Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict by Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham ; foreword by Stanley McChrystal.

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Information Operations (IO), Peace Intelligence, Public Intelligence, Uncategorized, Worth A Look

        The Small Wars Journal Blog has a post previewing a new book by Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham. Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict considers how the West's Post Cold War conflicts have been fought amongst people rather than between armies. From publisher's description:

“These people, amongst others, have been Mendes, Kissis and Konos (and the 13 other tribes of Sierra Leone), they have been Serbo-Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, Albanians, Unizzahs, al-Ribads, al-Zobaids, Kurds, al-Montifig (and the other tribal groups of the nearly 40 that make up Iraq), Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbecks (and the other 6 ethnic groupings that make up Afghanistan's rich tapestry of population), they have been Sunni, Shia, Orthodox, Agnostic, Christian, Catholic; they have been farmers, politicians, police, administrators, businessmen, narco khans, war lords, men, women and children. In fact you can divide them in any one of a hundred or so different ways but the only certainty is that all of these groups and people will exhibit behaviour, that may appear utterly irrational but for better or worse will have profound effects upon the manner in which military missions are conducted.” 

The book is based on a paper written in 2009 for the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. The tale of the lone Afghan farmer sowing seeds in a field near the Kajaki Dam should be a warning to those from the developed world who underestimate the intelligence of people just because they don't speak English or have grown up without electricity and running water.

This book will have utility for anyone working in military, peacekeeping, policing or any other other cross cultural situation.

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: David Isenberg (Military)

Alpha I-L, Public Intelligence
David Isenberg

David Isenberg is the author of the book Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. His blog is The PMSC Observer. He wrote the “Dogs of War” weekly column for UPI from 2008 to 2009. During 2009 he ran the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers project at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. His affiliations include the Straus Military Reform Project, Cato Institute, and the Independent Institute. He is a US Navy veteran. His e-mail is sento@earthlink.net.

David Isenberg at CATO Institute

David Isenberg at Huffington Post

David Isenberg: Your Job Search and the Big Picture

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Louis von Ahn

Alpha A-D, Public Intelligence

Luis von Ahn is a young computer scientist working at the intersection of cryptography, artificial intelligence, and natural intelligence to address problems of profound theoretical and practical importance.  Focusing on the 9 billion hours a year that people play solitaire, he has conceptualized means of harnessing that “cognitive surplus” to accomplish important micro-tasks, such as labeling images.

Born in 1979 in Guatemala City, Guatemala he is an entrepreneur and an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University[2]. He is known as one of the pioneers of the idea of crowdsourcing. He is the founder of the company reCAPTCHA, which was sold to Google in 2009.[3] As a professor, his research includes CAPTCHAs and human computation[4], and has earned him international recognition and numerous honors. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a., the “genius grant”) in 2006,[5][6] the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship in 2009, a Sloan Fellowship in 2009, and a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship in 2007. He has also been named one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover Magazine, and has made it to many recognition lists that include Popular Science Magazine‘s Brilliant 10, Silicon.com's 50 Most Influential People in Technology, Technology Review‘s TR35: Young Innovators Under 35, and FastCompany‘s 100 Most Innovative People in Business.

Siglo Veintiuno, a leading newspaper in Guatemala, chose him as the person of the year in 2009. In 2011, Foreign Policy Magazine in Spanish named him the most influential intellectual of Latin America and Spain.[7]

Best of Web

Personal Blog

2006 Google Tech Tack on Human Computation

2011 Human Computation: Channeling Human Brainpower

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Steven Howard Johnson

Alpha I-L, Public Intelligence
Steven Howard Johnson

Social Entrepreneur 1996 – Ongoing

Author, Integrity at Scale: Big Answers for America’s Challenges, book manuscript, presently available at www.IntegrityAtScaleBlog.com.  Today’s United States is not a competent nation.  Yesterday’s civic habits are insufficient for today’s major challenges.  America requires a redesign revolution and hasn’t the slightest idea how to begin.  Integrity at Scale lays out a path toward competence that is independent of political ideology.

Social Security Reform Websites.  Created two websites to help users understand Social Security’s long-range solvency challenges, www.sscommonsense.org and www.simcivic.org.  The second website featured a java-based solvency model.  These websites remain relevant and are retained for archival value.

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Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Steven Kull

Alpha I-L, Public Intelligence
Steven Kull

Steven Kull, PhD is a political psychologist who studies world public opinion on international issues. He is the Director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA). He conducts ongoing surveys of the US public and plays a central role in the BBC World Service Poll of global opinion. His articles have appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Foreign Policy, Public Opinion Quarterly, Harpers, The Washington Post and other publications. He is the co-author with I.M. Destler of Misreading the Public: The Myth of a New Isolationism (1999). He regularly appears in the US and international media and gives briefings for the US Congress, the State Department, NATO, the UN and the EC. He is a faculty member of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Wikipedia (Steven Kull)
Center on Policy Attitudes
Program on International Policy Attitudes

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Baruch Fischhoff

Alpha E-H, Public Intelligence
Baruch Fischhoff

BARUCH FISCHHOFF, Ph.D., is the Howard Heinz University Professor in the departments of Social and Decision Sciences and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where he heads the Decision Sciences major. A graduate of the Detroit Public Schools, he holds a BS in mathematics and psychology from Wayne State University and an MA and PhD in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and currently chairs the National Research Council Committee on Behavioral and Social Science Research to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security. He also chairs the Food and Drug Administration Risk Communication Advisory Committee. He is a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Advisory Committee, the World Federation of Scientists Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism, and the Department of State Global Expertise Program. He is past President of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and of the Society for Risk Analysis, and recipient of its Distinguished Achievement Award. He was a member of the Eugene, Oregon Commission on the Rights of Women and the Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board, where he chaired the Homeland Security Advisory Committee. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society), the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Society for Risk Analysis. He has co-authored or edited six books, Acceptable Risk (1981), A Two-State Solution in the Middle East: Prospects and Possibilities (1993), Elicitation of Preferences (2000), Risk Communication: A Mental Models Approach (2002), Intelligence Analysis: Behavioral and Social Science Foundations (2011), and Risk: A Very Short Introduction.

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