Recorded Future predicts when and where a demonstration will occur after mining from the web all the related activities.
EXTRACT
As it turns out, the software company Recorded Future (which has recently been praised by Wired, the MIT Technology Reviewand other media outlets, after the CIA and Google invested millions in their services) seems to be offering its clients something similar: a world where emergencies, that is, future events, can be calculated in advance. But how does this start-up actually function, and why are the German philosopher’s concerns relevant to its services?
The risk of conflict and fragility is influenced by both domestic factors (such as political marginalization and the unequal distribution of wealth) and global factors (such as the transnational organized crime and foreign direct investment). Much analysis to date has analyzed the political economy of fragile and conflict affected countries and neglected this global dimension of fragility.
Yet, powerful global influences are at play that, enhanced by the process of globalization, generate strong international constraints and opportunities for national development and the incentives of domestic stakeholders. Fragile states feature a heightened sensitivity and lower resilience to such influences because of their generally weak levels of institutional capacity, the often contested legitimacy of their political settlement, their high levels of inequality and the legacy or threat of violence they face. For the same reasons, they also easily mutate, multiply or transmit such influences, often in unexpected or negative ways. In short, such global factors have a critical influence on conflict and fragility but are underestimated in both the analysis and action.
INCAF’s work on this topic focuses on eight global factors that influence conflict and fragility, and in particular on interconnections between these factors. The aim of this work is to identify concrete entry points for international action that can reduce or mitigate the harmful effects of such global factors.
(NOTE: In this essay I intentionally subsume the thinking processes of official decision-makers into the thinking processes of the citizenry as a whole. I realize that official decision-makers can and do make decisions independently of the will of the people, unless that public will is united and organized. But elite decisions made independently of the public do not qualify as “public thinking” – at least in any democratic sense – and in this essay I am attempting to explore the nature of public thinking so that it can be upgraded and empowered to impact public policy. So here we will look at the thinking processes of the entire population and mini-publics thereof as they go about living a relatively democratic life.)
How can we think clearly about the collective thinking processes of a whole population in a democracy? How do populations reflect on public issues and come to conclusions about collective action and public policy? What follows is one framework for sorting out the different dimensions of public thinking and the quality of that thinking process.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The most basic form of public thinking is, of course, what goes on in the minds of individual citizens as they think about public affairs. We see manifestations of this – commonly called “public opinion” – in polls, in voting, in online “citizen input” sites, and in various other visible forms of citizenship that reflect the opinions of individual citizens in the population as a whole.
Public opinion evolves in a message-rich environment that includes – at the next higher level of public thinking – news media and commentaries from pundits and partisans, on talk shows and blogs, and in online forums, letters to the editor, and public hearings. This public thinking often takes the form of mediated or witnessed conversations: Diverse (often polarized) voices express their views to each other while being directly or indirectly witnessed by the public. Our society depends heavily on this kind of media-driven interaction to collectively reflect on its public issues and shape the views of its citizens and decision-makers.
CHINA’s new leaders, who will be anointed next month at the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress in Beijing, might want to rethink the Faustian bargain their predecessors embraced some 20 years ago: namely, that social stability could be bought by rapid economic growth.
As the recent riots at a Foxconn factory in northern China demonstrate, growth alone, even at sustained, spectacular rates, has not produced the kind of life satisfaction crucial to a stable society — an experience that shows how critically important good jobs and a strong social safety net are to people’s happiness.
Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.
Yet there is no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier, according to an analysis of survey data that colleagues and I conducted. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.
When it costs more to be poor – Fed and government shifting inflation onto rent, medical care, and food. QE3 to widen the gap between the poor and the wealthy.
Inflation has been picking up since the recession ended in 2009. The problem with the CPI increasing year over year with no rise in household incomes is that the standard of living for most Americans erodes every year that incomes do not keep up. Household incomes are back to levels last seen in the mid-1990s while the cost of necessities has gone up. This brings us to our article today that examines the nuts and bolts of what constitutes the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI attempts to measure the changes in price for consumer goods and services. Overall it did a very poor job of measuring the housing bubble because of the owner’s equivalent of rent metric.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Today, it is understating inflation because of the excess spending on “wants” that occurred in the 2000s has now shifted to spending on “needs” but is being dragged down by the amount of family spending on needed goods. We will dig deep into this data but suffice it to say that the Fed is creating inflation in items most Americans actually need to live their daily lives and the burden on the poor is actually increasing.
These three things—a biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation—are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a variety of discoveries and opportunities that offer tremendous prospect for improving the human condition.
Phi Beta Iota: The social sciences are the moral and intellectual runts of the academic litter, with public administration being the bottom feeders unable to even define a discipline or establish laudable norms. Computers are stupid — governments and corporations have very deliberately avoided the necessary investments in true cost economics, whole systems analytic models, and multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making (M4IS2). This is a very positive development, but it is highly unlikely that major progress will be made in the absence of an Open Source Agency (OSA) guiding a global “Open Source Everything” renaissance of thinking–of intelligence with integrity.
