Intelligence (Collective & Quantum) – Page 9

Seminal Work, Broad Overview, Provocative on All Fronts, June 18, 2008

Christine L. Borgman

FINAL REVIEW 22 June 2008

This is not a technical book, it focuses more on the socio-political aspects of how knowledge is communicated among scholars. While it addresses fraud, it does not address the ideological war against science, high crimes and misdemeanors including deliberate lies to the public, or the nuances of “fog facts” and “lost history.”

The author brings to this effort past experience in the Alexandria Digital Earth prototype project, and the National Research Council's signposts in cyberspace inquiry.

It would be good to have other reviews.

Overview comment: The author has done an extraordinary job in designing this book–writing it must have been easy once the seven page outline of detailed contents was created.

My notes:

+ National Science Foundation (NSF) did not begin investing in cyber-infrastructure until 2006 (my first web site was created in 1994).

+ Grab this lady for the project. She integrates informaiton science, information psychology, information sociology, information politics, and information culture in a manner so well presented I don't mind the headache.

+ Cites G. C. Bowker on data diversity, and ends the book with the observation that search and retrieval across specialized data sources is till very difficult (See Stephen E. Arnold's chapter <Search panacea or ploy:
Can collective intelligence improve findability?>, URL in the comment.

+ Words and concepts covered by the author, with substantive citation, that I found particularly interesting:

– Data withholding
– Knowledge diffusion
– Consequences of misconduct
– Cultural memory
– Open standards
– Accidents
– History and sense-making
– Cultural boundaries of science (see Dick Klavans and Brad Ashfords' lovely Maps of Science web site)
– Knowledge lost
– Bibliometrics, data as capital
– Ecologies of knowledge
– Ethnography of infrastructure within communities
– Communities of learning, meaning, identity
– Internet Time and unreliability of search engines
– Geographies of the Internet (the project is mapping substnative knowledge)
– The end of isolated inquiry and isolated conclusions (far future)
– “outcomes” and “results” are not in this book–it is a survey
– book's major self-limitation is its exclusive focus on academia–the other seven tribes of intelligence (government, military, law enforcement, commerce, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions are not addresses at all)
– talk about data intensive science but unwitting of urgency of getting to real-time science (changes that used to take 10,000 years now take 3)
– no discussion of retrospective research
– dismissive of self-publishing
– pre-print lag times to publishing are worse than the government
– peer review is broken (as well as tedious)
– conferences not yet digital
– dissemination, diffusion, publicity, transparency, discourse
– search and dfiscovery very corrupt (see Arnold–less than 2% efficacy)
– publishers losing ground to online (greed is killing them as well)
– termporal patterns and pattern analysis of the aggregate knowledge

Heart of the book is the issue of open access combined with the immaturity of the content, tools, and architecture of the digital world of knowledge. Legal, cultural, and technical obstacles will not be settled soon.

I put this book down with two thoughts: it is a stellar piece of well-documented and well-conceived reflection–and it barely scratches the surface of what can and should be known about scholarship in the digital age, to include call centers in China and India able to teach their respective 1.5 billion poor populations one cell call at a time. Schools and universities are still in the industrial era, half advanced day care and half prison. Knowledge is no longer an academic domain–it is the world brain emergent, with eight tribes of knowledge ignoring one another in 183 languages we don't speak, with the cell phone, not the laptop, as the great equalizer and enabler of the wealth of networks.

2009/07/042009/12/04

Review: The Duke Encyclopedia of New Medicine–Conventional and Alternative Medicine for All Ages

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Culture, DVD - Light, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

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.

2009/07/032012/12/16

1998 Open Source Intelligence Executive Overview (Handbook)

Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), OSINT Generic

Handbook Free Online

2004	US	Training	Steele	OSINT Executive Overview (Contents) in RTF
2004	US	Training	Steele	OSINT Executive Overview (Cover) in RTF
2004	US	Training	Steele	OSINT Executive Overview (Contents) in Word Doc
2004	US	Training	Steele	OSINT Executive Overview (Cover) in Word Doc

2009/07/032009/12/04

Review: Peaceful Positive Revolution–Economic Security for Every American

5 Star, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Citizen Intelligence, Core Good Idea Well Presented, June 9, 2009

Steve Shafarman

This book is the one that in combination with other things that are going on including Ron Paul's endorsement of the book Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny, has caused me to see 2008 as a tipping point. We the People are restless and on the prowl.

This particular book is the single best current exposition on the need for individual economic security as a citizen's right, in the book called the Citizen Dividend, also known as negative income tax or guaranteed income.

The author is clear on this being a modest sum, on the order of $500 to $1000 a month, a safety net, and the author also speaks to the Citizen Service that is made possible in return.

As a great admirer of the book by the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats and Challenges, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, I am totally blown away by the intelligence in all its forms of this author, who nails the essential better and more concisely than anyone I have seen anywhere else: poverty, crime, health care, education, social security, family values, racism, pollution and global warming, farms and all, local communities, national security, globalization, other countries, world peace. This is a SERIOUS citizen not to be triffled with. See Earth Intelligence Network and the strategic analytic model there to understand why I am so very impressed.

The author has done a great deal of work in putting the book together, and among the things about it that I really like are the 26 Frequently Askewd Questions (FAQ) with detailed answers; the superb quotes from the Founding Fathers onward on why this kind of thing is needed; and the two Appendices, the first on previous attempt to implement the idea, the second on current efforts.

The author concludes the book with some hard thoughts on the corporations, courts, and media, on politicians as performers and politics as theater (see my own book, Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography), and on how elected officials are out of touch with citizen reality while the special interests do not care.

The author gives credit to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), RIP, one of my own personal heroes, and his book The Politics of a Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan.

I put the book down well-satisfied, and feeling that if every citizen were as serious as Steven Shafarman, We the People are certain to triumph in the 2010-2015 timeframe as we seek to restore the Constitution and free open elections.

In myh remaining six recommended books I want to focus on the corruption of the existing capitalism system, which is not moral capitalism (going well by doing good) but immoral predatory capitalism that has also destroyed democracy:
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It

My complex annotated bibliography is free online at oss.net/PIG. It is also the only way to get to many of my reviews now that Amazon buries any reviews that are not 100% positive about the book they are trying to sell.

2009/06/042009/12/04

Review DVD: Humanity Ascending Series Part 1: OUR STORY featuring Barbara Marx Hubbard

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Reviews (DVD Only)

Common Sense and Clear Vision at its Very Best, June 4, 2009

Barbara Marx Hubbard

I met Barbara Marx Hubbard recently, and after reading and reviewing her book Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential bouight everything else she has done and am working my way through it.

This DVD is truly great in multiple ways, including the imagery provided as the changing backdrop for the speaker, her own presentation, and the selection of very short clips interspersed throughout. This is not a very long DVD, but it is priceless and *very* easy to watch. Certainly something to share with friends before or after a dinner.

Three key points that stayed with me:

1) Women are coming into the own again. The top down patriarchal control model is not working. The matriarchal nurturing and circle mode is needed. Many do not know that in the beginning of human society we mere matriarchal because birth was a miracle and the blood connection from mother to child was indisputable.

2) The psycho-social development of individuals is vastly outpacing the much slower “organizational” societal evolution, and this gives rise to both conflict and alternative solutions that are still on the fringes.

3) Our values and minds have not evolved fast enough to control and contain the weapons and other capabilities we have been building, and this is a major threat. Today, some years after this was made, we face super-empowered individual with off-the-shelf access to nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction including explosives and poisons that can be manufactured at home.

The speaker was the “alternative” vice presidential candidate to Geraldine Ferraro at the Democratic Convention in 1984, and that in itself is a remarkable contrast: Ferraro was the “man's woman” seeking to compete on male terms; Hubbard was the woman's woman, seeking to compete on alternative terms.

All fascinating. I hope millions more hear her message, there is not a single negative note, all positive, all common sense, all vital.

Other books that I recommend:
Human Scale
Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Imagine: What America Could be in the 21st century
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover))

2009/01/082012/10/27

2008 World Brain as EarthGame

Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

EarthGame is a trademarked representation of the original work of Professor Medard Gabel. Visit his web site by clicking on his photographl, and read his overview of the EarthGame by clicking on the EIN seal.

2009/01/082012/10/27