Category: Worth A Look

“A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.” – Michael Parenti, Historian, Author The Face of Imperialism

Phi Beta Iota:  metanoia-films.org has some of the most important free video online … the Psywar video post was a huge hit at phibetaiota … it had some of the most hits of any post in a short period of time.  This is the latest video series which is loaded with unsettling truths of US history.

See Also:

HUMAN RESOURCES: Social Engineering in t he 20th Century

Lifting the Veil: Barack Obama and the Failure of Capitalism “Democracy”

Police State Canada: Provocation and Police Terror at the G20 Summit in Toronto

PSYWAR: The Real Battlefield is the Mind

Rise Like Lions: OWS and the Seeds of Revolution

Metanoia Films Home

http://newsmap.mhlakhani.com/

From the Publisher

This book, while available to the public and especially to those who hope to restore informed democracy by reducing secret back room deals and lies based on secrecy, was actually published in order to distribute 1,000 copies to every Senator, every Representative, every Governor, and every Cabinet Officer, as well as 200 American thought leaders and 200 international thought leaders. We must defeat the attempt by the spies to control Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), and instead have the Open Source Agency as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) under diplomatic auspices. The book provides the road-map for public intelligence in the public interest.

Towards an Informed Public August 12, 2007

By Retired Reader

This book is really a compilation of the writings of Robert D. Steele that are relevant to the Smart Nation Act. This remarkable piece of legislation was introduced by Congressman Rob Simmons (R, Ct.) in September 2006 and represents an effort to persuade congress to think seriously about the kind of real intelligence reform that Steele has been advocating for close to twenty years. Simmons, like Steele, has a background in intelligence and is a rare informed critic of the U.S. Intelligence System. Needless to say there is neither powerful lobbyist support nor national security establishment support for real intelligence reform. And especially since few voters care one way or the other about such issues, this act will probably go nowhere.

What is commonly forgotten is that intelligence in the CIA sense of the word is simply processed information focused on specific subjects in such a way as to provide unique knowledge of those subjects. Intelligence does not have to be classified. It usually is classified for one of three reasons:1) to protect the sources and methods by which it was produced; 2) to protect bureaucratic turf from rivals; and 3) to prevent the subject(s) of the intelligence from realizing that unauthorized persons are in possession of knowledge about them. Steele correctly maintains that classification hinders the development of real knowledge about a variety of subjects and is largely unnecessary.

The core of the Smart Nation Act and Steele's primary theses is that an Open Source Intelligence Agency based on the free flow of information, the widespread use of outside experts, and the input from everyone including common citizens would provide better and cheaper intelligence than that now obtained from the existing U.S. Intelligence System. This agency would not be the typical hierarchy, but would be organized into semi-autonomous cells of researchers, analysts and experts. Each of the 50 U.S. States would have a local information processing center that would replicate the national Open Source Agency. These local centers would support state level activities requiring intelligence support and provide intelligence information from such sources as first line emergency response teams. Central to this whole concept is that the intelligence accumulated by these agencies would be available to every one so that the U.S. could actually achieve the Jeffersonian dream of an informed public.

So is this so much `pie in the sky' rhetoric and hopelessly impractical? Apparently Representative Simmons doesn't think so and neither does this reviewer.

See Also:

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

2012: The Battle for the Soul of the Republic

2012 PREPRINT FOR COMMENT: The Craft of Intelligence

2012 THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

2010  INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity & Sustainability

Learning analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs ^[1]. A related field is educational data mining.

Phi Beta Iota:  The obvious deficiency is that most projects are generally focused on retro learning environments.  The better idea would be to unleash student-driven education, empower every student with free cell phones, call centers, and access to desktop analytic toolkits, and see where it goes.  A better approach would be to do a comprehensive design intended to liberate human minds, access to all possible information in all languages, and responsive provision of information tools, all in the context of focusing students on the real world and the top challenges to humanity as a whole.  In our view, education, intelligence (decision-support) and research all need to be integrated and re-designed from bottom-up, blending all three into a DNA-like spiral that achieves M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).

Wikipedia / Learning Analytics

2011 Horizon Report: Four to Five Years: Learning Analytics

Learning analytics need not simply focus on student performance. It might be used as well to assess curricula, programs, and institutions.

1st International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge

February 27-March 1, 2011  in Banff, Alberta

Learning Analytics – 51 Resources

EVENT: Learning Analytics – ELI 2012 Online Spring Focus Session. April 11-12, 2012.   Register Now and explore learning analytics' potential for positively impacting student learning and instructor effectiveness.

Analytics Today: Getting Smarter About Emerging Technology, Diverse Students, and the Completion Challenge, EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, October 2011. This video provides an overview of the increased use of blended learning, mobile learning, gaming, personal learning networks, augmented reality in higher education. And asks pointedly  that  If we want these technology “power tools” to have a real and lasting impact on the challenges of college completion, then anchoring these efforts in on-target analytics that serve not only policy but also core practice will be essential.

Learning and Knowledge Analytics

Several briefings and graphics of note.

Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR)

The Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) is an inter-disciplinary network of leading international researchers who are exploring the role and impact of analytics on teaching, learning, training and development.

DuckDuckGo on Learning Analytics

Open source software for building private and public clouds.

OpenStack OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.

Who's behind OpenStack? Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open source cloud operating system. Our mission is to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.

Learn more.

See Also:

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books/Evolver Editions, 2012)