Access – Page 10 – Public Intelligence Blog

2015/05/132015/05/13

Worth a Look: Open Source Ecology

Access, Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Hardware, Innovation, Knowledge, Manufacturing, Resilience, Science

Open Source Ecology is accelerating the growth of the next economy – the Open Source Economy – an economy that optimizes both production and distribution – while promoting environmental regeneration and social justice. We are building the Global Village Construction Set. This is a high-performance, modular, do-it-yourself, low-cost platform – that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes – to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

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2015/05/112015/05/10

Jean Lievens: European Open Science Cloud

Access, Architecture, Cloud, Data, Design, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Science, Security, Software, Sources (Info/Intel), Spectrum

Towards the European Open Science Cloud

CERN has recently published a paper which outlines the establishment of the European Open Science Cloud that will enable digital science by introducing IT as a Service to the public research sector in Europe.

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2015/05/102015/05/10

Jean Lievens: Can Analytics Save The Earth?

Access, Architecture, Data, Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Science, Security, Software

This Earth Day, Let's Start Using Analytics To Conserve Energy

The success of new energy projects relies on one crucial skill: the ability to derive insights from massive amounts of rapidly changing data. That’s why utilities and energy companies are adopting analytics to meet the rising demand for renewable energy from more sophisticated customers.

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2015/05/092015/05/09

Mongoose: NATO Relies on Social Media, Not CIA

Access, Data, Politics

US NATO envoy: ‘I get most info on Ukraine conflict from social networks’

“We should all ask ourselves: why is it that we know so little really about what is going on in Donbass,” the US ambassador to NATO told “Friends of Europe” forum in Brussels.

“I mean, frankly, I read more on social media about what is going on in the Donbass than I get from formal intelligence networks. This is because the networks don’t exist today,” Lute said.

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2015/04/262015/04/27

Yoda: Electoral Reform — See the NO Votes!

Access

Clever, this is!

How to build a better ballot: Count the no votes, see which politician gets the least

By Vic Berardelli, Special to the Bangor (Maine) Daily News

The only effective ballot reform is one that puts politicians in their place. The current crop of proposed citizen initiatives tampers with the voting process but keeps political egos inflated. The time has come to enact the negative ballot.

Petitions are circulating in an attempt to get a referendum that would have the voters select office holders on a rank-and-reallocate basis.

Basically, one would vote for the candidate of choice but be asked to mark a second choice among the other candidates. In theory, if no candidate wins a clear majority (50 percent plus one) then the lowest candidate is eliminated and the second choice votes under that candidate are allocated to produce a majority vote winner.

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2015/04/252015/04/24

Independent Voter Network: Voting Rights Under Attack — 2 Party Monopoly of Primaries Subverts All Other Parties and General Election

Access

Voting Rights Have Been Under Attack; But Not How You Think

Our American election system is broken in no small part thanks to the primary election system. The Republican and Democratic parties have worked hand-in-hand for over a century to make ‘their’ party primaries the centerpiece of the entire electoral process.

In an age where 43 percent of Americans consider themselves politically independent of the two major parties, the twisted state-sanctioned closed primary election process prevalent in the majority of U.S. elections frequently leads to election results that are patently warped.

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2015/04/252015/04/24

SchwartzReport: Kochs’ Acquisition of Republican Party Nearly Complete

Access

The transformation of American democracy to an open oligarchy is really quite amazing; I wonder how the Founders would feel about this development. A handful of uber-rich White men, led by the Koch brothers basically have bought the Republican Party, anointing the candidates they want in office. I wonder if those who register as Republicans fully comprehend what has happened. Just to be clear. The Democratic Party is also complicit in the sale of democracy to the ultra-rich. My general take away from all of this is: This is what happens when most of the citizens in the country don't vote. We have no one to blame but ourselves and I, for one, have had enough.

Kochs' acquisition of the Republican Party nearly complete