3 Star – Page 9 – Public Intelligence Blog

NOT a Guide–A Coffee Table Book, Lots of Photos, No Stats, September 3, 2008

Mark Silva

This book is on sale in supermarkets, and I spent time with both this book and its counterpart for Barack Obama.

I recommend both books as coffee table books, lots of great photos and general information about the individuals, but this book is NOT a guide.

There are no statistics, no tables, no comparisons, no meaningful GUIDE to who the candidate is and what they really stand for based on their actual behavior, votes, known acquaintances, etcetera.

What would be extraordinarlily valuable, if the publishers want to do a fast make-over, is a SINGLE book that compares all four candidates On the Issues and on their Values and what it all means for the federal government's future, the budget's future, and the country's future.

For an idea of what I am talking about, look online for “On the Isuses,”
and see especially the way they plot on a map relative differences.

Review: Obama–The Essential Guide to the Democratic Nominee

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Politics

NOT a Guide–A Coffee Table Book, Lots of Photos, No Stats, September 3, 2008

Michael Tackett

This book is on sale in supermarkets, and I spent time with both this book and its counterpart for John McCain.

I recommend both books as coffee table books, lots of great photos and general information about the individuals, but this book is NOT a guide.

There are no statistics, no tables, no comparisons, no meaningful GUIDE to who the candidate is and what they really stand for based on their actual behavior, votes, known acquaintances, etcetera.

For an idea of what I am talking about, look online for “On the Isuses,”
and see especially the way they plot on a map relative differences.

Review: Linking Social and Ecological Systems–Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience

3 Star, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Too Expensive, April 28, 2008

Fikret Berkes

This book, a paperback, should not be costing more than $25.00. Authors need to start shunning publishers that prevent their knowledge from reaching the world at an affordable (honest) price. I will find this author's knowledge online rather than buy this book at this exhobitant price.

2008/08/242011/10/22

Review: Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State–Why Americans Vote the Way They Do

3 Star, Politics

Save your money–should have stayed an article, August 24, 2008

Andrew Gelman

This book is fine as far as it goes–the author provides a mind-numbing sequence of chapters, charts, and maps showing that rich states do not vote the way rich individuals do, and poor states do not vote the way poor individuals do.

Unfortunately, while he has a point and it is a useful important point, that is as far as the book gets. I was hoping for something much more nuanced, something that focused on all of the issues the way Paul Ray does, or Yankelovich or Weiss. This book focuses on religion and income–that's it.

I found two statements worth noting.

Page 23: “…the country is polarized in two ways, *economically* between the rich and the poor, and *culturally* between upper-income Americans in red and blue areas.” [Emphasis in original as italics.]

Page 177: “We need to move beyond stereotypes of income and place in order to understand how Americans of different backgrounds, attitudes, and cultures express their views in the electoral process.”

Duh. The last sentence is the book, above, is what I thought this book was going to be about. Not so. Nor do the terms electoral reform or Congressional corruption appear in this book.

Much more important books you can spend money on (I have reviewed all):
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Clustering of America
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back

2008/07/302009/12/04

Review: The Executive’s Guide to Information Technology

3 Star, Information Technology

With Regret, Must Give This Earnest Effort a Three, July 30, 2008

John Baschab

Few people know that I was responsible for developing the original advanced information technology applications in pilot (artificial intelligence, expert systems, natural language understanding, smart maps with a memory of operational history, etcetera) for the CIA, and served on both the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group and on the Information Handing Committee, both national level secret bodies. I also stood up the USMC Intelligence Center (today a Command) and wasted $20 million on the wrong high-end “stuff” while neglecting access to external content.

This book has an identity problem. On the one hand, it claims to be a guide for executives (who: CEO, corporate vice presidents, division chiefs?), and on the other, it provides an enormous amount of detail about managing the information technology investment and operations–information I would expect my CTO to have firmly in hand before he or she ever got hired.

This book (second edition published in 2007) also fails to mention:

Analytics or analytic tradecraft
Anomaly detection
Cloud computing
Data mining
External sources
Knowledge management
Pattern analysis
Semantic web
Social networks
Warning
Web 2.0 (or 3.0 or 4.0)

Return on Investment (RoI) is defined on page xvi and not mentioned again, at least according to the index, which is where I decide whether a large volume is worth my time. This index–this book–failed that test.

Decision making gets one reference (page 525), decision trees get two pages (310, 467).

Business intelligence and competitive intelligence do not appear in this book (according to the index).

Risk management focuses on management of the IT investment risk, not on risk management of every aspect of the organization from personnel to facilities to production to inventory to supplier vetting and so on.

Bottom line: this is a university primer for kids hoping to one day be a Chief Technology Officer. It is NOT a guide for executives. It is a summary of what the top three CTO folks should have in their DNA from day one (which is often not the case).

I am guided in my crankiness by Peter Drucker, who wrote in Forbes ASAP of 28 August 1998, that we have spent the last fifty years focusing on the T in IT, and now need to spend the next 50 years focusing on the I in IT. Generally, IT provides both a *negative* return on investment, and does nothing to create, nurture, and exploit “organizational intelligence.” Enough said.

Other books that I prefer to this one:
The Politics of Information Management: Policy Guidelines
The Business Value of Computers – An Executive's Guide (Information Technology Findings and Recommendations)
Information Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age
Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization
The Knowledge Executive
The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Organizational Intelligence (Knowledge and Policy in Government and Industry)
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

Review: Open Source Information–The Missing Dimension of Intelligence

3 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public)

Marginal Across the Board–26 pages of pablum, July 5, 2008

Arnaud De Borchgrave

I went to the meeting at which this was handed out, and left when I realized that most of those in attendance were retirees or students, and this book managed to discuss a topic I and 749 others have been pioneering since 1988, without ever once mentioning anyone else's effort.

I am not easily outraged, but this “immaculate conception” is on the one hand, encouraging (it only took CSIS 20 years to catch up with the rest of us) and on the other, infuriating because the arrogance and myopia of those who put this booklet (note the page count–26 pages) forward is unbounded on the one hand and so narrow on the other as to be clinically blind.

NewsFlash: Singapore is the only country that listened to me when I did my world tour in 1994, and they are well on their way to being the first “smart nation” but they are making the common mistake of believing in technology as a substitute for creating the world brain with real humans. The Nordic countries are close behind, and have pioneered Multinational Multiagency Multidisciplinary Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS) and public sense-making (24 of us are pioneering public intelligence in the public interest)

CSIS has enormous potential that is failing to contribute to the public dialog because they lack the discipline and humility to reach out to multi-cultural pioneers. Hubris is fatal.

In the comment I provide URLs to material superior to this lightweight endeavor, all free. Below I list a handful of books from true experts:
Early Warning: Using Competitive Intelligence to Anticipate Market Shifts, Control Risk, and Create Powerful Strategies
The New Competitor Intelligence: The Complete Resource for Finding, Analyzing, and Using Information about Your Competitors
The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence: How to See Through and Stay Ahead of Business Disruptions, Distortions, Rumors, and Smoke Screens
Strategic and Competitive Analysis
Super Searchers Do Business: The Online Secrets of Top Business Researchers (Super Searchers, V. 1)
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption

2008/06/032009/10/30

Review: Social Networks and the Semantic Web (Semantic Web and Beyond)

3 Star, Information Society, Information Technology

5 for Content and Relevance, Zero for Greed Pricing, June 3, 2008

Peter Mika

I am an author and publisher and I would have bought this book today had it been priced more honestly. It costs a penny a page to produce a book, and this book should not be sold for more than $29.95 (which is ten times cost, and also accounts for Amazon only paying 45% of retail to each publisher).

I hope the author reads this and posts the book online as a Creative Commons PDF. I advise all authors to retain original rights to everything they produce, and to always post a searchable savable PDF for the common good. Earth Intelligence publishes hard-copy books on Amazon as a marker, but the real value to all who wich to create a prosperous world at peace lies in our free PDFs that can also be translated into any language at no cost.

Search the web for the title and author of this book and find interesting free stuff. I am adding this book to my list of grotesquely expensive books I would have bought but will not because of the price.

Category: 3 Star

Review: McCain–The Essential Guide to the Republican Nominee