Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

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Patrick Meier: Data Mining Wikipedia in Real Time for Disaster Response [or Any Current Event]

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Geospatial, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Data Mining Wikipedia in Real Time for Disaster Response

My colleague Fernando Diaz has continued working on an interesting Wikipedia project since he first discussed the idea with me last year. Since Wikipedia is increasingly used to crowdsource live reports on breaking news such as sudden-onset humanitarian crisis and disasters, why not mine these pages for structured information relevant to humanitarian response professionals?

In computing-speak, Sequential Update Summarization is a task that generates useful, new and timely sentence-length updates about a developing event such as a disaster. In contrast, Value Tracking tracks the value of important event-related attributes such as fatalities and financial impact. Fernando and his colleagues will be using both approaches to mine and analyze Wikipedia pages in real time. Other attributes worth tracking include injuries, number of displaced individuals, infrastructure damage and perhaps disease outbreaks. Pictures of the disaster uploaded to a given Wikipedia page may also be of interest to humanitarians, along with meta-data such as the number of edits made to a page per minute or hour and the number of unique editors.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Fernando and his colleagues have recently launched this tech challenge to apply these two advanced computing techniques to disaster response based on crowdsourced Wikipedia articles. The challenge is part of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), which is being held in Maryland this November. As part of this applied research and prototyping challenge, Fernando et al. plan to use the resulting summarization and value tracking from Wikipedia to verify related  crisis information shared on social media. Needless to say, I’m really excited about the potential. So Fernando and I are exploring ways to ensure that the results of this challenge are appropriately transferred to the humanitarian community. Stay tuned for updates. 

See also: Web App Tracks Breaking News Using Wikipedia Edits [Link]

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Rickard Falkvinge: Is Bitcoin a Threat to US National Security?

Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard Falkvinge

Can Bitcoin Bring Down (What's Left Of) the US Economy?

Swarm Economy:  Bitcoin represents a significant threat to the currency domination of the USA, which is the only thing propping up the nation’s status as a worldwide superpower. Following the USA’s defaulting on all its international loans on August 15, 1971, the US trade balance has been maintained using a combination of military threats and telling people to buy US dollars just to fund the ongoing consumption of the USA. Where other world currencies have failed to challenge the USD, and therefore this mechanism of maintaining US economic dominance, bitcoin may succeed.

EXTRACT

What would happen if the US were one day unable to continue its overspending? We would see a mighty crash of the global economy, but more importantly, the US would come down in a Soviet-style collapse, only much worse due to structural differences. (To understand these differences, consider the fact that public transport kept running through the Soviet collapse, and that most families were well-prepared for food shortages. In the US, you would instead have people stranded in suburbs with no fuel, food, or medicine – only lots of weapons and ammo. See Orlov’s collapse gap for more on this structural difference.)

Enter bitcoin, which can break the cycle of borrowing and overspending.

As we observed, the key reason that people are forced to buy US Dollars today is that it’s the international mechanism of exchange of value. If you want a gadgetoid from China or India, you need to first buy US dollars, and then exchange the US Dollars for the gadgetoid. But as we have seen, bitcoin far outshines the US Dollar in every aspect as a value token for international trade. Using bitcoin is cheaper, easier, and much much faster than today’s international systems for transfer of value.

Pretty much everybody I’ve spoken to who is involved in international trade would switch to a bitcoin-like system in a heartbeat if they were able to, venting years of built-up frustration with the legacy banking system (which uses the USD). If that happens, the US won’t be able to find buyers for its newly-printed money that keeps its economy propped up (and its military funded).

If the cycle of dollar lock-in breaks, the United States of America comes crashing down. Hard. It would seem inevitable at this point, and bitcoin may be the one mechanism that breaks the cycle.

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Worth a Look: 15-17 December 2013 New York City Global Summit introducing the Reclaim Movement and the Open Source Imperative

#OSE Open Source Everything, Worth A Look

global summitIn the new global economy, innovation happens in diverse sectors.

More than an event, The Global Summit is a Catalyst for Collaboration throughout the Year.

The Global Summit series is a citizen-driven solution-making forum crowd-sourcing the most effective social and technological innovations for a sustainable future – an opportunity to create rippling social and economic impact.

Facilitated by US 501c3 tax-exempt organization, Empowerment WORKS (EW) since 2007, The Global Summit (TGS) was launched in San Francisco, CA in 2008. Uniting people hands-on, and online in shaping solutions to the issues that most affect them, The Global Summit advances a whole system approach to social, economic and environmental change.

The Global Summit

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Patrick Meier: Could Lonely Planet Render World Bank Projects More Transparent?

Access, Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Innovation, Resilience
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Could Lonely Planet Render World Bank Projects More Transparent?

Posted on June 3, 2013 | 5 Comments

That was the unexpected question that my World Bank colleague Johannes Kiess asked me the other day. I was immediately intrigued. So I did some preliminary research and offered to write up a blog post on the idea to solicit some early feedback. According to recent statistics, international tourist arrivals numbered over 1 billion in 2012 alone. Of this population, the demographic that Johannes is interested in comprises those intrepid and socially-conscious backpackers who travel beyond the capitals of developing countries. Perhaps the time is ripe for a new form of tourism: Tourism for Social Good.

There may be a real opportunity to engage a large crowd because travelers—and in particular the backpacker type—are smartphone savvy, have time on their hands, want to do something meaningful, are eager to get off the beaten track and explore new spaces where others do not typically trek. Johannes believes this approach could be used to map critical social infrastructure and/or to monitor development projects. Consider a simple smartphone app, perhaps integrated with existing travel guide apps or Tripadvisor. The app would ask travelers to record the quality of the roads they take (with the GPS of their smartphone) and provide feedback on the condition, e.g.,  bumpy, even, etc., every 50 miles or so.

They could be asked to find the nearest hospital and take a geotagged picture—a scavenger hunt for development (as Johannes calls it); Geocaching for Good? Note that governments often do not know exactly where schools, hospitals and roads are located. The app could automatically alert travelers of a nearby development project or road financed by the World Bank or other international donor. Travelers could be prompted to take (automatically geo-tagged) pictures that would then be forwarded to development organizations for subsequent visual analysis (which could easily be carried out using microtasking). Perhaps a very simple, 30-second, multiple-choice survey could even be presented to travelers who pass by certain donor-funded development projects. For quality control purposes, these pictures and surveys could easily be triangulated. Simple gamification features could also be added to the app; travelers could gain points for social good tourism—collect 100 points and get your next Lonely Planet guide for free? Perhaps if you’re the first person to record a road within the app, then it could be named after you (of course with a notation of the official name). Even Photosynth could be used to create panoramas of visual evidence.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Could Lonely Planet Render World Bank Projects More Transparent?”

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Open Source Hardware: Document the Project from Day One

Hardware
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Why you should document your Open Source Hardware project:

This specific moment, that moment when you start working on the refinements of a product to create the second version, could be a great moment to document your invention.

In fact, when you start again the production process, you already know how to do things, and also, you know what are the most complicated moments in the building process and you could leverage on this information to create compelling guidelines for folks interested in replication.

Via Open Electronics.

Continue reading “Open Source Hardware: Document the Project from Day One”

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Koko: Alternative View Calling for a New World Order Based on Water, Castrated Bankers, and Death Sentence for Politicians Betraying the Public Trust

Cultural Intelligence, Culture
Koko
Koko

Heard in the jungle….

Is it Time for a New World Order?

The Old World Order is Based on

1) Oil
2) Aviation
3) Banks that Steal Money from it's Customers
3) Religion that is based on Lies
4) The Occult Dictatorship of the 1% over the 99%
5) Politicians that are not responsible of their actions and act like Puppets for the Evil Cabal
6) Stock Markets that are Manipulated on a Daily Basis by the chosen People.
7) Slavery and Depression

The New World Order should be based on

1) Water as the only Source of Energy
2) A Global Network of Zero Emission Hypersonic Trains
3) Bankers that are castrated
4) The 1% taken all their Money and Land and give it to the 99% with the emphasis on overproduction of Food and cleaning up this Planet
5) Politicians that pay with all their belongings and even with their Life if they lead us into Wars that are unjustified
6) Closing of all Stock Markets as they are only there to Manipulate the Masses
7) Individual Rights, Right of self Rule and Freedom.

The New World Order is coming, make no mistake.
But right now we can shape it the way we want/
How it will look like is up to us.
Oppose any Dictatorship I say!