I’ve been invited to give a “very provocative talk” on what humanitarian response will look like in 2025 for the annual Global Policy Forum organized by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in New York. I first explored this question in early 2012 and my colleague Andrej Verity recently wrote up this intriguing piece on the topic, which I highly recommend; intriguing because he focuses a lot on the future of the pre-deployment process, which is often overlooked.
For many launching businesses in today's fast-moving tech sector, the goal is to attract investors and shareholders, and eventually selling it all to an even larger company. One tech vendor, however, is bucking this urge, preferring instead to have a positive impact on its communities — both users and the cities in which it is locating offices.
“A lot of companies are following that typical Silicon Valley path,” says Brian Cheung, CEO and co-founder of Liferay, Inc., a Los Angeles-based company which provides portal technology to organizations. “They’ve got their investors, and they’re aiming for that acquisition or that public offering. We're very conscientious about not doing that. We're still independent, privately held, with no outside capital.” The advantage to staying private is that becoming beholden to shareholders stifles innovation, he adds.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Cheung at Liferay's recent confab in San Francisco, in which he expounded on his company's unique philosophy toward innovation and community development. The company, which builds and distributes its software via an open-source model, is founded on the belief that innovation and growth comes from helping to make its customers and communities stronger.
You sir are a lonesome voice of sanity reason and common sense in the asylum of todays political landscape. I ran across this video online and thought of you immediately. Brad Barker CEO of Halo Corporation is giving a TED talk. He proves the value of OPEN SOURCE INTEL in the real world. In the video he explains how a bunch of Hatian teens with cell phones schooled the GOVT and relief agencies on how to operate with tactical efficency. Don't let the bastards get you down!
Phi Beta Iota: See everything by Patrick Meier on this web site. One day we will see Amazon, Avazz, CrisisMappers, and WISER fully integrated and operating on an Open Source Everything (OSE) technical foundation. THAT will be a revolution.
It’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the powers that be: A sizable number of Americans think the undead would do a better job than our Representatives in Washington, D.C.
Americans ages 18 to 64 express slightly more confidence in zombies to run things than in the federal government. Seniors have more faith in the government.
Do over-the-top political attack ads work?
The political advertising cycle is about to heat up again and outrageous attack ads are already hitting the airwaves. A new political advertisement attacking San Diego mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher is raising eyebrows because it is from a political action committee: Zombies for Responsible Government:
Published reports said the documents filed with the San Diego City Clerk show the group was registered by David Bauer, a treasurer with the conservative Sacramento Valley Lincoln Club. However, those documents are not clear as to who is really behind the group.
Philosophy Professor, Karen Frost-Arnold, has just published a highly lucid analysis of the dangers that come with Internet accountability (PDF). While the anonymity provided by social media can facilitate the spread of lies, Karen rightly argues that preventing anonymity can undermine online communities by stifling communication and spreading ignorance, thus leading to a larger volume of untrustworthy information. Her insights are instructive for those interested in information forensics and digital humanitarian action.
Click on Image to Enlarge
To make her case, Karen distinguishes between error-avoidance and truth-attainment. The former seeks to avoid false beliefs while the latter seeks to attain true belief. Take mainstream and social media, for example. Some argue that the “value of traditional media surpasses that of the blogosphere […] because the traditional media are superior at filtering out false claims” since professional journalists “reduce the number of errors that might otherwise be reported and believed.” Others counter this assertion: “People who confine themselves to a filtered medium may well avoid believing falsehoods (if the filters are working well), but inevitably they will also miss out on valuable knowledge,” including many true beliefs.
Here is something new from Gigaom: “Stanford Researchers To Open Source Model They Say Has Nailed Sentiment Analysis.”Richard Socher and a team from Stanford have created a computer program that can classify the sentiment of sentence with 85% accurately. They tested the model on movie reviews with a positive or negative tone. Even more amazing is that Socher and his team are making the project available to everyone. Why not capitalize on it instead? After all, companies have been trying for years to analyze social media and would pay the big bucks for said technology.
What makes Sucher’s project different from other sentiment software is that is reads whole sentences rather than just words.
“The team then built a new model it calls a Recursive Neural Tensor Network (it’s an evolution of existing models called Recursive Neural Networks), which is what actually processes all the words and phrases to create numeric representations for them and calculate how they interact with one another. When you’re dealing with text like movie reviews that contain linguistic intricacies, Socher explained, you need a model that can really understand how words play off each other to alter the meaning of sentences. The order in which they come, and what connects them, matters a lot.”
Socher hopes to reach a 95% accuracy, but the technology will never be 100% accurate because of jargon, idioms, odd word combinations, and slang. The project is making landmark strides in machine learning, logical reasoning, and grammatical analysis.
It means better news for online translators and speech technology, but commercial sentiment analytics vendors may see a decline in their profits.
Events: Next Tuesday, the leadership book Swarmwise will be featured in a book launch event in Brussels. Simon Wilson, the director of Edelman Brussels, will moderate a discussion between Joe Paluska and the author, yours truly. The event will be held at The Centre, Rue du Trône 4, 2nd floor, B-1000 Brussels at 12:30 on Tuesday October 15.
Joe Paluska, who is Global Technology Chair of Edelman, will provide his views on the author’s experiences and conclusions on cost-efficient leadership by empowering volunteers in an informal discusson. Paluska has more than 20 years of experience spanning public relations, public policy, journalism, and business affairs.
The event takes place at Edelman’s The Centre over lunch Tuesday. Register at Edelman to book your participation in the event.
(Oh, and there will also be copies of Swarmwise for sale for €10 each – less than half Amazon’s price.)
