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Cory A. Booker of Newark: Politician From and For the Future? Data-Driven, Interactive, Separating from Party Dogma?

Politics

cary A Politician From the Future

Anand Giridharadas

New York Times, 22 March 2013

Cory A. Booker is hoping to be the next U.S. senator from New Jersey. But the constituency he seems keenest to represent is the future itself.

Perhaps more than any prominent American politician, Mr. Booker — the 43-year-old Democrat and mayor of the rust-coated, luck-starved city of Newark — has cultivated his brand as a leader of, by and for a new era.

He tweets with something approaching the frequency of his own heartbeat, so much that his staff calls Twitter his girlfriend. He meditates. He balances old-school talk of God with new-age ideas of being “open to what the universe brings me.” He champions Big Data and knows how many consumer impressions he got last week. He gushes over what may be called the hipster economy: using technology to rent out bedrooms, borrow vacuum cleaners, share cars and raise seed capital.

Educated at Stanford, Oxford and Yale, Mr. Booker is a model of self-propelled ascent in a postindustrial city where rises like his have grown ever rarer. In conversation, he might cite the writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes; Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction; the business book “Built to Last”; ancient Roman history; and an African proverb about going fast alone but far together. Owing in part to the gap between his own sophistication and the travails of the city he has led since 2006, he has endured ceaseless speculation about whether Newark is merely a steppingstone.

Now, as he turns his attention to a U.S. Senate race in 2014, the more interesting question may be whether a self-styled politician from the future can make it to the Washington of right now — and what a city of marble, pearls and power ties might make of him.

Even as the Republican Party undergoes a time of soul-searching, self-flagellation and contestation, Mr. Booker’s emergence hints at schisms to come among Democrats. He represents the Googly-Facebookish wing of the party — liberal as ever in its views on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion rights, but more libertarian than the old guard on economics, more trusting of markets than unions to improve lives, more reliant on the business jargon of “synergy” and “scale” than the language of activism and justice.

Mr. Booker sounds like a new kind of Democrat, for example, when he says that running Newark has made him trust data more than his own liberal principles on the issue of reducing gun violence.

Read rest of article.

Patrick Meier: GeoFeedia: Ready for Digital Disaster Response

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

GeoFeedia: Ready for Digital Disaster Response

GeoFeedia was not originally designed to support humanitarian operations. But last year’s blog post on the potential of GeoFeedia for crisis mapping caught the interest of CEO Phil Harris. So he kindly granted the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) free access to the platform. In return, we provided his team with feedback on what features (listed here) would make GeoFeedia more useful for digital disaster response. This was back in summer 2012. I recently learned that they’ve been quite busy since. Indeed, I had the distinct pleasure of sharing the stage with Phil and his team at this superb conference on social media for emergency management. After listening to their talk, I realized it was high time to publish an update on GeoFeedia, especially since we had used the tool just two months earlier in response to Typhoon Pablo, one of the worst disasters to hit the Philippines in the past 100 years.

Read full article with graphics.

Michel Bauwens: Peer Governance and Wikipedia (interview with Bauwens & Bruns)

P2P / Panarchy
Michel Bauwens
Michel Bauwens

Peer Governance and Wikipedia (interview with Bauwens & Bruns)

This week the interviews with experts and (ex-)Wikipedians, on which parts of my paper “Peer Governance and Wikipedia: Identifying and Understanding the Problems of Wikipedia’s Governance (2009)” were based, are going to be presented in a series of separate posts. This first post contains the short interviews with Michel Bauwens and Axel Bruns who are answering the same questions.

Read full interview.

Phi Beta Iota:  Strongly recommended.  Wikipedia lacks integrity.  It has been taken over by various cabals including Zionists, the various industrial complexes, and our very own CIA.  Wikipedia is a classic example of a “controlled” asset used to misinform the public at great convenience.  Across the sciences and the humanities, across most public issue areas, and certainly with respect to Open Source Intelligence, WIkipedia is a disinformation source that is very convenient for the loosely educated to embrace.  It is a form of “soft” propaganda and therefore toxic.

Rickard Falkvinge: Does Freedom of Speech Require a Technical Resilience Solution Impervious to Government Corruption?

#OSE Open Source Everything

Rickard Falkvinge
Rickard Falkvinge

The Pirate Bay Is A Trailblazer In Technical Resilience

Infrastructure:  The Pirate Bay is a site that has remained online for ten years come this summer, despite attempts from almost every Ancient-Power-That-Be to shut it down. It has often been said that The Pirate Bay hasn’t evolved much at all in the past five years; I disagree, it has adapted and overcome everything thrown in its path. There may soon come a time when we need to learn from its experiences in resilience just to safeguard freedom of speech.

The Pirate Bay went through a user-interface redesign some time late 2005 or early 2006, when it went multilingual, and has remained fairly constant since then. The only other site in the world’s top 100 that has remained similarly consistent could possibly be Wikipedia; for every other site, it’s a necessity to evolve, modernize, and meet new user demands.

It is not without irony that Hollywood’s nemesis number one in distribution technology hasn’t innovated in user experience in almost ten years, and still outcompetes the copyright industry hands down when it comes to who provides better service.

But I would argue that The Pirate Bay has been remarkably innovative, just not in the user experience field – a lot of other sites are blazing that trail. Rather, The Pirate Bay has been a trailblazer in resilience. After all, a number of bought-and-paid-for or just plain misguided legislatures and courts have tried to eradicate the site, and yet, it still stands untouched.

As the freedom-of-speech wars escalate, we will need to start taking cues from what The Pirate Bay has learned in the art of staying online, and that time may be approaching fast. This was never a war over the copyright monopoly; it was a war over the concept of the letter as such, over the right to communicate in private, over the right to publish and broadcast ideas that somebody else wouldn’t like the world to see or hear.

For this is what we see – the techniques originally used to attempt silencing The Pirate Bay have already come to be used against activists trying to highlight abuse of power, and corporations and others are trying the might-makes-right approach. You have the example with Greenpeace’s protest site being silenced in the exact same way by an oil company, just to take one example among many.

There is the idea among people with money and power that they have the right to control what other people can say about them. Unfortunately, they are starting to enforce that idea with what amounts to mafia tactics, using the threat of courtrooms as their battlefield, and using intimidation to squelch dissent. (The Pirate Bay themselves were victims of law in this very manner.)

As this war on freedom of speech escalates, we would do well to study the methods for staying online that The Pirate Bay has pioneered.

SmartPlanet: Japan discovers massive rare earth deposit

SmartPlanet

smartplanet logoJapan discovers massive rare earth deposit

For the second time this month, Japan has made an important natural resource discovery.

Japanese researchers say they have found a massive rare earth deposit on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The deposit, according to AFP, is 20 to 30 times more concentrated than Chinese mines, the world’s largest rare earth supplier.

Why is this important? For one, these precious metals are used in high-tech manufacturing. The computer or phone you’re reading this from is brought to you by rare earth metals. The other major reason is that this find could break up China’s rare earth monopoly. It controls about 90 percent of the global supply and has been somewhat of a rare earth bully, banning exports as it pleases. (Though those restrictions have led to industry innovations.)

The big question will be if Japan can find a cost-effective way of extracting the minerals that are nearly 20,000 feet below the surface of the ocean. If it figures out that puzzle, there are an estimated 6.8 million tonnes of rare earth materials waiting on the seabed — that’s equal to 230 years of rare earth use in Japan.