Neal Rauhauser: Confusion & Disinformation

Advanced Cyber/IO, Architecture, Design, Knowledge, Software
Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

Confusion & Disinformation

I published What 2013 Has In Store 166 days ago and summed up my discoveries in Professionalism & Propaganda a week ago. This 1,800+ word piece with descriptive links to over thirty posts covers everything from my network of now over 3,000 Facebook Anonymous supporters through the CIA’s application of mindfulness to the analysis process, a direction taken in response to network threats.

During that time I completed a social network analysis class offered by Coursera and I curated nineteen related documents in my SNA Class collection. Humans exhibit a variety of interconnected ways of making decisions, information itself has a network of precursors and successors, and the flow of information through human networks can often be modeled as a spreading contagion.

There are a variety of problems that professional analysts face which have been studied in-depth by the Central Intelligence Agency‘s internal think tank, the Center for the Study of Intelligence. A distributed, grassroots network shares some characteristics with a professional cadre of analysts, but organizing, motivating, and assessing their progress is dramatically different from that of a hierarchical organization.

Here is an overview of the universe for the next stage in my inquiries. This Maltego graph displays five major components. The large group with the most diverse colors is representative of my place in the scheme of things – people who engage me in a bi-drectional fashion and organizations to which I subscribe. The cluster of people(lavender) and Twitter accounts(green) at the lower left represents e-International Relations, which is open and academic in nature. The similar looking cluster at the upper right are the Twitter users among the 156 analysts for Wikistrat. A larger graph of their complete network is seen in the next image. The cluster at the lower right is the LinkedIn-centric International Security Observers, an open, web based think tank.

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If I had to distill what I am trying to get at here in one paragraph, it would be this:

Groups of analysts need a shared context that can store and display information in chronological order, recognizing entities in the field ranging from states to naval vessels to individuals. The system needs to be able to store documents, images, URLs, and other internet accessible content. The system need not perform link analysis, but it must be amenable to doing so with its content using a tool like Maltego or Gephi, and then making the analysis available as an integral part of the overall offering.

Read full post with many links and graphics.

Continue reading “Neal Rauhauser: Confusion & Disinformation”

Michel Bauwens: Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Advanced Cyber/IO, Architecture, Civil Society, Data, Design, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Software, Worth A Look
Michel Bauwens
Michel Bauwens

People are raving about this as a possible alternative command and control system for the public to use.

Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Jeff Atwood

Coding Horror, February 5, 2013

EXTRACT:

After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder – what would it feel like to change sides? What if I became a champion of random, arbitrary discussion, of the very kind that I'd spent four years designing against and constantly lecturing users on the evil of?

I already built an X-Wing; could I build a better Tie Fighter?

Today we announce the launch of Discourse, a next-generation, 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

 

logo discourseThe goal of the company we formed, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., is exactly that – to raise the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet through seeding it with better discussion software:

  • 100% open source and free to the world, now and forever.
  • Feels great to use. It's fun.
  • Designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
  • Built in moderation and governance systems that let discussion communities protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and bad actors – even without official moderators.

Our amazingly talented team has been working on Discourse for almost a year now, and although like any open source software it's never entirely done, we believe it is already a generation ahead of any other forum software we've used.

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Berto Jongman: EU Emergency Response Centre (no NATO); E-Stonia; Google Takes Hit on Privacy; Strongbox Anonymous Document Sharing Tool

Architecture, Design, Governance, Software
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Emergency Response Centre: for a faster and more efficient European response to disasters

“With the unfortunately increasing frequency and complexity of disasters, EU Member States need to cooperate even more closely. The new EU Emergency Response Centre provides a state of the art platform that allows them to coordinate under the most extreme circumstances, enables them to tackle these challenges even more effectively and thus helps to protect our citizens,” said Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission.

How Estonia became E-stonia

In some countries, computer programming might be seen as the realm of the nerd

World from Berlin: A ‘Clear Defeat' for Google

A German high court has ruled that Google must remove automatically suggested search terms if they violate a person's privacy. Editorialists at the country's national newspapers see a defeat for the Internet giant and a victory for privacy law.

Introducing Strongbox

This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: EU Emergency Response Centre (no NATO); E-Stonia; Google Takes Hit on Privacy; Strongbox Anonymous Document Sharing Tool”

Neal Rauhauser: Professionalism & Propaganda

Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Sources (Info/Intel)
Neal Rauhauser
Neal Rauhauser

Professionalism & Propaganda

One of the things I have done over the last six months has involved identifying and observing hive mind constructs in the real world. This happened in the context of examining the publicly visible process of foreign policy making. I wrote thirty three posts that are at least tangentially related to this pursuit. Hive mind constructs will eventually win out over point source propaganda, but it won’t be pretty to watch.

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Links and short descriptions of various sequential endeavors and their findings

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CONCLUSION:

Monolithic corporate forces heavily invested in the status quo are wrestling with networked humans and finding they face a sort of memetic Devil’s Snare. Their struggles may seem to be momentarily successful, but they are only educating their opponent as to their strengths and weaknesses.

The concept of the corporation didn’t really take off until the Catholic church relaxed usury laws three centuries ago. Compound interest depends on exponential growth and humans have pretty much hit the wall in terms of what our environment will support. Any one of climate change or peak oil could undo the perception that we are all consumers living in a conglomeration of free markets. Those two have arrived pretty much simultaneous with a financial sector meltdown and we are entering a period where our society will wind down to the Earth’s solar maximum. A value system based on exponential growth will not survive a disproof by counter example, and Mother Nature responds to neither paper injunctions nor heartfelt supplications.

Some of those networked humans are starting to realize that they need not tear down the corporatocracy by hand and they are already thinking about how and what to preserve. What role does a hive mind play in this? What role can it play when electrical power is intermittent and the supply chains needed for electronic devices are interrupted?

Read full post, see all linked posts with graphics.

Stephen E. Arnold: A Fresh Look at Big Data & Big Data (-) Human Factor (+) Transformation (+) RECAP

Access, Advanced Cyber/IO, Architecture, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Design, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Strategy, Threats
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

A Fresh Look at Big Data

May 8, 2013

Next week I am doing an invited talk in London. My subject is search and Big Data. I will be digging into this notion in this month’s Honk newsletter and adding some business intelligence related comments at an Information Today conference in New York later this month. (I have chopped the number of talks I am giving this year because at my age air travel and the number of 20 somethings at certain programs makes me jumpy.)

I want to highlight one point in my upcoming London talk; namely, the financial challenge which companies face when they embrace Big Data and then want to search the information in the system and search the Big Data system’s outputs.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Notice that precision and recall has not improved significantly over the last 30 years. I anticipate that many search vendors will tell me that their systems deliver excellent precision and recall. I am not convinced. The data which I have reviewed show that over a period of 10 years most systems hit the 80 to 85 percent precision and recall level for content which is about a topic. Content collections composed of scientific, technical, and medical information where the terminology is reasonably constrained can do better. I have seen scores above 90 percent. However, for general collections, precision and recall has not been improving relative to the advances in other disciplines; for example, converting structured data outputs to fancy graphics.

 

I don’t want to squabble about precision and recall. The main point is that when an organization mashes Big Data with search, two curves must be considered. The first is the complexity curve. The idea is that search is a reasonably difficult system to implement in an effective manner. The addition of a Big Data system adds another complex task. When two complex tasks are undertaken at the same time, the costs go up.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: A Fresh Look at Big Data & Big Data (-) Human Factor (+) Transformation (+) RECAP”

Jean Lievens: Warren Karlenzig: Collective Intelligence–Cities as Global Intelligence Platform

Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Warren Karlenzig: Collective Intelligence–Cities as Global Intelligence Platform

Social media and collaborative technologies–layered with smart systems combining geo-location data with human experience–will make cities the driving sustainability force in a dawning planetary era. Cities will anticipate new risks with rapid urban systems innovation based upon crowdsourcing, virtual and physical communities, and transparent markets sensitive to full carbon and resource costs. Creatively leveraging collective intelligence for clean energy, low carbon mobility and sustainable food and water, the new urban grid will enable high local quality of life, lifelong learning and vibrant green economies.

Jean Lievins: 10 Ideas Driving The Future Of Social Entrepreneurship

Architecture, Design
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Ideas Driving The Future Of Social Entrepreneurship

Future of Social via Fastcompany

1. It’s about changing the system, stupid.

2. Change is accelerating.

3. To solve our problems we need more problem solvers.

4. It starts with young people.

5. Scale through collaboration.

6. Technology is driving creative disruption.

7. Power is moving from the few to the many.

8. The silos are breaking down.

9. Here comes the social Intrapreneur.

10. When You pass the torch light many fires.

 

Yes there is a difference between “social entrepreneurship” and “Social Media Marketing” but they are complimentary tactics and philosophies.

Read full article.