The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
97% Owned – Monetary Reform documentary – Directors Cut
97% owned present serious research and verifiable evidence on our economic and financial system. This is the first documentary to tackle this issue from a UK-perspective and explains the inner workings of Central Banks and the Money creation process.
YouTube (2:10:23) 97% Owned – Monetary Reform documentary – Directors Cut
on the necessity of digital humanities centers
In The Chronicle, Williman Pannapacker writes about the importance of receiving digital humanities training.
In The Chronicle, Williman Pannapacker writes about the importance of receiving digital humanities training, which he summarizes in a tweet: no dh, no interview. At the end of this piece he backs away from this provocation, writing “even though I've been excited about the digital humanities since my first visit to the summer institute, I want to urge job candidates: Don't become a DH'er out of fear that you won't get a position if you don't.” And I would certainly agree with that, though it always comes back to this matter of defintion. Even in the narrowest of defintions of DH, the field is beginning to spin out a range of sub-specializations. Pannapacker compares the current interest in DH to the focus on “theory” in the nineties, but mostly as a cautionary tale. Indeed DH has had an ambivalent (at best) relationship with theory, which makes sense in a way as two competing methods, which might become complementary (and may be complementary in some scholars' work) but are largely seen as incongruous at this point. Of course the primary difference between DH and other humanities methods is the infrastructure required to support the endeavor. As Pannapacker points out:
Continue reading “Alex Reid: On the Necessitiy of Digital Humanities”
Social startup VoteIt wants to make decision-making simpler
Ever been in one of those interminable meetings or email conversation loops where everyone has an opinion but no one is willing to make a decision? Then you’ll appreciate a new social platform called VoteIt that aims to make the process of reaching informed consensus easier.
VoteIt is far more than just an online polling platform, like the ones that are found in Yahoo! Groups. By offering structure around the topic at hand, it aims to keep a conversation or debate on topic and relevant — essentially preventing tangential discussions that can derail the decision-making process. It encourages input and new ideas from participants, but only that that are related to the original conversation.
Here are a couple of examples of how the platform has been used:
The screenshot below gives you a sense of how a VoteIt conversation can be structured:
Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change
The purpose of PeaceTXT is to use mobile messaging (SMS) to catalyze behavior change vis-a-vis peace and conflict issues for the purposes of violence prevention. You can read more about our pilot project in Kenya here. We’re hoping to go live next month with some initial trials. In the meantime, we’ve been busy doing research to develop an appropriate monitoring and evaluation strategy. As is often the case in this new innovative initiatives, we have to look to other fields for insights, which is why my colleague Peter van der Windt recently shared this peer-reviewed study entitled: “Mobile Phone Technologies Improve Adherence to Antiretroviral Treatment in a Resource-Limited Setting: A Randomized Con-trolled Trial of Text Message Reminders.”
Full post below the line. Original source.
Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change”
Collective Presencing: A New Human Capacity
This is the first in a series of articles introducing the phenomenon and practice of Collective Presencing, a new capacity evolving in humanity at this time. Great thinkers have foreseen its coming—we recognise it in Aurobindo’s descent of the supramental and Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. But what exactly do those terms mean? Where these gifted individuals intuited and envisioned the birth of this new collective capacity at the dawn of the last century, we are now starting to be able to describe it from experience.
While many might recognise the phenomenon from transpersonal group work and other such practices, so far as we are aware, this is the first attempt to articulate it as a path and a set of capacities that can be intentionally developed…
this is one of the best and finest descriptions I have read in a long time. Thanks Helen…AC
Via Anne Caspari
Learning with ‘e's: Education funnels and webs of learning
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the personalisation of education. The sticking point is that most education is publicly funded, the state has a major stake in how it's conducted, and therefore dictates what should be taught in schools. […]
by Steve Wheeler
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the personalisation of education. The sticking point is that most education is publicly funded, the state has a major stake in how it's conducted, and therefore dictates what should be taught in schools. Because of lack of space, time and resources (you will always have this problem when the state intervenes) 
there is little latitude for personalised approaches and creativity is stifled. Every child gets the same content, and every child is tested in the same, standardised way. The result: children become disenfranchised and demotivated, teachers are exhausted and demoralised, schools are positioned unfairly in league tables, and governments measure success not through human achievement or creativity, but through cold, hard statistics. This is universal education, and if one size does not fit all … tough. Shame no-one has told the powers that be that universal education is unachievable.
Ivan Illich railed against this mindset way back in 1970 in his anarchical, visionary critique of the school system. In Deschooling Society, Illich called for personal learning through informal learning networks, and rejected the funnelling approach of mass, unidirectional, instructivist education systems. More recently, powerful modern day visionaries such as Stephen Heppell and Sir Ken Robinson are saying the same thing. They ask how we can sustain a factory model of education ‘production', where children are ‘batch processed' according to their age groups. It's obvious to any teacher or parent that children develop at different rates, and all have different talents and interests. I suppose we have Jean Piaget and his fellow ‘stage theory' psychologists to thank for that kind of constrained thinking.
Continue reading “Steve Wheeler: Learning with ‘e's – Education funnels and webs of learning”
Big Bat USA Restores DemocracyJoe Trippi, Zephyr Teachout and a handful of others — and the Deaniacs, made history with the BigBat fund-raising tool. However, it was a one-way channel and it did not do crowd-sourcing, deliberative democracy, or comprehensive constant auditing of real decisions.
I ran for President briefly as an accepted Reform Party candidate, listed at Politics1, with opinions summarized at On the Issues. I ran for two reasons: to put all the good ideas from across a wide range of non-partisan / transpartisan minds in one place (http://bigbatusa.org), and to be able, as a presidential candidate, to reach out to all the other presidential candidates to propose a unified demand for an Electoral Reform Summit and an Electoral Reform Act of 2012 that trashes the two-party tyranny, levels the playing field IN TIME FOR NOVEMBER 2012.
If we can get 1 million, then 10 million, then 100 million citizens to agree to donate $10 each, we can restore democracy and create a Smart Nation – Panarchy.
Submit the First Proposal Visit Noodlecrumbs (Home Page)
Phi Beta Iota: This is an achievable idea, it just needs a torched soccer-mom on the steps of Capitol Hill, with CNN coverage, to get going. Or any of the veterans that commit suicide, 18 daily, doing so on the steps of Capitol Hill where it cannot be hushed up as was the veteran who torched himself on the steps of the Courthouse in New Hampshire.
See Also:
