Superb with Very Intelligent Conclusion, June 22, 2008
Gottfried Vossen; Stephan Hagemann
I borrowed this book from someone who knows a great deal about web directions, and I found it to be very very good. Although the authors do not reflect the tsunamis being created by Doug Englebart (Open hypertextdocument system or OHS) and Pierre Levy (Information Economy Meta Language or IEML), this is a very elegantly organized and presented book.
It forced me to question my here-to-fore blind expectations with respect to the Semantic Web where in practice the theory of seamless integration has not been realized. I was especially taken with the author's conclusion that we must continue to develop applications for smallish communities of practice where the human brain continues to be the primary searcher, sorter, and valuation or linkage agent.
Jim Bamford's book on the National Security Agency (NSA), Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, concludes that one day NSA may–after spending hundreds of billions more of our hard-earned wages, create the ultimate computer–one weighing very little, running on virtually no energy, and able to do petaflop calculations per second: THE HUMAN BRAIN.
I am among a handful of co-founders of the Earth Intelligence Network, and I will conclude this very favorable review with my opinion: the World Brain is emergent, and it is the end-users, as the co-authorrs of this book conclude, that will continue to be the primary content creators, content sharers, and content valuators.
As soon as China and India figure out they can create infinite wealth by handing out free cells phones and offering their respective 1.5 billion poor free information and education “one cell call at a time,” it will be game over for both American and European digital ambitions.
Machine learning has been over-hyped since the 1980's, and while I respect the computational mathematics being pioneered by Google, and various deep web or meta web endeavors, the reality is that search today stinks, yielding less than 2% of relevant information. I don't expect that to be resolved anytime soon. What I *do* expect is for humans empowered by relatively simple tools, to figure out how to do a national referendum from neighbood to nation=state, in 24 hours, and how to mobilize a public cabinet that posts a sensible slate of policies backed up by a balanced budget.
I've been thinking about publishing a book on health intelligence, and borrowed this from a colleague.
My contribution will be the image I created while thinking about what the book should look like–the inner square was co-created with another person.
This book can be summarized with three words: *corruption* killed health; *transparency* can heal us; and only we, the *patients* (or victims) can come together to demand resolution.
In the comment, where Amazon does allow URLs, I am pointing to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report online, which documents 50% of all health costs as waste.
The author ends with very specific recommendations that are excellent as far as they go, but that ignore the 80% of solutions that are outside the existing hospital-pharmaceutical complex. The Japanese have started weighing and measuring their population–a population's health and vitality is the single greatest contributor to national power and prosperity, ergo, we need a “360” approach to national health, and I try to depict that in the image above.
I totally disagree with the reviewers that pontificate against this book. It is not a techno-geek book, or a philosophy book, it is simply a common sense overview that I personally consider to be educated, helpful to the point of essential. At $16, with the Amazon discount, this book is a bargain.
I started with the index, and immediately discovered Meta-Data had 18 lines.
The book opens with examples from Staples (“hacking the physical”) to Apple iTunes (end of bundling) and I am immediately charmed by the combination of an end to fraudulent store organization (Giant supermarket moves everything from one week to the next to force searching which increases impulse buying) and an increase in focus on serving the individual rather than serving up a “one size fits all” solution. Separately I am looking at Chinese medicine for a health intelligence book, and this resonates.
Early on one sees the author agreeing with Jean Francois Noubel (the end of the pyramidal organization) and Jim Rough (rise of the circle of citizen wisdom)–I myself enraged the secret intelligence mandarins by announcing in the 1990's that “in the age of decentralized information central intelligence is an oxymoron.” The author is one of the gurus of what is becoming known as the axis of Cognitive Science and Collective Intelligence (the Art), and he and another 54 authors are brought together in the first collective work of its kind, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace which is also free online in full pdf or chapter docs. Disclosure: I published the book–I do not know the author personally, but Jock Gill, a gifted communicator, exposed me to the author's earlier work on Open Spectrum, something that inspired my own informal views on “Open Everything” and unlike most of the other contributors that were identified by Tom Atlee or Mark Tovey (the editor), I personally sought his contribution to the book because of my very high regard for his “take” on all this.
I bought the book as a fan already, but the content easily validates my appreciation The discussion of first order pigeon-holing (the Weberian concept of bureaucracy applies), second order cross referencing (naturally limited and often wrong in early generations–Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal System are toast), versus unlimited tagging, chunking, clustering, socially-informed selection, and other aspects of the power of the collective, are all illuminated by this book.
I am further impressed early on with his stellar discussion of Mortimer Adler and the limitations of alphabetization. I was a penniless graduate student when I discovered the Great Books, and as a young officer, spent my first $700 acquiring a set. The Syntopicon that the author mentions in the book is better understood by the image I introduce above, something I created in 1979, my second of four analytic models (the first was on predicting revolution across all domains).
I have two notes at this point:
1) Truth or what can be known constantly changing, a fixed or slow to adapt “index” process cannot scale or survive.
2) 2008 election is already lost–neither candidate offers us what we deserve: listening instead of stump speeches; appointed cabinet and balanced budget now, as part of the campaign, instead of empty promises; and 24/7 interaction with all 65 political parties, instead of focusing on the one third that is their base and a slice of the middle third.
He emphasizes that knowledge is not top down, and with a tip of the hat to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and also facilitator for the nation-wide network of 27 separatist movements, I also post above an image of Epoch B “bottom up” leadership that none of our world leaders understand.
Page 80, discussion of Ranganathan (India) Colon Classification system impresses me. I think to myself, wow, needs to be integrated into Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language, or IEML.
The middle of the book discusses–engagingly, I feel–how the digital world enables infinite variations in relationships and labels that can in turn create infinite variations of just right, just in time, just enough visualizations.
Crowd tagging leads to sub-set clustering which leads to contextual sense-making.
He spend time on Wikipedia. I admire Jimbo Wales and try to attend the Wikimanias, but I have given up on Wikipedia because in the case of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) page, I had to give up–while the author would have me engage and patiently lead the recalcitrant along (I have 20 years experience with that in the real world) I have come to a different conclusion: I believe that anyone should be allowed to CREATE, but only master moderators should be allowed to destroy.
The summary of the book's message is offered by the author with four concepts:
1) Filter on the way OUT, not in (this is the difference between the read only publishing model, and the read-write Creative Commons model)
2) Put each leaf on as many branches as possible–unlike the physical world, each leaf can have infinite lives
3) Everything is meta data and everything can be a label (he provides a fine discussion of bar codes, RFIDs, and Thinglinks)
4) Give up control. He admires Wikipedia for doing precisely that. When I first started the modern OSINT movement in 1992, I coined the phrase, “Give up control to gain control” meaning that centralized intelligence had to give way to decentralized sharing and sense-making. The spies still don't get it, but public intelligence in the public interest is here to stay. A corollary here is that the best approach is to include all–optimize inclusiveness and diversity; and where there is conflict or disagreement, postpone exclusion or resolution, more data later will make it easier and easier to come back to…
The final section of the book deals with mapping the implicit, mining the clouds of tags, creating an infrastructure of meaning with infinite potential. I have a note: unites the eight tribes of intelligence (governmenbt, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions).
Other flyleaf notes:
+ Stupid works. Keep it simple and let it evolve on its own.
+ Bit by bit, not all at once. Provide for innovation at the intersections and on the margins
+ Kind of and sort of rule, not the black and white that did rule
+ I learn of Valdis Krebs and his concepts of social cartography
+ I am engaged with the discussion of information sprawl and natural typologies
+ The author concludes that the search for knowledge will constantly struggle between the simple and the complex (sources and methods).
+ Going meta is what is so cool about web ecology and evolution.
The author does NOT say this, but I mark his book down as being in favor of the human web of sense-making beating out the semantic web and machine learning schools.
Page 230, this is a quote that really grabs my attention: “It's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individual thinking out-loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.” The rest of this page is equally good.
I am surprised to learn that the author holds a PhD in philosophy, and that he advised Howard Dean. I am not surprised to learn that he has been twice renewed as a fellow at the Berkman Center.
There are many others, most obvious. Please do see the two images I post above–I firmly believe that the last eight years were a gift from heaven, a necessarily catastrophic gutting of our Nation so that we might properly conclude that both political parties stink with corruption, and it is time we put We the People back into the Republic, 24/7. This book is a solid brick in our foundation for understanding why this is both possible, and necessary.
Superb Re-Discovery of Core Knowledge, Presents New Insights,
July 4, 2009
David N. Gibbs
At the age of 56, having been educated in the 1970's when political science created “comparative studies” as a ruse for avoiding field world and foreign language mastery in favor of statistical comparisons from afar, I am now quite accustomed to seeing each generation rediscover core knowledge.
Even more distressing for one who loves books as artifacts of human wisdom, is to see each generation re-discover knowledge known to earlier generations, without citation. Scholarship seems to be on a wheel making little forward progress, at least in the humanities.
This is a fine book. It is exceptional for both its clear-eyed understanding of the combination of evil and banal ignorance that characterizes those in power, whether of one party or another. In the 1970's, for the US Institute of Peace, I wrote that the greatest threat to peace was the cataclysmic separation of those with power from those with knowledge. This book manifests all of that brilliantly.
It is also exceptional in this era for being a clear-eyes appraisal of the evil of military intervention. This again is not new knowledge, but it is helpful to have this generation be reminded.
Great evil has been done “in our name,” for the basest of reasons. I pray that our rising generation of digital literati will not be as ignorant in power as those who now surround world leaders–sychophants, dilitants, and craven opportunists.
Brilliantly Conceived and Executed, Totally Absorbing, July 5, 2008
Helmut K. Anheier
Half the book is text and half superb illustrations and charts.
The publisher has failed to provide a table of contents, the easiest way to make it instantly clear to any prospective purchaser that this book is quite unusual in its scope and weight.
This is the first book in a series, the next two will focus on culture and economy, and then on culture and politics.
Close to 50 contributors, and a process of conferences in advance of the book's preparation, assure the quality and diversity of this offering.
Chapters 1-6 are introductory, each by different authors or pairs of authors, focusing on approaches and developments in the cultural dimension of conflicts and tensions.
Chapters 7-13 discuss different regional realities, including China and how the US cultural wars went global (no focus on the global class war in this book).
Chapters 14-17 discuss tensions; chapters 18 & 19 values, and chapters 20-22 migration into respectively, the USA, Argentina, and Malaysia.
Chapters 23-27 introduce the concept of culture as a tool for preventing and resolving conflict and are followed by a massive resource section, the cultural indicators suite.
My word limit prevents me from doing this book full justice. I hope someone else will provide a good overview and review of the second half of the book where the indicators are developed. While similar to Banks & Textor in the 1970's, and to many of the “State of ….” Graphical and Visual Atlases, I found this book to be completely engrossing and extremely worthwhile. Worth every penny. A signal contribution.
Fifteen Years of Extreme Hacking on the Edge, Under-Priced!, July 19, 2008
Emmanuel Goldstein
I am attending Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in NYC this week-end, and have just spent time with this volume. Unlike the individual issues, all of which I have had in my possession over the years, this volume is HUGE, readable, indexed, and priceless. I mean that–PRICELESS.
The publisher is to be saluted for not only putting a great deal of effort along with the editor, the founder of 2600 Magazine and also of the HOPE conference, for making this volume a true reference work. I was immediately impressed by the selection of “best of the best,” the organization of the material, the index, and the fact that the publisher moved away from the micro-print that was used to keep costs down on the volume of knowledge being transmitted in the individual journal issues, and instead went for a high-end glossy, “just right” white space presentation that should be in every Information Technology library across the country, and is also a collectible for anyone who pretends to know anything at all about information INsecurity.
If you got this far, this lovely volume, easily worth $60, is a real value at the much lower price being offered, and I hope enough people buy it to occasion a reprint or a second volume.
It merits comment that this is not just a volume of hand-picked items from a single journal. The editor and his closest colleagues created a community of over 30,000 hackers (whom I have always said are like astronauts on the edge with the “right stuff”) and this volume LITERALLY represents the 30,000 who were decades ahead of the US Government, which is still–as are corporations and public utilities–largely stupid about information system security, to include our Supervisory Control and Direction (SCADA) systems, all of them on the Internet.
For a really good time on what the Chinese know and can do that we cannot, see my Memorandum, easily found online, <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>. They brought Dick Cheney's plane down over Singapore in Feburary 2007, and when he got off to stretch his legs, told him exactly what they could do, and what the US would not be allowed to do. Thus did the power of the information age move East.
There are two sets of hackers: these, and the ones who came out of the Homebrew Garage Club (Lee Felsenstein, Eric Hughes, etc) and tended to created businesses rather than live free. Bill Gates is certainly in that number, as are Stewart Brand and others. The most famous Free/Open Hacker in the first group is Richard Stahlman, whose book on the origins of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is most recently complemented by Yochai Benkler's book on Wealth of Networks. With a tip of the hat to Nat at O'Reilly, open source software is Darwinism, while malware and proprietary software are Intelligent Design that is not so intelligence. VISTA by Microsoft is the biggest scam in history, for the first time forcing documents to be uniquely tied to the Microsoft operating system and not processable anywhere else. It is time for Microsoft to die, or come to its senses and put its money into F/OSS while monetizing the transactions. Bill Gates has called F/OSS communist. In my view, that makes Bill Gates a fascist. My money is on F/OSS.
Best in Class Overview–Follow On Volume Warranted, July 23, 2008
Duke Center for Integrative Medicine
Below I list links to two other “alternative” or natural medicine books, and above I post a slide that I created as I contemplate a new book on Health Intelligence.
Unlike the other two books, this book is an overview book that integrates both conventional and “alternative” or natural medicine as commonly developed by both the Chinese (more structured, easier to access and exploit) and the Indian (more verbal and not as documented).
For this book to come out of Duke University (the “Harvard” of the South, but a powerhouse in its own right) is easily worth a fifth star, as Duke appears to be, along with the University of Washington, one of a tiny handful of institutions that is committed to balancing a very unreliable, wasteful, and often deceptive “conventional” medicine program (big phrama and lots of elective surguries that are not evidence-based), with natural cures including lifestyle and behavior or preference patterns that have been proven over centuries in China and India, but deliberately repressed, censored, subverted and scorned by the American Medical Association, which exists largely to protect a very badly broken medical “practice” that is closer to witch doctoring than it is to evidence-based holistic health.
I am very pleased to see that the publisher and Amazon have made it possible to “look inside” this excellent book, so my normal remediation is not necessary. This book is a “class act” in every possible sense of the word, from content to organization to presentation to glosary and index. It is true that “encyclopedia” may not be completely appropriate, “overview” might be a better term, but I have to give all those associated with this book real credit for taking the giant leap forward in integrating Part I, a Catalog of Health Conditions with Part II, Complementary & Alternative Therapies.
The book earns one of its stars for its emphasis on Prevention. I fear that more critical reviewers are missing the paradigm-shift in the forest due to their micro-focus on a specific condition about which they have deep knowledge. I regard this book as a true pioneering endeavor, one with huge credibility, and one extremely meritorious and worthy of follow-up.
The volume I would really like to see next from Duke would examine the true costs to society, and the true costs to heal (with an emphasis on the cost of prevention and the cost of natural cures), for each of the diseases covered in volume one. If we can articulate, in cold hard proven numbers, the costs, the common sense of the public will take us to the next leve.
Superb with Very Intelligent Conclusion, June 22, 2008
