Recently a few people have blamed Obama for his lack of leadership and ability of breaking short lived promises. Critics mostly point financial and health care issues as a result of his political failure. Truth is the Bailout of 08, was a mixture of wild capitalism, corporate decision makers, and no government regulations. Thanks to the pressure of some Lobbyist, the Glass Stiegel Act bill, signed by Bush allowed, an early century law during the 30’s depression, to come alive and allow markets to regulate themselves. But the idea comes back to the Reagan era. It could be argued that both republicans and democrats are in fault of the financial problems the U.S. is currently experiencing.
The question is: Does it really matter whether Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, are elected and would it really change anything?
We discovered a brief film clip of one of Tesla's demonstrations. It is embedded in the trailer for Dr. Steven Greer's movie-in-progress Sirius,, beginning at 53 seconds in and lasting until 57 seconds. By rapidly double-clicking the pause button you can watch it in slow motion. No explosive phenomena are apparent to me, but the structure does seem to be made of metal. See if it doesn't remind you of anything.
Click start. Then use mouse to move to 50-53 seconds, see the tesler enery pulverize rocks — very similar to what happened to the World Trade Center towers when combined with controlled demolitions. http://www.sirius.neverendinglight.com/
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:
TechStars, a technology company accelerator in Boulder, Colo., used it to help rename its office
Market research firm Schedulist likewise used VoteIt communities to develop a new product line on behalf of a client
A New Orleans neighborhood association decided how to use $2,000 in extra budget
The screenshot below gives you a sense of how a VoteIt conversation can be structured:
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.”
I have been writing and blogging about “information forensics” for a while now and thus relished Nieman Report’s must-read study on “Truth in the Age of Social Media.” My applied research has specifically been on the use of social media to support humanitarian crisis response (see the multiple links at the end of this blog post). More specifically, my focus has been on crowdsourcing and automating ways to quantify veracity in the social media space. One of the Research & Development projects I am spearheading at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) specifically focuses on this hybrid approach. I plan to blog about this research in the near future but for now wanted to share some of the gems in this superb 72-page Nieman Report.
In the opening piece of the report, Craig Silverman writes that “never before in the history of journalism—or society—have more people and organizations been engaged in fact checking and verification. Never has it been so easy to expose an error, check a fact, crowdsource and bring technology to bear in service of verification.” While social media is new, traditional journalistic skills and values are still highly relevant to verification challenges in the social media space. In fact, some argue that “the business of verifying and debunking content from the public relies far more on journalistic hunches than snazzy technology.”
I disagree. This is not an either/or challenge. Social computing can help every-one, not just journalists, develop and test hunches. Indeed, it is imperative that these tools be in the reach of the general public since a “public with the ability to spot a hoax website, verify a tweet, detect a faked photo, and evaluate sources of information is a more informed public. A public more resistant to untruths and so-called rumor bombs.” This public resistance to untruths can itself be moni-tored and modeled to quantify veracity, as this study shows.
Full post less two graphics below the line. Original post.
Phi Beta Iota: The cost, totalling $12 billion, is as good as a deceptive bureaucracy can provide. Our own estimate based on other sources over time is that it is closer to $15-20 billion, and this is without considering the cost of lost productivity, lost critical access to multiple data bases (the National Counterterrorism Center, for example, should be included in any calculation of the cost of idiocy, along with half or more of the cost of the Department of Homeland Security and half the cost of the Pentagon). Then of course one has the complex cost of dereliction of duty across all the Cabinet functional areas. Good people trapped in a bad system that is totally lacking in both intelligence and integrity.
