In The Chronicle, Williman Pannapacker writes about the importance of receiving digital humanities training.
In The Chronicle, Williman Pannapacker writes about the importance of receiving digital humanities training, which he summarizes in a tweet: no dh, no interview. At the end of this piece he backs away from this provocation, writing “even though I've been excited about the digital humanities since my first visit to the summer institute, I want to urge job candidates: Don't become a DH'er out of fear that you won't get a position if you don't.” And I would certainly agree with that, though it always comes back to this matter of defintion. Even in the narrowest of defintions of DH, the field is beginning to spin out a range of sub-specializations. Pannapacker compares the current interest in DH to the focus on “theory” in the nineties, but mostly as a cautionary tale. Indeed DH has had an ambivalent (at best) relationship with theory, which makes sense in a way as two competing methods, which might become complementary (and may be complementary in some scholars' work) but are largely seen as incongruous at this point. Of course the primary difference between DH and other humanities methods is the infrastructure required to support the endeavor. As Pannapacker points out:
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?
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.
Joe Trippi, Zephyr Teachout and a handful of others — and the Deaniacs, made history with the BigBat fund-raising tool. However, it was a one-way channel and it did not do crowd-sourcing, deliberative democracy, or comprehensive constant auditing of real decisions.
I ran for President briefly as an accepted Reform Party candidate, listed at Politics1, with opinions summarized at On the Issues. I ran for two reasons: to put all the good ideas from across a wide range of non-partisan / transpartisan minds in one place (http://bigbatusa.org), and to be able, as a presidential candidate, to reach out to all the other presidential candidates to propose a unified demand for an Electoral Reform Summit and an Electoral Reform Act of 2012 that trashes the two-party tyranny, levels the playing field IN TIME FOR NOVEMBER 2012.
If we can get 1 million, then 10 million, then 100 million citizens to agree to donate $10 each, we can restore democracy and create a Smart Nation – Panarchy.
Phi Beta Iota: This is an achievable idea, it just needs a torched soccer-mom on the steps of Capitol Hill, with CNN coverage, to get going. Or any of the veterans that commit suicide, 18 daily, doing so on the steps of Capitol Hill where it cannot be hushed up as was the veteran who torched himself on the steps of the Courthouse in New Hampshire.
This new book, Human Rights and Information Communication Technologies: Trends and Consequences of Use, promises to be a valuable resource to both practitioners and academics interested in leveraging new information & communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of human rights work. I had the distinct pleasure of co-authoring a chapter for this book with my good colleague and friend Jessica Heinzelman. We focused specifically on the use of crowdsourcing and ICTs for information collection and verification. Below is the Abstract & Introduction for our chapter.
Abstract
Accurate information is a foundational element of human rights work. Collecting and presenting factual evidence of violations is critical to the success of advocacy activities and the reputation of organizations reporting on abuses. To ensure credibility, human rights monitoring has historically been conducted through highly controlled organizational structures that face mounting challenges in terms of capacity, cost and access. The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) provide new opportunities to overcome some of these challenges through crowdsourcing. At the same time, however, crowdsourcing raises new challenges of verification and information overload that have made human rights professionals skeptical of their utility. This chapter explores whether the efficiencies gained through an open call for monitoring and reporting abuses provides a net gain for human rights monitoring and analyzes the opportunities and challenges that new and traditional methods pose for verifying crowdsourced human rights reporting.
An important and informative Tony Capaccio article (from Bloomberg; shown below) came out today. It summarizes (accurately) CBO's analysis of the budget effects of sequester: if sequester were to occur, the Pentagon's “base” (non-war) budget would be $469 billion for 2013. This is slightly above what was spent in 2006, and it is “larger than the average base budget during [the Reagan era of] the 1980s.” (See page vi and the table on page 11 of the attached.)
This amount is also significantly more than the Pentagon received, on average, during the Cold War, and it is multiples of the defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea–combined.
This $469 billion is the same amount that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta calls “doomsday,” that House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) calls a “catastrophe” and that others, both Democrats and Republicans, want to rescue the Pentagon from–by adding money above the $469 billion level.
These same people will likely argue that this new CBO report is a reason to spend more money, not less. The new report, “Long-Term Implications of the 2013 Future Years Defense Program,” is CBO's annual update of its re-estimate of what it would actually cost to implement the Pentagon's programs in the “FYDP,” in this case the 2013-2017 version. Basically, like its previous iterations, CBO says DOD would need $53 billion more than it received in 2012 for each of the next five years to accuratey fund all its programs, as currently planned and implemented.
Ergo, the spending advocates will argue DOD needs more money, not less. Their logic is that nothing in the Pentagon should change–other than the amount of money it receives.
How can it be that more money than Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush spent on defense, tens of billions more than spent all through the Cold War and multiples of what any conceivable combination of opponents spend on defense are all a catastrophe for the Pentagon?
Such questions are prompted by Tony Capaccio's article and the new CBO report.
When the House of Representatives debates the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for FY 2013 next week, will these basic questions to be asked, or will there be only more hysteria and table pounding for more money?
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government continues to lack intelligence and integrity on the fundamentals. The truth about defense spending, defense abuse of defense personnel, and defense corruption across all acquisition programs from small arms to big ships, is relatively easy to document–what is less easy is to get anyone to pay attention to the truth–the truth today lacks a broad constituency.
Phi Beta Iota: they have been scorned out of existing twice now, but evidently Mike Bloomberg and his friends have not given up kludging together three failures to try to make lemonade, all three corrupt to the bone:
Independent Voters / Jackie Salit, well-funded stalking horse for Bloomberg, does not play well with others and specifically ignores both grass-root Independents and the six small parties.
Americans Elect, despite a great deal of money, could not overcome the abject obviousness of its internal corruption and the abysmal even shocking ineptitude of its web design and content management teams.
No Labels — the cartoon says it all. These people really do not “get” the travesty of their dismissal of the six small parties that have been blocked from ballot access, or the shallowness of their general intellect. No Labels, No Brains, No Balls.
Below the line is the email that went out across the land today. What is shocking is the number of progressives angry at Obama who really think No Labels might be on to something. For an example of what an honest viable alternative to the two-party tyranny might look like, see We the People Reform Coalition. We can still save 2012, but it will require organized people, not organized false flag money.
ON A CONSTRUCTIVE NOTE: If NO LABELS and Americans Elect would come together to sponsor an Electoral Reform Summit in early September 2012, they could restore the integrity of America. They are probably not capable of making that ethical and intellectual leap, but if they did, they would in one instant achieve their alleged goals dishonored behind closed doors, and open the way for the Second Republic. Add the six small parties, Occupy and the Tea Party and the Independents without Jackie Salit playing games, and it is “game over.” There is NOTHING stopping the election of a coalition cabinet and a reform ticket in November 2012 except a lack of FOCUS by all those who share the same desire: to create a prosperous America at peace, to restore America the Beautiful. We are the passive silent majority at this time. We need to be the active vocal majority for the next 90 days. 90 days.
