The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
1. Simpol – John Bunzl – Interview Part One (April 15, 2009)
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See Simpol's Founder, John Bunzl, explain Simpol on Youtube, Part 1. (about 5 minutes) |
2. Simpol – John Bunzl – Interview Part Two (April 15, 2009)
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See Simpol's Founder, John Bunzl, explain Simpol on Youtube, Part 2. (about 5 minutes) |
Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science
By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times, April 25, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO — Inside a darkened theater a viewer floats in a redwood forest displayed with Imax-like clarity on a cavernous overhead screen.
The hovering sensation gives way to vertigo as the camera dives deeper into the forest, approaches a branch of a giant redwood tree, and then plunges first into a single leaf and then into an individual cell. Inside the cell the scene is evocative of the 1966 science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage,” in which Lilliputian humans in a minuscule capsule take a medical journey through a human body.
There is an important difference — “Life: A Cosmic Journey,” a multimedia presentation now showing at the new Morrison Planetarium here at the California Academy of Sciences, relies not just on computer animation techniques, but on a wealth of digitized scientific data as well.
Comment and Seven Graphics Below the Line…
Continue reading “Journal: Cheery Waves Flags How Supercomputers Alter Science”
whether talking about a intelligent knowledge infrastructure, robert's global brain, or suresh's project matching for climate change initiatives, this article seemed useful.
Noah Raford
Large-scale participatory futures systems
Futurescaper is an online tool for making sense of the drivers, trends and forces that will shape the future. As a user interface system, it is horrible. As a tool for analyzing and understanding complex systems, it works pretty well. Several people asked me about this after my last post, so here is some more detail.
Following the logic of collective intelligence (as part of my my PhD), I broke up the the scenario thinking process into discrete chunks, came up with a system for analyzing and relating them together, and then distilled them into key outputs for helping the scenario development process: 1) Emergent Thematic Maps 2) Revealing Hidden Connections 3) Drilling Down
See Also by Noah Radford:
The Three Systems, an Overview
The first system is called “Futurescaper” and was developed in partnership with the International Futures Forum (IFF), Tony Hodgson and my friend Nathan Koren. This was piloted on a project for the UK Government, exploring secondary and tertiary impacts of climate change.
The second system is called “SenseMaker Scenarios.” This uses a customized version of Cognitive Edge’s SenseMaker Suite to aggregate micro-stories about the future into themes and patterns for scenario generation. This was done with Dave Snowden and Wendy Schultz, and was unveiled at the 2010 RAHS conference in Singapore.
The third system is called “FogCatcher”, and was developed with Anab Jain and Jon Ardern from Superflux. This was based on a modified version of Jerome C. Glenn’s futures wheel, combined with a “hot or not” style cross-impact analysis engine. As before, this approach benefited greatly from previous conversations with my colleagues above, but also from others such as Andrew Curry of the Futures Company, Emile Hooge of Nova7, Indy Johar of 00:/research, Vinay Gupta and others.
All three projects are still in continuous development and available for experimental project use.
Global Voices Blog Critique from Jacob Appelbaum: My motivation for writing this response is to inform readers of the serious concerns that many people, myself included, have about the recent Freedom House report. I am always pleased to see more analysis of censorship circumvention and Internet security tools, but I have concerns about this report’s methodologies and resulting conclusions. The report in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.
The reporting methodology is sloppy at best and the information in the report is often inaccurate or poorly written. The report demonstrates a general disconnection from the language used by the projects and the circumvention community as a whole.
Internet censorship poses a large and growing challenge to online freedom of expression around the world. Censorship circumvention tools are critical to bypass restrictions on the internet and thereby to protect free expression online.
Circumvention tools are primarily designed to bypass internet filtering. Therefore, the core principle behind these technologies is to find alternative paths for data packets. These alternative paths use one or more collaborative servers in order to bypass the network of blocking mechanisms.
This document provides a comparison among different circumvention tools, both in terms of their technical merits, as well as how users of these tools describe their experience with them. The countries included in this report are Azerbaijan, Burma, China and Iran.
Phi Beta Iota: Within the emerging Autonomous Internet, these tools assume use of the existing grid, and can in turn be used by the authorities, sometimes with the collaboration of the Internet Service Providers, to identify dissidents. The Autonomous Internet seeks first to bypass local interception points (local solar-powered nodes using leased satellite communications), and ultimately to permit all individuals everywhere to enjoy the Internet for free and in liberty. Novices forget that anonymous is not the same as invisible, and that security is needed at the point of receipt as well (counter-intelligence outside the denied area is focused on identifying dissidents on the basis of leaks outside the denied area). NOTE: Freedom House has a trojan virus–if you don't see the deletion notice your security program is not up to par.
For information.
From Afghanistan for ACOS: I have not seen so much BS in a while. The 10th Mountain deployed to Afghanistan without the proper equipment to operate in the mountains. They lacked adequate cold weather gear and our lift capability does not fly well here either. With the exception of 40 year old Chinooks, most can't climb over the lofty peaks that permeate this country.
I attended a farewell for a friend of mine, there were 33 people there, 11 of them in the rank of 06, two in the rank of 08. What these guys did everyday is beyond me, but little work gets done in the palace of King David I can assure you. There are Green Berets out in villages that depend on their families to help them with the Hearts and Minds that Petraeus so often says he is trying to win, but doesn't support. That type of warfare does little to increase the coffers of the MICC….
Chuck Spinney–we read all your stuff and his–has it right: this guy lives in a palace, Versailles on the Potomac, and is totally out of touch with reality.
Phi Beta Iota: It is not at all clear that the new Army Chief of Staff (ACOS) understands that the standard issue weapon is worthless beyond 300 meters, or that his force in combat (4% of the total force) takes 80% of the casualties while receiving 1% of the total military budget. We know what our troops are fighting for–what is this guy fighting for on behalf of his troops?
REVOLUTION OS tells the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.
On June 1, 2001, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”
Microsoft fears GNU/Linux, and rightly so. GNU/Linux and the Open Source & Free Software movements arguably represent the greatest threat to Microsoft's way of life. Shot in cinemascope on 35mm film in Silicon Valley, REVOLUTION OS tracks down the key movers and shakers behind Linux, and finds out how and why Linux became such a potent threat.
REVOLUTION OS features interviews with Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, Brian Behlendorf, Michael Tiemann, Larry Augustin, Frank Hecker, and Rob Malda. To view the trailer or the first eight minutes go to the ifilm website for REVOLUTION OS.
Two books below the line…
