Review (Guest): Intelligence for Earth – Clarity, Diversity, Integrity & Sustainability

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5.0 Stars One visionary's way out of the Corporate Feudalism/International Conflict trap

By Herbert L Calhoun on April 1, 2014

In this book, the author, drawing extensively on his intelligence and military background, has cleanly written an easy to follow book, that outlines a careful course of action for developing a new kind of global information sharing infrastructure. To be headquartered at the UN, this new infrastructure would make it possible for every organization (and through them, everyone) on the globe to share open-source intelligence equally as a free public resource. If it is successful, this new global brain could transform our world from its current insecurity-driven and corrupt corporate dominated lose-lose, economic and conflict trap, into a much revived win-win strategy for bottom-up collective survival in a peaceful and sustainable world economy.

At least that is the theoretical hope and vision. On paper, and in principle, it is a stunningly sexy and attractive vision, one that, should it prove operationally testable and feasible, could indeed have the important side benefit and advantage of creating new bottom-up wealth, energizing the world economy and easing world tensions by reducing mistrust and fear back down to the noise level.

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Review (Guest): Dynamics Among Nations – The Evolution of Legitimacy and Development in Modern States

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atlases & State of the World, Complexity & Resilience, Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Hilton Root

5.0 out of 5.0 Stars Complexity thinking that shifts the paradigms of international relations

By J. P. Massing on December 5, 2013

In ‘Dynamics Among Nations’, Professor Hilton Root convincingly challenges the propositions of the liberal international consensus and re-frames the prevailing conceptualisation of development by introducing complexity thinking to the fields of political economy and international relations.

I highly recommend this intellectually stimulating and excellently written book to decision makers, researchers and students – as well as to anyone who is interested in gaining an advanced and well-informed understanding of the complex realities of development and global policy.

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Review: Dawn of the Akshic Age – New Consciousness, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World

4 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Culture, Research, Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design
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Amazon Page

Ervin Laszlo and Kingsley L. Dennis et al.

4.0 out of 5 stars Superb Appetizer Book — a Potpourri of Genius — Not the Main Plate, December 26, 2013

Buy and read this book for a marvelous panoramic view of the latest thinking circling around the end of the top-down scarcity model that concentrates wealth, and the emergence — sooner than most might expect — of the distributed bottom-up local to global harmonization.

This is a hybrid book — the first two thirds are written by the co-authors (Laszlo and Dennis), while the last third is a collection of eleven very short essays, each generally provocative and each providing me with at least one insight, web site, or book that I was not aware of. The book ends with recommended readings in the following categories that are a also a summary of what the book strives to cover at a very high level:

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Review (Guest): Scripting Intelligence – Web 3.0 Information Gathering and Processing

4 Star, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)
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Amazon Page

Mark Watson

4.0 out of 5 stars Ruby-centric tutorials on Semantic Web, Natural Language Processing, and Large-Scale Data Storage and Processing Technologies July 4, 2009

ByTechie Evan

This four-part book is focused on programming techniques and technologies that in the author's opinion can help next generation web applications handle data more “intelligently”. The code samples are implemented in Ruby (and a little bit of Java).

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Review (Guest): Algorithms of the Intelligence Web

5 Star, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)
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Amazon Page

Haralamlos Marmanis and Dmitry Babenko

5.0 out of 5 stars A soon to be classic Algo book for improving intelligent web applications June 19, 2009

By Michael Mimo I have always had an interest in AI, machine learning, and data mining but I found the introductory books too mathematical and focused mostly on solving academic problems rather than real-world industrial problems. So, I was curious to see what this book was about.

I have read the book front-to-back (twice!) before I write this report. I started reading the electronic version a couple of months ago and read the paper print again over the weekend. This is the best practical book in machine learning that you can buy today — period. All the examples are written in Java and all algorithms are explained in plain English. The writing style is superb!

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Review: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid [Updated 5tyh Anniversary Edition]

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Economics, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

C. K. Prahalad

5.0 out of 5 stars Nobel Prize Material-Could Transform the Planet [But Most Seem to Have Missed the Point], October 24, 2013

There are some excellent and lengthy reviews of this book so I will not repeat anything that has already been said. This book review should be read together with my review of Stuart Hart's Capitalism at the Crossroads: Next Generation Business Strategies for a Post-Crisis World (3rd Edition) which points to several other related books, and Kenichi Ohmae's book, The Next Global Stage: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World (paperback) All three are published by Wharton School Publishing, which has impressed me enormously with its gifted offerings.

Here's the math that I was surprised to not see in the book: the top billion people that business focuses on are worth less than a trillion in potential sales. The bottom four billion, with less than $1000 a year in disposable income, are worth four trillion in potential sales.

In combination, Prahalad and Hart make it clear that business suffers from the same pathologies as the Central Intelligence Agency and other bureaucracies: they are in a rut.

I will end by emphasizing that I believe this author merits the Nobel Peace Prize. As the U.S. Department of Defense is now discovering, its $500 billion a year budget is being spent on a heavy metal military useful only 10% of the time. Stabilizization and reconstruction are a much more constructive form of national defense, because if we do not address poverty and instability globally, it will inevitably impact on the home front. This author has presented the most common sense case for turning business upside down. He can be credited with a paradigm shift, those shifts that Kuhn tells us come all too infrequently, but when they come, they change the world. It may take years to see this genius implemented in the real world, but he has, without question, changed the world for the better with this book, and make global prosperity a possibility.

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Review: On Complexity

7 Star Top 1%, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks)
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Amazon Page

Edgar Morin

7 Stars Life Transformative  Foundation Work for Everything Else

This is a remarkably coherent book about the most important topic for all of us, the matter of complexity and more to the point, thinking about complexity. I certainly recommend it most strongly, along with two other books by the same author that I have reviewed:

Homeland Earth : A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity and the Human Sciences)
Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future (Education on the Move)

The Foreword by Alfonso Montuori is easily the equal of the main body by Edgar Morin, and I am totally awed by the mastery demonstrated in Montuori's synthesis and framing of Morin's work. I venture to say that I would not have gotten as much from the main body without the structure of the Foreword.

Montuori, always drawing on Morin, emphasizes a number of core concepts that I note down:

01 We must abandon the architectural or machine metaphor that assumes a foundation or base for what is actually a complex complete whole that can be viewed from any point.

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