Decision Makers Needs Workshop Report
Inevitable Transhumanism? How Emerging Strategic Technologies will affect the Future of Humanity
Patrick Meier: Mining Mainstream Media for Emergency Management 2.0
Data, Design, Innovation
Mining Mainstream Media for Emergency Management 2.0
There is so much attention (and hype) around the use of social media for emergency management (SMEM) that we often forget about mainstream media when it comes to next generation humanitarian technologies. The news media across the globe has become increasingly digital in recent years—and thus analyzable in real-time. Twitter added little value during the recent Pakistan Earthquake, for example. Instead, it was the Pakistani mainstream media that provided the immediate situational awareness necessary for a preliminary damage and needs assessment. This means that our humanitarian technologies need to ingest both social media and mainstream media feeds.
Now, this is hardly revolutionary. I used to work for a data mining company ten years ago that focused on analyzing Reuters Newswires in real-time using natural language processing (NLP). This was for a conflict early warning system we were developing. The added value of monitoring mainstream media for crisis mapping purposes has also been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years. In this study from 2008, I showed that a crisis map of Kenya was more complete when sources included mainstream media as well as user-generated content.
So why revisit mainstream media now? Simple: GDELT. The Global Data Event, Language and Tone dataset that my colleague Kalev Leetaru launched earlier this year. GDELT is the single largest public and global event-data catalog ever developed. Digital Humanitarians need no longer monitor mainstream media manually. We can simply develop a dedicated interface on top of GDELT to automatically extract situational awareness information for disaster response purposes. We're already doing this with Twitter, so why not extend the approach to global digital mainstream media as well?
Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Mining Mainstream Media for Emergency Management 2.0”
Robin Good: 13 Sense-Making Approaches to Add Value to Information
IO Tools
According to Harold Jarche, knowledge is an emergent property of all sense-making activities.
Curation and PKM (personal knowledge management) have the same objective: helping oneself and others gain more understanding about whatever we are interested in. The only difference between the two is that curation devotes itself to satisfy the knowledge needs of an audience while the second addresses these at a personal level.
But what are sense-making activites about?
Harold Jarche draws on Ross Dawson's five ways of adding value to information as well as on Nancy Dixon examination Rob Cross and Lee Sproull examination of tacit knowledge sharing practices inside large organizations to identify at least eight individual approaches to sense-making or adding more value to existing information.
These include:
- Validating
- Synthesizing
- Presenting
- Customizing
- Answering
- Meta-informing
- Reformulating
- Legitimizing
to which I would personally add:
- Comparing
- Finding related items
- Illustrating – Visualizing
- Evaluating
- Crediting and attributing
It is indeed around identifying and becoming aware of these specific aspects of our sense-making activities that we can improve and augment our capability to learn and to effectively curate information for others.
Thoughtful. Inspiring. 8/10
Original post: http://www.jarche.com/2013/10/pushing-and-pulling-tacit-knowledge/
Open Mind: Wilcock on Fulford – Cabal Planning Mega-Event
07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence
Posted: 28 Oct 2013 01:56 PM PDT
David is not the only one saying similar things, especially about Obama. I have followed David for many years, read both his recent books, and highly respect his work. He is not always “right on”, but he is always pretty close and mostly right on.
Tom
——————————
David Wilcock Comments of Fulford: “The Cabal are Planning on Creating a Mega-Event of Some Sort..”
Posted By: Jordon [Send E-Mail]
Date: Monday, 28-Oct-2013 15:52:12
Date: Monday, 28-Oct-2013 15:52:12
In Response To: Fulford Blurb: Big Moves Made Against The Cabal in The Past Week (Jordon)
Stephen E. Arnold: Better Data Is Out There [Just Not From the US Government, or the Banks, or the Corporations, or Most Universities and Media….]]
Data
Many have been operating under the assumption that the digital age has been providing us with reliable and accurate information. David Soloff noticed that this was incorrect when he was comparing grocery store prices against a government claim that they had dropped for the first time in more than half a century. Soloff discovered that prices, however, had increased by 5%. People are relying on misconstrued data, so Soloff founded Premise Data Corp. to sell better data. The San Francisco Gate details Soloff in “Google-Backed Startup Seeks Clearer Economic Signals Through Better, Faster, Stronger Data.” Backing the company are Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Harrison Metal.
Premise gathers data with a “global Internet trawl” that reads data from the Internet as well as using the old-fashioned approach of sending people into the field. The company plans on selling its “better” data to financial institutes, packaged good companies, and government and international organizations. So far the only customer they have is Bloomberg, but starting off with a big name like that is not a bad start.
John Morgan, an economist at UC Berkley, does not think it will be as easy to collect data as Premise hopes. He points out that governments change data for their own political aims and stores are not too keen on having people take photos of their wares. These are obvious observations, but Morgan goes on to say that not many people are going to want to buy Premise’s product:
“Meanwhile, he’s dubious that many consumer product companies will pay for this information because there are already many reliable sources on pricing for packaged goods. He’s also doubtful governments will be in the market for this information because they’ll insist on control over the collection and analysis. Morgan said the remaining question is whether Premise can earn a comfortable profit supplying tools to remaining potential customers, such as financial institutions, while paying a worldwide army of data collectors.”
It looks like we will have the choice of data vendors in the future. Who provides the best data? Who is going to be providing Google with the better results? A new market just opened up and Wall Street has not caught on yet.
Whitney Grace, October 29, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Chuck Spinney: Steven Walt’s Proof of Col John Boyd’s Strategic Theorem — Don’t Think, Just Keep The Money Moving….
Military, Officers Call, Strategy
Boyd's Theorem
(pounded with unrelenting ferocity into the heads of friends for over 30 years):
“People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy
They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy; it is:
Don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it.”
— Col. John R. Boyd (U.S. Air Force, ret.)*
Fighter Pilot, Tactician, Strategist,
Conceptual Designer, Reformer
Now read the attached opinion piece to see why Steven Walt's last sentence is dangerously wrong.
Lesson: If you want to understand U.S. foreign policy and U.S. military strategy, you need to climb down from Mount Olympus and dig into the dirt to discern and acknowledge its domestic roots.
Hint: A good place to start getting your hands dirty would be to investigate the real reasons why the Pentagon has refused to fix its corrupt and unauditable accounting system, a disgraceful state of affairs that is in violation of the law (i.e., the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990), not to mention the spirit and the letter of the Appropriations and Accountability Clauses of the Constitution (which, by the way, every member of the US government has taken a sacred unconditional oath to protect and uphold).
Chuck Spinney
* New readers unfamiliar with Boyd and his seminal works will find an introduction and references to his strategic theories here, including especially Robert Coram's highly readable biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Little Brown).
Leaving Afghanistan: Not With a Bang, But a Whimper
Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy, 28/10/13
Marcus Aurelius: CSA Interview + AWC SSI Reminder — Answers from the 1990’s Long Ignored…
Ethics, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Strategy
PDF (1 Page): (U) CSA Interview (Defense News, 28Oct13)-1
Interview
GEN. RAY ODIERNO
US Army Chief of Staff
Defense News 10/28/2013
At last week’s Association of the United States Army annual meeting and exposition in Washington, thousands gathered to hear senior leaders explain where the service is headed in this era of austerity. And the message from Gen. Ray Odierno, Army chief of staff, was one of frustration with uncertain budgets and automatic and inflexible defense cuts that are gutting readiness, with only two of his brigades ready for combat. The Army has been cutting personnel at a breakneck pace to save as much money as possible, given additional budget cuts are likely.
The Army is headed from a force of 570,000 soldiers, just a few years ago, down to 490,000. That number could get smaller, given sequestration is likely to continue and deeper reductions are expected over the coming months as part of a broader debt and spending deal.
Q. What is the real impact of past and future budget cuts on the force? Why are you so alarmed? And what is the way out of it?
