This Prezi is about “making assignments ‘Prezilicious' but it's really about visual representation of information and learning; i.e., infotention — Howard
Howard Rheingold: Visual Representation and Infotention
KnowledgeDavid Isenberg: What the US Government Knew About PMC Slave-Trade & Atrocities – The Case of Najlaa
Commerce, Corruption, Government, Knowledge
What the U.S. Government Knew About Najlaa
Huffington Post, 11 July 2012
A bit over a year ago a report I co-wrote, documenting human trafficking and abuse of workers by Najlaa International Catering Services, a KBR subcontractor, was published by the Project on Government Oversight.
The internal company documents I uncovered revealed, among other things, that U.S. authorities were aware of the deplorable living conditions Najlaa workers endured back in 2008. To their credit both the U.S. government and KBR both worked to pressure Najlaa to fix things once they were alerted to the problem.
But, thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union, newly released documents reveal that the U.S. government and KBR were even more aware of the problem than previously known.
In July 2011 the ACLU filed a lawsuit demanding that the government release documents relating to the trafficking and the abusive treatment of foreign workers on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case sought documents from the Departments of State and Defense that detail audits and complaints about military contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bear in mind this is hardly an isolated problem. As the New York Times reported:
David Isenberg: Private Military Corporations – The Worst of All Evils
07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, Government, KnowledgePMSC Not Ready for U.N. Prime Time
Huffington Post, 11 July 2012
For many years now, private military and security contractor (PMSC) advocates have argued that utilization of PMSC in United Nations peace operations offers an alternative to doing nothing or trying to organize a frequently dysfunctional U.N.-sponsored, often ill-equipped and organized intervention.
Indeed, about ten years ago, Doug Brooks, head of the International Stability Operations Association (ISOA), a PMSC advocacy group, wrote in a paper that:
PMCs offer the only military forces both willing and capable to provide rapid and effective military services in most Third World conflicts. PMC operations in the past have saved tens of thousands of lives, but their potential is even greater. Working as “force multipliers” PMCs can provide the competent military backbone to ensure the success of UN or regional multinational peacekeeping or peace enforcement operations.
As sweeping generalizations go that, to use my childhood Yiddish, takes a lot of chutzpah.
Don't get me wrong. While I'm the first to agree that U.N. operations often leave a lot to be desired, a U.N. blue helmet peace operation can only be as successful as members of the Security Council want it to be. Given the often radically differing agendas and interests of Council members that doesn't happen very often.
And to be objective about it, the United Nation already employs large number of private contractors for all sorts of humanitarian purposes and has greatly increased its use of these companies in recent years. But does the record to date with regard to PMSC use by the U.N. encourage even greater use of and dependence on PMSC?
There is reason to doubt that, according to a just released report by the Global Policy Forum and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Continue reading “David Isenberg: Private Military Corporations – The Worst of All Evils”
Patrick Meier: PeopleBrowsr – Next-Generation Social Media Analysis
Knowledge
PeopleBrowsr: Next-Generation Social Media Analysis for Humanitarian Response?
As noted in this blog post on “Data Philanthropy for Humanitarian Response,” members of the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHNetwork) are still using manual methods for media monitoring. When the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) activated the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) to crisis map Libya last year, for example, SBTF volunteers manually monitored hundreds of Twitter handles, news sites for several weeks.
SBTF volunteers (Mapsters) do not have access to a smart microtasking platform that could have distributed the task in more efficient ways. Nor do they have access to even semi-automated tools for content monitoring and information retrieval. Instead, they used a Google Spreadsheet to list the sources they were manually monitoring and turned this spreadsheet into a sign-up sheet where each Mapster could sign on for 3-hour shifts every day. The SBTF is basically doing “crowd computing” using the equivalent of a typewriter.
Meanwhile, companies like Crimson Hexagon, NetBase, RecordedFuture and several others have each developed sophisticated ways to monitor social and/or mainstream media for various private sector applications such as monitoring brand perception. So my colleague Nazila kindly introduced me to her colleagues at PeopleBrowsr after reading my post on Data Philanthropy. Last week, Marc from PeopleBrowsr gave me a thorough tour of the platform. I was definitely impressed and am excited that Marc wants us to pilot the platform in support of the Digital Humanitarian Network. So what’s the big deal about PeopleBrowsr? To begin with, the platform has access to 1,000 days of social media data and over 3 terabytes of social data per month.
To put this in terms of information velocity, PeopleBrowsr receives 10,000 social media posts per second from a variety of sources including Twitter, Facebook, fora and blogs. On the latter, they monitor posts from over 40 million blogs including all of Tumblr, Posterious, Blogspot and every WordPress-hosted site. They also pull in content from YouTube and Flickr. (Click on the screenshots below to magnify them).
Patrick Meier: Crowd-Seeding – This is HUGE Advance
Knowledge, P2P / PanarchyFrom Crowdsourcing Crisis Information to Crowdseeding Conflict Zones
“Crowdseeding brings the population (the crowd) from only A (what you get with crowdsourcing) to A+B+C+D: because you give phones & credit and you go to and inform the phoneholds about the project. So the crowd increases from A to A+B+C+D. And then from A+B+C+D one takes a representative sample. So two important benefits. And then a third: the relationship with the phone holder: stronger incentive to tell the truth, and no bad people hacking into the system.”
Read full brief with links and graphics.
To learn more about crowdsourcing as a methodology for information collection, I recommend the following three articles:
Carnegie Council Competitive Ethics Just Business: Two Interviews on Competitive Intelligence – Richard Horowitz and Cynthia Cheng Correia
Commercial Intelligence, Knowledge
Two Interviews on Competitive Intelligence – Richard Horowitz and Cynthia Cheng Correia
Carnegie Council Competitive Ethics Just Business
July 3, 2012
JULIA TAYLOR KENNEDY: Welcome to Just Business. I'm Julia Taylor Kennedy.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “I consider ethics, as well as religion, as supplements to law in the government of man.”
One field that really illustrates the distinction we all draw in our professional lives between ethics and law is competitive intelligence. Today on the show I'll talk to two competitive intelligence specialists to unpack the legal and ethical lines they draw each day.
First, a primer on competitive intelligence, known as CI for short. When the renowned Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter broke types of business competition into five categories in the 1970s, he established his legacy. Nearly every first-year MBA student now must internalize Porter's five forces. They are competitive threats, like substitute products, long-time industry rivals, and others.
Porter's forces also spawned a new industry, competitive intelligence. It's a service that some companies develop internally. Others hire a consulting firm. The main goal is to keep tabs on the competition and to project what competitive threats lie ahead.
This is a vital resource, but it's also one that businesses don't like to talk about because it seems kind of shadowy.
Howard Rheingold: How to manage a research library with Zotero
Knowledge, SoftwareInfotention-technique-rich — Howard
“Keeping up to date with research and managing an ever-increasing number of journal articles is skill that must be well-honed by academics. Here, Alex Hope sets out how his workflow has developed using Zotero, Dropbox, Goodreader and his iPad.”
Phi Beta Iota: This one person's tested approach with existing tools could be the foundation for creating the World Brain. Also exciting is the London School of Economic platform that his contribution has been published on, and the idea of Twitter as a replacement for the Institute of Scientific Information's various citation analytics efforts, all mired back in the Industrial Era.
