The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Former CIA Director: Obama Forced Out Intel Chief Who Warned About Weak Iraqi Army
Wednesday on Newsmax TV's “The Steve Malzberg Show,” President Bill Clinton's former director of the CIA James Woolsey said President Barack Obama's attempt to blame poor intelligence is getting “less and less true” as he pointed to the forced resignation of the Head of [Defense Intelligence Agency] Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn who was “making it very clear he was very worried about the stability of the Iraqi army.”
For consideration.
Pentagon Official: The President Is Lying To America — About Us, And About ISIS
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President Barack Obama has taken a lot of flak since his Sunday night “60 Minutes” interview, in which he blamed the intelligence community for his failure to tackle the threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And that is right and proper. Because not only was his excuse of blaming us a lie, but when questioned on his lie, White House press secretary Josh Earnest doubled down with a whole new lie — both of which are easily, publicly proven false.
(Slideshare)
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Venture Capitalists Are Poised to “Disrupt” Everything About the Education Market
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Next year, the market size of K-12 education is projected to be $788.7 billion. And currently, much of that money is spent in the public sector. “It’s really the last honeypot for Wall Street,” says Donald Cohen, the executive director of In the Public Interest, a think tank that tracks the privatization of roads, prisons, schools and other parts of the economy.
That might be changing soon as barriers to investment are rapidly fading. As Eric Hippeau, a partner with Lerer Ventures, the venture capital firm behind viral entertainment company BuzzFeed and several education start-ups, has argued, despite the opposition of “unions, public school bureaucracies, and parents,” the “education market is ripe for disruption.”
Hippeau’s vision is the growing sentiment among investors. Education technology firms secured a record $1.25 billion in investments across 378 deals in 2013, while analysts predict that number will continue to surge this year. Since 2010, Moe has led what has been billed as the premiere education investment conference, which takes place annually in Scottsdale, Arizona. The first year attracted around 370 people and 55 presenting companies. This year, that number soared to over 2,000 with over 290 presenting companies and speeches by luminaries including former Governor Jeb Bush, Magic Johnson and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. One of the largest start-ups, a Herndon, Virginia–based company called K12 Inc., a for-profit largely online charter chain, posted nearly $1 billion in annual revenue for its last fiscal year in August.
Good, this is.
OSHWA is Officially a Non-Profit Organization!
Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) is thrilled to announce we have just received our official non-profit status!
OSHWA aims to be the voice of the open hardware community, ensuring that technological knowledge is accessible to everyone. We encourage the collaborative development of technology that serves education, environmental sustainability, and human welfare.
Has Capitalism Reached A Turning Point?
Steve Denning
Forbes, 26 September 2014
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These events are worth remembering in the context of the emerging movements to reform the management of big corporations today, as thought leaders allude to the possibility of a Reformation in management, and indeed of the entire system of capitalism in which managers operate. Thus in June 2014, Clayton Christensen and Derek van Bever wrote in the June 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR). “The orthodoxies governing finance are so entrenched that we almost need a modern-day Martin Luther to articulate the need for change.”
Christensen and van Bever are not alone in calling for some kind of Reformation. At the conclusion of this article, I list a number of the articles that have appeared over the past few months in leading pro-business journals such as Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Forbes.com, all denouncing key management practices and calling for major change. So are we reaching a turning point in management, and indeed in capitalism as a whole, analogous to the religious Reformation five centuries ago?
There’s a new way to quantify structure and complexity
Analyzing information sharing among the parts of a system can help explain its behaviors on different scales
Science News, 22 September 2014
EXTRACTS
It’s hard to find simple scientific principles from which to deduce all the multifaceted things that such complex systems do. But there is, for sure, one thing that they do all have in common. They all have a structure. And it’s by quantifying structure, three scientists suggest in an intriguing new paper, that complexity can be tamed.
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Supposedly, information theory provides the math for quantifying relationships among the parts of a system. “An information measure indicates how many questions one needs answered to remove uncertainty about the system components under consideration,” Allen (of Harvard), Stacey (Brandeis University) and Bar-Yam (New England Complex Systems Institute) point out. But traditionally, information measures have ignored the scale at which a system’s behavior is operating. Systems exhibit different behaviors on different scales. Only by incorporating the importance of scale can structure and complexity be properly accounted for, Allen, Stacey and Bar-Yam aver. An effective approach “requires an understanding of information theory in a multiscale context, a context that has not been developed in information theory nor in the statistical physics of phase transitions.”
Scale considerations are also often absent in the network approach, which emphasizes pairwise relationships (links) between two parts of a system. Network math can be tweaked to accommodate how pairwise links influence behaviors at higher scales, but it misses relationships that are intrinsically large-scale to begin with.
Working out the math to take scale more fully into account is at the core of Allen, Stacey and Bar-Yam’s new approach to coping with structure.
