The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Small-town mayors: the cutting edge of climate action
How two mayors of small towns in right-wing America are showing the way to energy and climate progress: through local action.
By Chris Nelder
IBM uses cell phone data to redraw African bus routes
With data from thousands of cell phones, IBM is creating a better commute.
By Tyler Falk
The Future of Learning — the Death of Rote Education
Ericsson put together an inspiring 20-minute video promoting its “Networked Society” and “Future of Learning” movements. It’s worth watching whether or not you work in education because it makes some poignant statements about issues that affect our society as a whole.
Here are 5 quick take-aways:
1) Instead of molding students to fit into the educational system, we should be adapting systems to address the different needs of students.
2) The concept of school used to be synonymous with access to information, now they are no longer the same thing.
3) Answers are everywhere, especially online. So, a teacher’s job is to point growing minds towards the right questions. We should teach people to solve interesting problems, not to memorize answers to problems we’ve already solved.
4) Nobody takes standardized tests for a living. Learning should prepare you to cope with life’s surprises, but traditional education prepares you to cope with certainty. There is no certainty.
5) There is no virtual substitute for universities. They provide an essential space in which teachers and students learn to solve problems, debate issues, and develop passions together. However, online learning and technology are not only improving the traditional university experience, they are providing high quality education to those who did not have access to it before. On a global level.
The Open Source Project Lifecycle, Challenges and Opportunties
Paula Hunter on Apr 30, 2013
Presented at OBC2013, San Francisco
#Bitcoin as a Publishing System: From Wikileaks to Pedophile Links
Bitcoin is an open source software system. That means nobody owns it.
Up until now, it's been used as a decentralized currency system.
Bitcoin makes it possible to make non-reversible decentralized transactions on a global scale.
It's visibility as a currency has been good for bitcoin. Speculation has driven up the price of bitcoin to a market cap over $1 billion.
That's attracted lots of use and investment activity (mostly in mining), which has grown bitcoin much faster than it would have grown otherwise.
However, one thing that most people don't understand: bitcoin is more than just a currency.
NOTE: Actually, it's more of a fungible share of ownership in the system than a pure currency, as you will see.
Firstly, it's the first system to deploy that solves the distributed consensus problem in computing (a hard problem). That means a clone of the system has many potential uses. For example, it could be used a global reputation system (as in, everyone on the system says this person has the good reputation they claim).
It also some uses in its current form that most people don't know. For example, it has a limited capability to publish information. It was built into the system by the original designer, who left some notes on what the system was originally designed to do.
That publishing capability was put into use a couple of days ago when someone publish 2.5 MB of Wikileaks cables in the bitcoin blockchain. It cost a bit of money (about $500) to accomplish that, but the information that was published is now going to be public forever.
Of course, it didn't take long for someone to up the ante. Someone decided to publish links to pedophile links in the blockchain.
It's going to be interesting to see how Bitcoin responds to this.
Our spending practices, as a country, are completely upside down. We spend endless billions on war instead of what it will take to keep the U.S. functioning as a country, as this report makes clear. Think about what is being said here, just in reference to your own area.
Our Infrastructure Isn’t Ready for Climate Change
ED MAURER and EUGENE CORDERO – Market Watch
This is an excellent essay on the power of data. Big data. It describes the first stages of the emerging Metaview Trend, which is going to change our lives. And has the potential to recreate democracy in an electronic age.
The Rise of Big Data
KENNETH NEIL CUKIER and VIKTOR MAYER-SCHOENBERGER, Data Editor of The Economist and Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford U. – Foreign Affairs
Micro Manufacturing, Third Wave Style…Perfect for Worker Coops?
In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits
By Chris Anderson
The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories.
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In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.
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Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.
This story is about the next 10 years.
Social Media and the Emergence of Open-Source Geospatial Intelligence
We have just finished a paper entitled ‘Social Media and the Emergence of Open-Source Geospatial Intelligence' for Socio-Cultural Dynamics and Global Security. For those interested below is the abstract:
The emergence of social media has provided the public with an effective and irrepressible real-time mechanism to broadcast information. The great popularity of platforms such as twitter and YouTube, and the substantial amount of content that is communicated through them are making social media an essential component of open-source intelligence. The information communicated through such feeds conveys the interests and opinions of individuals, and reveals links and the complex structure of social networks.
However, this information is only partially exploited if one does not consider its geographical aspect. Indeed, social media feeds more often than not have some sort of geographic content, as they may communicate the location from where a particular report is contributed, the geolocation of an image, or they may refer to a specific sociocultural hotspot. By harvesting this geographic content from social media feeds we can transfer the extracted knowledge from the amorphous cyberspace to the geographic space, and gain a unique understanding of the human lansdscape, its structure and organization, and its evolution over time. This new-found opportunity signals the emergence of open-source geospatial intelligence, whereby social media contributions can be analyzed and mined to gain unparalleled situational awareness. In this paper we showcase a number of sample applications that highlight the capabilities of harvesting geospatial intelligence from social media feeds, focusing particularly on twitter as a representative data source.
