Each year, I teach a class called Advanced Analytic Techniques (AAT) here at Mercyhurst. It is a seminar-style class designed to allow grad students to dig into a variety of analytic techniques and (hopefully) master one or two.
The students get to pick both the topic and the technique on which they wish to focus so you wind up with some pretty interesting studies at the end. For example, we have applied the traditional business methodology of “best practices” to western European terrorist groups and the traditional military technique of Intelligence Preparation of The Battlefield to the casino industry.
I was surprised at some of the information in the slide deck. First, I thought the New York Times was first online in the 1970s via LexisNexis.
I thought that was an exclusive deal and reasonably profitable for both LexisNexis and the New York Times. When the newspaper broke off that exclusive to do its own thing, the revenue hit on the New York Times was immediate. In addition, the decision had significant cost implications for the newspaper.
The transition out of carbon energy is beginning to bite, and the Kochs' and their allies in carbon energy are squeezing the political whores they bought in the state legislatures and agencies to protect their interests. It's all getting very late Roman empire. Wisconsin, a state already deeply troubled is the point of their spear at the moment. The ques! tion is will the people of Wisconsin roll over like possums, or stand up for their interests? Frankly, I think it is a toss-up.
What is not in dispute is that the utilities believe their business model hinges on undercutting the rooftop solar industry before it matures. A 2013 report by the Edison Electric Institute, a leading utility group, made it clear that forcing consumers who sell their surplus back to the grid to pay more for the privilege was a ‘near-term, must-consider action.” The group’s big worry is that as more and more solar power–producing homes pay less and less each month, the cost for traditional consumers will go up, making a jump to solar that much more appealing. If utilities wait until that starts happening, the Edison report warned, ‘it may be too late to repair the utility business model.”
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And so the industry isn’t waiting. In the 20 months since that report was published, utilities have taken aim at rooftop solar (and to a lesser extent, small-scale wind projects) in at least 12 states, lobbying regulatory commissions and statehouses to rewrite rules to de-incentivize customers from buying or leasing rooftop solar panels. While each proposal is different, most share the common goal of forcing people who install solar panels on their rooftops to pay for both the electricity they buy from the grid and for a portion of the electricity they sell back to it.
The runoff round of the Afghan presidential election on June 14 was massively rigged, and the ensuing election audit was “unsatisfactory,” a result of Afghan government-orchestrated fraud on a scale exceeding two million fake votes, completely subverting the will of the Afghan people. That is the watered-down conclusion of the press release of the European Union's yet-to-be-released report detailing its thorough and non-partisan investigation of the entire Afghan election. The report was completed last week, according to sources in Kabul who have seen it, but political pressure has so far resulted in heavy redaction and kept it from public release.
The key point is this: Ashraf Ghani did not win the election. The U.S. Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) concluded in July that it was mathematically impossible for Ghani to win, given Afghan demographics and the initial 46 percent to 32 percent first-round vote spread, according to sources familiar with the analysis. According to sources who reviewed the private report, the top experts in statistical analysis in the United States used every known computer model of election balloting and concluded that a Ghani victory was scientifically impossible. In simple terms, there is no mathematical doubt that Abdullah Abdullah won.
This may be stating the obvious, but ComputerWorld declares that “IT Outages Are an Ongoing Problem for the U.S. Government.” The article cites a recent report sponsored by Symantec and performed by MeriTalk, which runs a network for government IT workers. Though the issues that originally plagued HealthCare.gov were their own spectacular kettle of fish, our federal government’s other computer networks are no paragons of efficiency. Writer Patrick Thibodeau tells us:
“Specifically, the survey found that 70% of federal agencies have experienced downtime of 30 minutes of more in a recent one-month period. Of that number, 42% of the outages were blamed on network or server problems and 29% on Internet connectivity loss….
This is the latest on the Willful Ignorance Trend. American schools are under attack from the Theocratic Right, who literally want to rewrite history, and get it taught the way they want. This is some very good news about that trend. Real pushback. But how many schools do you think will do this? Still it's my favorite story of the week.
In Tuesday, hundreds of high school students in Jefferson County, Colorado walked out of classes this week to protest conservative censorship of the national Advanced Placement U.S. history class curriculum.
According to the Denver Post, students and teachers are protesting the removal of all mentions of civil disobedience from texts and classroom materials intended for the teaching of AP U.S. history.
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Tensions have run high in Jefferson County schools since three conservative candidates were elected to the school board. These new board members have suggested an extensive rewrite of the way history is taught to the area’s students to a model they believe is more patriotic.
The right-leaning board-members said they believe history teachers should teach nationalism, respect for authority and reverence for free markets. They should avoid teaching any historical events or acts that promote ‘civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
I've been invited to participate in The New Story Summit in Scotland, and they are paying all expenses, which matters since I have no salary, no pensions, and no savings. The event is closed now to further registration, but open to any who wish to take advantage of the live streaming portions. For myself, with help from Tom Atlee, it is an opportunity to reflect on the past quarter century of failed activism in favor of government intelligence reform, and at the same time to lay down some aspirations for the next quarter century during which I intend to be active in new ways — creating the people's world brain. Although there are those — including Buckminster Fuller (don't fix a broken system, create a new system that displaces the old) and Russell Ackoff (stop doing the wrong things righter, do the right thing instead) that might consider my time and energy wasted these past 25 years, I do not — everything has its time and place. Now is the time for me to take what I have learned from tilting at windmills owned by others, and apply that deep experience to building the people's windmill — what Google and Microsoft and IBM should have been doing all this time.
