Global Traffic Map 2010 The Global Traffic Map depicts voice traffic flows on the world’s largest international calling routes. Accompanying figures and tables provide valuable insight into regional traffic flows, price and revenue trends, top calling destinations, the impact of mobiles on the international voice market, and the scale of Skype.
A new study from Interphone, a study group within the , a segment of the World Health Organization, says there is no increased risk of brain cancer from cell phone use … but then seems to waiver a bit in its position. When it comes to adults, an increased risk of brain cancer is not established…
Open video is the idea that the moving image should belong to everyone. This vision requires not only free and open video technologies, but also that viewers are empowered to go beyond just watching—creating, sharing, and engaging in the multimedia public sphere they now inhabit. The Open Video Conference (OVC) is a multi-day summit of thought leaders in business, academia, art, and activism to explore the future of online video. The first Open Video Conference was host to over 800 guests, including 150 workshop leaders, panelists and speakers.
The search term brings up appropriate results, but the fact of the search gives us an opportunity to provide comment.
1) Nothing now being used by governments, and certainly not iBase or Palantir, both aging technologies that do not scale and have too many fat-finger handicaps, fulfills the originial requirements documents crafted in the late 1980's.
2) The ONLY programs that have gotten anywhere close are COPERNICUS plus plus, and SILOBREAKER. However, both of these have been slow to recognize the urgency of integrating–fully integrating–capabilities that address each of the eighteen functionalities. Below is the list of softwares now in use by US Special Operations Command J-23 Open Source Intelligence Branch along with the STRONG ANGEL TOOZL and a couple of other things.
The global standard for multinational information-sharing and sense-making is in the process of being designed, funded, and distributed. If you think you have something relevant to that, generally only open source software will be considered, get in touch with any of the individuals above.
Phi Beta Iota: We are detecting a fascinating evolutionary process within the United Nations “system” which is not a system at all, more like an archipelago with a different cat in charge of each island. Information-sharing is coming into vogue, but more importantly, the United Nations, perhaps stimulated by the report of the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A more secure world: our shared responsibility, appears to finally be realizing that all threats are connected and that poverty is the foundation for all of the other threats thriving–one cannot defeat transnational crime (threat #10) without first addressing poverty (threat #1).
With the top United Nations anti-drug official urging concerted global action to “break the vicious circle between insecurity and underdevelopment” being increasingly fuelled by criminal networks, drug smugglers and human traffickers, the Security Council today called on the world body’s Member States to increase international and regional cooperation to tackle transnational organized crime.
The Council invited Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who opened today’s meeting, to consider transnational threats as a factor in conflict prevention strategies, conflict analysis, integrated missions’ assessment and planning and to consider including in his reports, as appropriate, analysis on the role played by those threats in situations on the Council’s agenda. [Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis Added.]
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – International criminal gangs and traffickers are exploiting large geographic blind spots where radar, satellite or other surveillance is minimal or nonexistent, the U.N. crime and drugs czar said on Wednesday.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told members of the 15-nation U.N. Security Council that countries must improve their systems of sharing intelligence to reduce these surveillance gaps.
“We need a change in attitude,” Costa told the council. “It is time to regard information sharing as a way of strengthening sovereignty, not surrendering it.”
Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace
A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.
Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.
Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.
Phi Beta Iota: This is righteous, but as Howard Bloom addresses in Global Brain, it will taqke 50 years and it will not achieve the intended result until the children who START with this are adults in power. In the meantime, the adults in power who are both digitally and ideologically impaired, will continue to favor war to profit the few over peace to provide prosperity to the many.
Twitter Teams with Haiti Telco To Provide Free Text Tweets
WIRED 22 February 2010
Text messages have already raised $32 million for Haiti relief. Now Twitter is partnering with the devastated nation’s dominant telco to provide free text Tweets to Haitians so they can better keep in touch with each other and the outside world.
“Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes on the company’s blog. “To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.”
The move is much more than a gesture, as it might seem in place where limitless text plans abound and the standard of living is much higher. Under Digicel’s pre-paid plan Haitians pay $0.08 to text locally, $0.15 to text internationally and $0.23 to send an MMS. But considering that the country’s per capita income is about $1,300, that would be the equivalent of $2.46, $4.62 and a whopping $7.07 in the U.S. (which had a 2008 per capita income of about $40,000).
As has become almost routine now, the initial flood of information and pictures to emerge from the disaster zone reached the world via Twitter, and the use of texting is an especially crucial lifeline in the underdeveloped world.
Phi Beta Iota: BRAVO TWITTER! Who would have thought Haiti would be the silver lining for the poor. At one stroke Twitter hass connected scharitable giving from the 80% that do not normally give, with the bottom-up needs of the poor articulated via Twitter for free. Now if Twitter can team with others such as Nokia, Microsoft, and IMB to offer free cell phones to the five billion poor, with back office harvesting of the data and a global grid of volunteer translator educators in 183 languages, we save the world quick time.
Unlike Facebook, whose builders strive to make it an ever more organized social network, Twitter seems to thrive on being a jumble. It is an egalitarian sort of mess: Twitter does not sort its users into categories, does not tag some as celebrities, does not map out who does lunch with whom in the real world. You and Shaquille O’Neal are Twitter equals, only he has an extra 2.8 million followers.
There is also a Web site, Listorious listorious.com where volunteers publish personally chosen lists of posters to follow based on specific themes. But it is hit or miss. The Best of Photography list is a sharp collection of 29 eye-catching feeds, but Tech News People is a pile of 499 journalists for you to sort through.
So, how do you figure out who to follow? Start with a sweeping generalization: Twitter users can be grouped into different categories. For each, there is an automated site somewhere that lets you follow the genre without having to find and follow dozens, or even hundreds, of individual Twitter streams.
Phi Beta Iota: This article provides an extraordinary bridge to the future, when Twitter could become the real-time feed for inputs easily sorted in an infinite number of “back offices” that remix the information by threat, policy, player, and zip code. The difference between Google and Twitter is that Twitter empowers the end-user, Google ravages the end user (intellectually and metaphorically speaking).
