The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture, and Politics
Our mono-cultural worldview is literally preventing us from understanding the deeper causes of our multiple crises. Author Andreas Weber, in the below essay, gives us a glimpse of the different scientific paradigm now coming into focus. He calls it “Enlivenment,” because the new sciences are revealing organisms to be sentient, more-than-physical creatures that have subjective experiences and produce sense.
New! Humanitarian Computing Library
The field of “Humanitarian Computing” applies Human Computing and Machine Computing to address major information-based challengers in the humanitarian space. Human Computing refers to crowdsourcing and microtasking, which is also referred to as crowd computing. In contrast, Machine Computing draws on natural language processing and machine learning, amongst other disciplines. The Next Generation Humanitarian Technologies we are prototyping at QCRI are powered by Humanitarian Computing research and development (R&D).
My QCRI colleagues and I just launched the first ever Humanitarian Computing Library which is publicly available here. The purpose of this library, or wiki, is to consolidate existing and future research that relate to Humanitarian Computing in order to support the development of next generation humanitarian tech. The repository currently holds over 500 publications that span topics such as Crisis Management, Trust and Security, Software and Tools, Geographical Analysis and Crowdsourcing. These publications are largely drawn from (but not limited to) peer-reviewed papers submitted at leading conferences around the world. We invite you to add your own research on humanitarian computing to this growing collection of resources.
Many thanks to my colleague ChaTo (project lead) and QCRI interns Rahma and Nada from Qatar University for spearheading this important project. And a special mention to student Rachid who also helped.
In MIT Technology Review
Introduction
For our 13th annual celebration of people who are driving the next generation of technological breakthroughs, we’re presenting the stories in a new way. We’ve grouped them by categories that reflect the variety of approaches that people can take to solving big problems. The Inventors, for instance, are creating new technologies. The Entrepreneurs are turning technologies into viable businesses. The Visionaries are anticipating how technologies can make life better, while Humanitarians are concentrating on expanding opportunities. And the Pioneers are exploring new frontiers, setting the stage for future innovations.
This project takes months of effort. It begins with nominations from the public and MIT Technology Review editors. People who have been selected by our publishing partners as local Innovators Under 35 in several regions worldwide are also considered. The editors go through the hundreds of candidates and select fewer than 100 finalists, all of whom will be younger than 35 on October 1. A panel of judges rates the finalists on the originality and impact of their work. Finally, the editors take the judges’ scores into account to select the group.
See Especially:
Kira Radinsky: Web Prophen Maps the Past to Predict the Future
Here's an inspiring and insightful article by Sally Whiting on ContentsMagazine analyzing the role of the archivist and the traits and responsibilities that make his work so valuable to content producers.
She writes: “Applying archival principles to content strategy makes for solid content—I can demonstrate this, and I exercise it in my work.”
As content curators will increasingly need to learn more about archiving, organizing and preserving what they curate, this article provides an inspiring set of considerations about the key value of context and provenance.
In addition she poses some important questions about what could actually be done by better curating our own content archives:
“Archives are accustomed to a passive role, asking reflectively what their patrons want to find.
As they work to help researchers tell their stories, it’s easy for archives to forget to keep shaping their own.”
Inspiring. Rightful. 8/10
Digital Archives & the Content Strategist
by Sally Whiting for Issue № 5
Full article: http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/digital-archives-the-content-strategist/
(Image credit: girl picking from the books – Shutterstock)
Big Data, Disaster Resilience and Lord of the Rings
The Shire is a local community of Hobbits seemingly disconnected from the systemic changes taking place in Middle Earth. They are a quiet, self-sufficient community with high levels of social capital. Hobbits are not interested in “Big Data”; their world is populated by “Small Data” and gentle action. This doesn’t stop the “Eye of Sauron” from sensing this small harmless hamlet, however. During Gandalf’s visit, the Hobbits learn that all is not well in the world outside the Shire. The changing climate, deforestation and land degradation is wholly unnatural and ultimately threatens their own way of life.
. . . . .
There’s been push-back of late against Big Data, with many promoting the notion of Small Data. “For many problems and questions, small data in itself is enough” (1). Yes, for specific problems: locally disconnected problems. But we live in an increasingly interdependent and connected world with coupled systems that run the risk of experiencing synchronous failure and collapse. Our sensors cannot be purely local since the resilience of our communities is no longer mostly place-based. This is where the rings come in.
Replicant Hopes to Free Mobile from the Tyranny of Proprietary Software
August 27, 2013
Citing freedom and security concerns, the makers of Replicant are calling for donations, we learn from “Fundraising a Fully Free Fork of Android” at Boing Boing. The project hopes to give us all the choice to run our Android-based mobile devices entirely upon free software.
But wait, you ask, isn’t Android is already open source? Well, most of it, but a few “key non-free parts” keep our Android devices tethered to proprietary programs. Such parts, they say, include the layer that communicates with hardware; yes, that would be pretty important.
Also of concern to Replicant developers are the pre-loaded applications that some of us call “bloatware,” but upon which many users have come to rely. The team plans to develop free software that provides the same functionality. (I hope they also include the option to delete applications without them returning uninvited. That would be a nice change.) Furthermore, they have set up rival to the Google Play store, their app repository called F-Droid. That repository, the article notes, works with all Android-based systems.
The write-up summarizes:
“Mobile operating systems distributed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google all require you to use proprietary software. Even one such program in a phone’s application space is enough to threaten our freedom and security — it only takes one open backdoor to gain access. We are proud to support the Replicant project to help users escape the proprietary restrictions imposed by the current major smartphone vendors. There will still be problems remaining to solve, like the proprietary radio firmware and the common practice of locking down phones, but Replicant is a major part of the solution.”
Replicant is underpinned by copyrighted software that has been released under an assortment of free licenses, which their site links to here. This is an interesting initiative, and we have a couple of questions should it be successful: Will Google’s mobile search revenues come under increased pressure? What happens if Samsung or the Chinese mobile manufacturers jump on this variant of Android? We shall see.
Cynthia Murrell, August 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Networking Things and Creators in Open Source Hardware
As many of you know, just few months I had the chance to co-host the first Open Source Hardware Documentation jam in New York. It was an event dedicated to grow more interest from the Open Source Hardware community and the community at large to the topic of documentation, especially thinking about how this enables replication, reuse, integration among the different projects around.
The event has been reported here if you’re interested to the results (a couple of reports here http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/open-source-hardware-documentation-jam-a-report/ and here http://www.oshwa.org/2013/05/16/oshw-doc-jam-followups-releasing-the-format-to-the-community/)
Few days ago, as I was browsing, I discovered, thanks to Alessandro Ranelluci who posted it on the Facebook wall of the italian fabber community, that Gary Hodgson, a very active british developer and hacker, now living in Germany, is working on a very interesting project that deserves more attention and contribution. So I decided to interview Gary to introduce you to the Thing Tracker Network.
