• Do you have trouble letting in the good around you?
• When someone says or does something nice to you, do you get all squirmy and suspiciously nervous? Do you uncontrollably and immediately go to standard cultural programming [“Deny. Minimize! Deflect!!”] even when there's no need for it? You see yourself ending up invalidating your friend's experience and making community building that much harder, when in fact it's clear this actually serves no one?
• If your “nutrition barrier” is hyper-active and preventing you from letting in to metabolize the very things that you want and need most? Yet even knowing this does not stop you from invoking it?
By and for Open Space practitioners, the annual Open Space Technology practitioner's gathering is sure to be exciting this year. If the practice of self-organizing is something you care about, join a free-ranging, in-depth discussion with people from around the world. For more information or to register, visit http://wosonos2013.crowdvine.
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Phi Beta Iota: Cost is $250 for individuals rising to $500 for White SOF, for whom this event is strongly recommended. There is no faster better way to get a mind-wash on cultural diversity than by going into this event and letting it sweep over you.
Every academic and professional field has its jargon. While often criticized, jargon has its uses. It serves as a kind of shorthand, allowing us to communicate complex or multiple concepts in short phrases or single words. But it does have its downsides. Excessive use of jargon renders meaning incomprehensible to non-specialists. Even between specialists it may lead to misunderstandings when users and audiences have different conceptions of what the term refers to. Worse, it can be used as a kind of tick-box or name check, allowing users to communicate the sense that they are engaging with the concepts underlying the jargon without necessarily genuinely doing so. We are therefore rightly wary when a new term comes along; asking ourselves whether there is a need for it in our vocabulary.
The field of peacebuilding and conflict transformation is no stranger to jargon. A new term pushing its way into the lexicon is “infrastructures for peace” (“I4P” or “peace infrastructures”). It has been floating around for some time and looks like it may be on the verge of going mainstream. The origins of the term have been credited to conflict transformation guru Jean Paul Lederach. More recently the term has been championed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and an international NGO network has been established to promote the concept. The concept is now the focus of two recent publications: the Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series dedicates its latest issue to the topic as does the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development. On top of these, the inaugural issue of the new open access journal Peacebuilding contains an article and comments on the topic.
[A covert-sterilisation programme using vaccines such as tetanus, rubella and what looks to be Gardasil (1), also the use of mercury in third world country vaccines (even after they have removed most of it it from Western countries) is suspected of being a birth control ploy (1). They have form with 60,000 Americans coercively sterilized , and between 1963 and 1965 more than 400,000 Colombian women were sterilized in a program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation which also helped found and fund the German eugenics program; and even funded the program that ultimately sent Josef Mengele into Auschwitz (1, 2, 3).]
GDACS, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, sparked my interest in technology and disaster response when it was first launched back in 2004, which is why I’ve referred to GDACS in multiple blog posts since. This near real-time, multi-hazard monitoring platform is a joint initiative between the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the European Commission (EC). GDACS serves to consolidate and improve the dissemination of crisis-related information including rapid mathematical analyses of expected disaster impact. The resulting risk information is distributed via Web and auto-mated email, fax and SMS alerts.
I recently had the pleasure of connecting with two new colleagues, Daniel Link and Adam Widera, who are researchers at the University of Muenster’s European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). Daniel and Adam have been working on GDACSmobile, a smartphone app that was initially developed to extend the reach of the GDACS portal. This project originates from a student project supervised by Daniel, Adam along with the Chair of the Center Bernd Hellingrath in cooperation with both Tom de Groeve from the Joint Research Center (JRC) and Minu Kumar Limbu, who is now with UNICEF Kenya.
GDACSmobile is intended for use by disaster responders and the general public, allowing for a combined crowdsourcing and “bounded crowdsourcing“ approach to data collection and curation. This bounded approach was a deliberate design feature for GDACSmobile from the outset. I coined the term “bounded crowd-sourcing” four years ago (see this blog post from 2009). The “bounded crowd-sourcing” approach uses “snowball sampling” to grow a crowd of trusted reporters for the collection of crisis information. For example, one invites 5 (or more) trusted local reports to collect relevant information and subsequently ask each of these to invite 5 additional reporters who they fully trust; And so on, and so forth. I’m thrilled to see this term applied in practical applications such GDACSmobile. For more on this approach, please see these blog posts.
A British Petroleum representative is being accused of rewriting almost half of the firm's environmental records on popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.
For more information on the lack of public and press access to United States v. Pfc. Manning, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed a petition requesting the Army Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA) “to order the Judge to grant the public and press access to the government's motion papers, the court's own orders, and transcripts of proceedings, none of which have been made public to date.”
The statement below was read by Private First Class Bradley E. Manning at the providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification under Article 92 with a substituted time frame for the offense, and nine specifications for lesser included offenses under Article 134. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at the Article 39(a) session of United States v. Pfc. Bradley Manning on February 28, 2013 at Fort Meade, MD, USA.
Judge Lind: Pfc. Manning you may read your statement.
Pfc. Bradley Manning: Yes, your Honor. I wrote this statement in the confinement facility. Start now. The following facts are provided in support of the providence inquiry for my court martial, United States v. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning.
Personal Facts.
I am a twenty-five year old Private First Class in the United States Army currently assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, HHC, US Army Garrison (USAG), Joint Base Myer, Henderson Hall, Fort Meyer, Virginia.
My [exodus?] assignment I was assigned to HHC, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, NY. My primary military occupational specialty or MOS is 35 Foxtrot intelligence analyst. I entered active duty status on 2 October 2007. I enlisted with the hope of obtaining both real world experience and earning benefits under the GI Bill for college opportunities.
Facts regarding my position as an intelligence analyst.
