escape to the wild the consequences will be dire. “One thing we have found is that the young don't survive as well … it is quite likely the population could go extinct”. “What could be more important than deciding on the permanent genetic future of life on Earth, but we don't vote on that”. While the questions over these Salmon remain, they will shortly be arriving on our plates and we won't be able to do anything about it. We won't even be able to tell when we're eating it.

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Army of Techies Taking on City Hall, Coding to Fix Local America, and Developing the Do-It-Yourself City

Collective Intelligence, Mobile, Open Government, Technologies

How an Army of Techies Is Taking on City Hall

By: Anya Kamenetz, November 29, 2010

Fast Company article on citizens (and yes, politicians are citizens) engaging in basic community maintenance, and those working to make web and mobile technologies use city data and neighborhood requests for community care-taking.
Links mentioned:
+ SeeClickFix
+ OpenPlans
+ Code for America

Also see Do-It-Yourself-City (which Fast Company does not mention).