USA: Thirteen Big Lies — Needed Counter-Narrative

07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Policies, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Jock Gill

Here are a few of the BIG lies used to support the status quo.  What we need, rather urgently, is a counter-narrative

LIE 1. The earth is an open system with infinite supplies and sinks;

POSSIBLE TRUTH:  Earth is a closed system, changes that used to take 10,000 years now take three, humanity is “peaking” the entire system.

LIE 2. Everything must be monetized;

POSSIBLE TRUTH:  Money is an exchange unit and an information unit; in the absence of holistic analytics and “true cost” transparency, mony is actually a toxic means of concentrating wealth and depriving communities of their own resources (e.g. land).

LIE 3. The extreme unregulated free market is the only option for a modern economy;

POSSIBLE TRUTH:  Information asymmetries and “rule by secrecy” have been clearly documented–the free market is neither free nor fair.  A modern economy needs to be transparent, resilient, and hence rooted in the local.

Continue reading “USA: Thirteen Big Lies — Needed Counter-Narrative”

Nuclear/Climate Change: CLOSED 17 May 2011

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, 12 Water, Communities of Practice, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Technologies

ROLLING UPDATE from Beginning of Crisis

SHORT URL: http://tinyurl.com/PBI-Japan-Update

Click on Image to Enlarge

16 May 2011

ALL:  Study: Seaports unready for climate change

CANADA:  Climate change threatens arctic coastlines

CHINA:  China’s Nuclear Arsenal: Status and Evolution

EUROPE-SPAIN:  Spanish Quake Jolts European Nuclear Debate

GERMANY-JAPAN-USA:  Nuclear Nations Turn To Natural Gas And Renewables

INDIA:  Manmohan Singh takes stock of country's nuclear arsenal

INDIA-PAKISTAN:  Towards An Indo-Pak Nuclear Lexicon: Minimum Nuclear Deterrence – Analysis

INDONESIA:  Strong earthquake strikes off Indonesia’s Java island

JAPAN:  Japanese Officials Ignored or Concealed Dangers

JAPAN:  Japan Sticks to Timeline for Solving Nuclear Crisis

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. also acknowledged that one of the factors contributing to a rapid meltdown of reactor cores was the failure to keep emergency batteries safe from the tsunami, preventing a key emergency cooling system from performing its intended function.

Meanwhile, Tepco said one of the key causes of a rapid meltdown at Unit No. 1 was the failure of two emergency cooling mechanisms—the suppression pool and the isolation condenser—to perform their intended functions.

PAKISTAN:  Pakistan's nuclear surge exposed

Indian slam, satellite and video, 100% jump by 2021.

Click on Image to Enlarge

SWEDEN:  Sweden's Holding Tank For Nuclear Waste

“We have here about 2,000 tons that you are looking (at), and you can stand here as long as you want to,” she tells me before quickly adding, “If we take one of these bundles out of the water I will give you 20 seconds to leave this room alive.”

USA:  US reactor outages 50 pct above late-spring average

USA:  U.S. Nuclear Output Falls as Entergy, Progress Shut Reactors

Twenty- five of the nation’s 104 reactors were offline.

USA:  75% of Americans Have Never Heard of Climate-Gate, Study Reveals

Prior Updates, Graphics, and Original Overviews Below the Line

Continue reading “Nuclear/Climate Change: CLOSED 17 May 2011”

Australia to Microsoft: You’re Fired

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Collaboration Zones, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Strategy, Technologies
Marc Bailey

Marc bails out Macquarie Uni on business intelligence

HTML5 business intelligence developed by Australians

James Hutchinson

ComputerWorld, 16 May 2011

Marc Bailey wants to kill the spreadsheet.

At least, that’s what the research fellows at Macquarie University asked for when he first stepped on board as CIO in late 2009. The proliferation of Microsoft Excel documents, changed countless times and shared between any number of siloed departments at the institution, had created “islands of data” that made one of his first challenges a seemingly insurmountable one.

Nearly 18 months later, and with nine months of development under the belt, the first release of the solution — Datamart — was pushed out to university staff in April this year. The offering, built upon Web-based software offered by Melbourne outfit Yellowfin, replaced multiple business intelligence systems and, of course, the spreadsheet.

. . . . . .

Bailey says the second year is all about leveraging the data often hidden under illusions of protection by university staff, and leveraging the infrastructure the IT team worked hard to replace in his first year at the institution.

. . . . . .

Bailey’s first year has been characterised by his challenge to form what is now known as the Informatics team and pursue technology goals centred around students and staff, rather than controlling the technology. The department has been split into nine groups, with Bailey heading the federation of those groups under his overarching strategy.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added.  This is a tremendously important initiative.

See Also:

Graphic: Business Intelligence Hits the Wall

Psychology of Human Incompetence: New Metrics

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Waste (materials, food, etc)
John Steiner

“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”

—George Eliot
We're losing!  Here's a playbook, see especially the focus on new metrics that have more meaning.

Posted by nate hagens on May 11, 2011 – 10:50am
Topic: Demand/Consumption
Tags: evolutionary psychology, human psychology, overconsumption [list all tags]

The essay below is an updated and edited version of a post I wrote here a few years ago, I'm Human, I'm American and I'm Addicted to Oil. Richard Douthwaite, Irish economist and activist, (and a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute), invited me to contribute it as a chapter in the just released book Fleeing Vesuvius, which is a collection of articles generally addressing “how can we bring the world out of the mess it finds itself in”? My article dealt with the evolutionary underpinnings of our aggregate behavior – neural habituation to increasingly available stimuli, and our evolved penchant to compete for status given the environmental cues of our day. And how, after we make it through the likely upcoming currency/claims bottleneck, we would be wise to adhere to an evolutionary perspective in considering a future (more) sustainable society.

Click here for the table of contents from Fleeing Vesuvius, followed by my article.

Phi Beta Iota: Will and Ariel Durant, in Lessons of History, state that the only real revolution is in the mind of man.  We strongly believe that strategic analytics is the next revolution, and that strategic analytics will make possible transparency, truth, and truth leading to compassionate non-zero evolution–a world that works for all.
See Also:

Cooperation Is Pledged By Nations Of the Arctic

06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Maps, Methods & Process, Open Government, Policies, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Real Time, Reform, Research resources, Serious Games, Standards, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools
Click on Image to Enlarge

Cooperation Is Pledged By Nations Of the Arctic

By

New York Times, May 12, 2011

NUUK, Greenland — The eight Arctic nations pledged Thursday to create international protocols to prevent and clean up offshore oil spills in areas of the region that are becoming increasingly accessible to exploration because of a changing climate.

The Arctic Council — the United States, Russia, Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden — said the protocols would be modeled on a separate agreement signed here in Nuuk on Thursday to coordinate search-and-rescue operations over 13 million square miles of ocean.

Read more….

Phi Beta Iota: This is potentially world-changing, but pedestrian at this time.  Legal and logistics arrangements institutionalize old ways of doing things–slow, expensive, often inappropriate ways.  Much more exciting would be for the nations to agree to create an Arctic M4IS2 Centre, perhaps based in Copenhagen or in Oslo, with an emphasis on sustainable energy and climate change to begin with, but rapidly filling out to provide holistic analytics across all threats and helpful to the harmonization of spending across all policies.  Such a center could be innovative from the first day if it includes all eight tribes of intelligence in its organizational and outreach schema, creating a model for both the United Nations and for each of the continental political organizations.

4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Geospatial, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Maps, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Serious Games, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Venessa Miemis

4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy

Venessa Miemis | May 9, 2011

This post originally appeared on CNN.com's Global Public Square.

Humanity and technology continue to co-evolve at an ever increasing pace, leaving traditional institutions (and mindsets) calcified and out of date. A new paradigm is emerging, where everything is increasingly connected and the nature of collaboration, business and work are all being reshaped. In turn, our ideas about society, culture, geographic boundaries and governance are being forced to adapt to a new reality.

While some fear the loss of control associated with these shifts, others are exhilarated by the new forms of connectivity and commerce that they imply. Transactions and interactions are growing faster and more frictionless, giving birth to what I call a “superfluid” economy.

Business will not return to usual. So let's discuss 4 key concepts to help us  better understand the shifts that are underway:

1. Quantifying and mapping everything
2. Everyone has access to the internet
3. Self-organizing expands
4. Peer-to-peer exchange changes the future of money

4 Trends discussed below the line with links

Continue reading “4 Trends Shaping the Emerging “Superfluid” Economy”

Decentralized Web Standard by W3C

Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Standards, Technologies
Sepp Hasslberger

When times are right, things do start to move…

ReadWriteWeb

This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C

By Marshall Kirkpatrick / May 5, 2011

Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.

It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.