Category: Knowledge

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Theophillis Goodyear: Experts, Wisdom, and the Public

Knowledge
Theophillis Goodyear

I'm a talented nobody. I don't even have an associates degree. And it's been my experience that some of the the most educated people tend to underestimate the importance of educating the general public.

Professionals tend to see the public as people to be managed by professionals. They see them as people who are sick, and themselves as doctors dispensing medicine.

The public doesn't have time to read all the books. They need things condensed. They have bright minds that are sponges for wisdom, but the wisdom never reaches them. A lengthy booklist won't help them, no matter how many good books are on the list. It's a tough problem, but I have one solution.

Wisdom quotes.

Can you ask all the people you know, who are copacetic with Collective Wisdom and Open Source, to collect their favorite wisdom quotes from the books they've read? Then you can post them to phi beta iota. That's almost an archaic method compared to open source technology, but it's a reliable and kitchen-tested recipe!

Wisdom quotes are like data visualization. They condense complex perspectives into readily graspable concepts.

One of my favorites, at the moment, is: In a room full of intelligent people, the smartest person in the room is the room.

Verbosity is the enemy of spreading the word about anything. Verbosity slows the information cycle—-Open Source Everything included. Someone needs to collect wisdom quotes from your field to condense all the main ideas.

The great unwashed masses are far smarter than most people realize. They're just lacking in important feedback! Wisdom quotes, widely circulated, accelerate the flow of information.

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SmartPlanet: Bill Gates is Shit Hot — Really!

Knowledge, SmartPlanet

Next-gen toilets that could change the world

| August 16, 2012,

Flush toilets get the job done. They also require a network of piped water, sewer and electrical connections, the kind of vast infrastructure developing nations don’t have, and likely won’t, for years.

That translates into a potentially lethal situation for the 2.5 billion people in the world who don’t have access to modern sanitation. Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, a competition aimed at developing a new generation of Johns, crappers and loos that can capture and process human waste and turn it into useful resources, such as energy and water.

The end goal is to improve sanitation in a world where 1.5 million children die every year due to diarrhea caused by food and water tainted with fecal matter.

The competitors could design just about whatever kind of toilet they wanted. The toilets just had to be affordable and able to operate without traditional modern infrastructure such as piped water, sewer or electrical connections. The Gates Foundation brought in 50 gallons of fake feces made from soybeans and rice for the demonstrations, which were held this week in Seattle.

And the winners are …

The California Institute of Technology earned the $100,000 first prize for designing a solar-powered toilet (pictured below) that generates hydrogen and electricity.

The toilet uses a solar panel to power an electrochemical reactor. The reactor breaks down water and human waste into fertilizer to be used for agriculture, and hydrogen, which can be stored in hydrogen fuel cells as energy. The treated water can be reused to flush the toilet or for irrigation.

Loughborough University in the UK won the $60,000 second prize for a toilet that produces biological charcoal, minerals and clean water. The University of Toronto won the third-place prize of $40,000 for a toilet the sanitizes feces and urine and recovers resources and clean water.

Eawag, or the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, and EOOS received a $40,000 special recognition prize for their design of a toilet user interface.(See photo to the right).

The toilet challenge isn’t over. The Gates Foundation has awarded grants to four universities to develop the 2.0 toilets for the next round of the challenge.

Read full article with more photos.

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SmartPlanet: How Brain Deals with Waste

Advanced Cyber/IO, Knowledge

A dirty mind – scientists discover how your brain deals with waste

| August 15, 2012,

Every day, as you move about in the world, your brain is chugging along with you. Just like any other engineer, or organ, as it works, millions of neurons firing and guiding you around, the brain builds up waste products. But for a long time it wasn’t clear where that waste went. Now, scientists think they know the answer.

They’re calling the draining pipes the “the glymphatic system” – after the glial cells that control it and the lymphatic system that it resembles. The system works like a series of pipes to funnel waste away from the brain. A new paper in Science Translational Medicine describes the system as they observed it in mice.

Researchers knew about a slower system to remove waste. A fluid called the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) moves through the brain and carries away waste through diffusion. But this new system works much faster. Senior author on the paper Maiken Nedergaard describes how the system works in the press release:

“It’s as if the brain has two garbage haulers – a slow one that we’ve known about, and a fast one that we’ve just met,” said Nedergaard. “Given the high rate of metabolism in the brain, and its exquisite sensitivity, it’s not surprising that its mechanisms to rid itself of waste are more specialized and extensive than previously realized.”

But how was there an entire structure for draining in the brain, without us knowing about it? The press release explains:

Read full post.

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Owl: Covert Plans for Banking Holiday – Move Your Money Now…

Commerce, Corruption, Economics/True Cost, Government, Knowledge
Who? Who?

Should the People Pull Their Money from the Banks While They Can?

“The biggest banks in the US have been given advisement by US regulators that they must make plans to stave off a complete financial collapse without relying on the US government. Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and other technocrats have secretly crafted worst-case scenarios in which they can continue to thrive during a full-blown domestic monetary crisis.”

This article offers many interesting items, including claims that the mega-banks have invested in DOD and security contractors such as DynCorp to protect the bankers when collapse comes, but the most interesting item comes from the end of this article, which talks about the real agenda to be implemented behind the new “Gauss” virus when its presence increases enough to significantly threaten the world banking system (my emphasis):

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Patrick Meier: Crowd-Sourcing, Crisis Mapping, & Sustainable Resilience

Geospatial, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Patrick Meier

Could Social Media Have Prevented the Largest Mass Poisoning of a Population in History?

I just finished reading a phenomenal book. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, was co-authored by my good friend Andrew Zolli of PopTech fame and his won-derful colleague Ann Marie Healey. I could easily write several dozen blog posts on this brilliant book. Consider this the first of possibly many more posts to follow. Some will summarize and highlight insights that really resonated with me while others like the one below will use the book as a spring board to explore related questions and themes.  Read full post.

Crisis Mapping for Disaster Preparedness, Mitigation and Resilience

Crisis mapping for disaster preparedness is nothing new. In 2004, my colleague Suha Ulgen spearheaded an innovative project in Istanbul that combined public participation and mobile geospatial technologies for the purposes of disaster mitigation. Suha subsequently published an excellent overview of the project entitled ”Public Participation Geographic Information Sharing Systems for Co-mmunity Based Urban Disaster Mitigation,” available in this edited book on Geo-Information for Disaster Management. I have referred to this project in count-less conversations since 2007  so it is high time I blog about it as well.  Read full post.

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Koko: Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Koko

Koko:  A smart human.

Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

Damon Horowitz, a philosophy professor and “serial entrepreneur,” recently joined Google as an In-House Philosopher/Director of Engineering. Prior to his work at Google, Horowitz co-founded Aardvark, Perspecta, and a number of other tech companies. In this talk at Stanford University’s 2011 BiblioTech conference on “Human Experience,”  Horowitz explains why he left a highly-paid tech career, in which he sought the keys to artificial intelligence, to pursue a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stanford (the text of the talk is available here).

Horowitz offers fellow techies a formidable challenge, but a worthwhile one. In saying so, I must confess a bias: As a student and teacher of the humanities, I have watched with some dismay as the culture becomes increasingly dominated by technicians who often ignore or dismiss pressing philosophical and ethical problems in their quest to build a better world. It is gratifying to hear from someone who recognized this issue by (temporarily) giving up what he admits was a great deal of power and societal privilege and headed back to the classroom.

Horowitz describes his intellectual journey from “technologist” to philosopher with passion and candor, and concludes that as a result of his academic inquiry, he “no longer looks for machines to solve all of our problems for us,” and no longer assumes that he knows what’s best for his users. This kind of humility and intellectual flexibility is, ideally, the outcome of a higher degree in the humanities, and Horowitz uses his own trials to make a case for better critical thinking, for a “humanistic perspective,” in the tech sector and elsewhere. For examples, see Horowitz’s TED talks on a “moral operating system” and “philosophy in prison.” Complicating Google’s well-known, unofficial slogan “don’t be evil,” Horowitz, drawing on Hannah Arendt, believes that most of the evil in the world comes not from bad intentions but from “not thinking.”

Serial Entrepreneur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities”

in Education, Google, Philosophy, Technology | August 7th, 2012 14 Comments

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Search: federal government spending osint

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corruption, IO Impotency, Key Players, Knowledge, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Policies, Politics, Reform, Resilience, Searches, Strategy, Threats

ROBERT STEELE: The IC, DoD, and oversight agencies such as OMB and GAO have not sought to audit government spending on OSINT and probably could not do so effectively with the combination of ignorance on the part of the auditors and recalcitrance on the part of those who should be audited.  The closest anyone came to setting the stage for this was in 2000 when Sean O'Keefe, DD/OMB, established code M320 to tag all spending by the US Government on contractor provision of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).  When O'Keffe moved to NASA, the impetus for getting OSINT right died.  More recently, Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele met with senior civil servants at OMB and got a second approval  for the Open Source Agency (OSA) contingent on a Cabinet secretary asking for it.  There was universal agreement the OSA should not be under secret community management but rather under diplomatic and/or commercial agency auspices.  Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele continue to favor Markowitz's original idea, that the OSA be a sister-agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG).  It would of course provide near-real-time feed of all OSINT to the high side, the secret side, but all OSINT would remain outside the wire for liberal sharing with any other actor US or foreign.

Robert Steele

What is known is that DoD treats OSINT as a technical processing challenge (this is ineffective since 80% or more of OSINT is not published, not digital, and not online); that ABLE DANGER was a very expensive program that included both digital OSINT and the digitization of visa application; that Document Exploitation (DOCEX) has received a great deal of investment within DIA, to the point that seriously silly claims have been made to justify new SES/DISL positions, e.g. that DOCEX is its “own” discipline.  The two largest contracts in OSINT, both hosed by the client with the contractors going along, are the L-3 provision of OSINT technical and subject matter support to the CIA's Open Source Center (the latter is NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, a national capability, just an over-hyped internal capability whose budget has been cut in half since the conversation from being the Foreign Broadcast Information Service) and the SOS International contract with USSTRATCOM to provide butts in seats that pretend to do IO/online OSINT monitoring (more idiocy).

Over-all, including classified projects, including DARPA and IARPA and hidden relationships with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, among others, and including non-secret non-national security element spending on open sources and what pass for methods, is no less than one billion a year, probably around three billion a year, and when counting all the buried pieces (e.g. contractors doing Mission X and creating their own OSINT support that is still not available for the CIA OSC), perhaps as much as five billion a year.  All out of control, lacking any combination of intelligence and integrity, as much if not more of a waste than the $80 billion plus spent on technical collection that is not processed, with little regard for human intelligence and advanced analytics, all to provide “at best” 4% of what the President or a major commander requires to make good decisions.

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