Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2132 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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America’s Threat-Centric [Lie-Based] Education System: Out of Date and Out of Time

“History is a story. That’s why we fight over history. We make sense of ourselves, the world and ourselves in the world through the struggle to tell the truth through stories. Facts have to be contextualised to become the truth. And that truth is a struggle that is constantly fought over. It is not given. And telling stories helps to create debate about that truth. That is why working people should tell their stories. Truth is a class issue. I would appeal to all your readers, especially to young ones, to make their own political films; shoot interviews, especially with older comrades, and dare to express themselves on the screen. Film making is for everybody. I would be looking at the new technologies. They are disruptive and a problem in capitalist society…That’s why they want to close down the Internet if they can. Politicians don’t like allowing people to communicate anonymously with each other. They want to restrain freedom … But still for a while there is a window of opportunity and freedom. They monitor you, but don’t yet stop you. That will come, of course…[But] it’s where people ought to be, where creative people and political people ought to be.” Tony Garnett interviewed by the editors of WSWS

How can young people be encouraged and coached to narrate a “true” history of their lives and times in the world—and the events, people and geography that influence them—for the bulk of their literate existence (i.e., 21st Century literate to include visual and technological literacy)?

Continue reading “4th Media: America’s Threat-Centric [Lie-Based] Education System: Out of Date and Out of Time”

2013/10/282013/10/28

SmartPlanet: Global wind power expected to skyrocket

05 Energy, Earth Intelligence

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Global wind power expected to skyrocket

You might have seen more wind farms popping up over the last few years, but wind energy still only accounts for a small percentage of global electricity production. According to a new report from the International Energy Agency, wind power generates only 2.6 percent of the world’s electricity, but that number is expected to grow significantly over the next few decades.

Continue reading “SmartPlanet: Global wind power expected to skyrocket”

2013/10/28

Stephen E. Arnold: Search Squared + How Amazon Rules

Advanced Cyber/IO

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Search Wizards Speak: Oleg Rogynskyy, Semantria

Semantria focuses on a class of problems that a few years ago would have been outside the reach of many firms. He said:

We make it simple for our clients to solve the following problems: First, some organizations have too much text to read. For example, a Twitter stream or surveys with many responses. Also, there is the need to move quickly and reduce the time to get to market. Many survey results come with an expiry date before they’re irrelevant. Then there is reporting the information. Anyone can use their Excel smarts to build simple/interesting reports and visuals out of unstructured data. But that can take some time, and Semantria accelerates this step. Finally, users need to analyze text with the same impartiality each time. A human might see a glass as half full or half empty, but Semantria will always see a glass with water.

Changing the Approach to Enterprise Search: Horse First

The greatest issue is when there is a growing crevasse between the wealth of information and findability.

Amazon and Its Money Losing Model

The former employee then offers this observation or is it a threat?

If I were an Amazon competitor, I’d actually regard Amazon’s current run of quarterly losses as a terrifying signal. It means Amazon is arming itself to take the contest to higher ground. The retail game is about to become more, not less, punishing.

All three articles in full text with links below the line.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Search Squared + How Amazon Rules”

2013/10/282013/10/28

Patrick Meier: Second-Order Eyewitnesses — Twitter, Open Sources, and the Information Revolution the US Intelligence Community Refused to Think About….

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency

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Automatically Identifying Eyewitness Reporters on Twitter During Disasters

My colleague Kate Starbird recently shared a very neat study entitled “Learning from the Crowd: Collaborative Filtering Techniques for Identifying On-the-Ground Twitterers during Mass Disruptions” (PDF). As she and her co-authors rightly argue, “most Twitter activity during mass disruption events is generated by the remote crowd.” So can we use advanced computing to rapidly identify Twitter users who are reporting from ground zero? The answer is yes.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Second-Order Eyewitnesses — Twitter, Open Sources, and the Information Revolution the US Intelligence Community Refused to Think About….”

2013/10/28

Chuck Spinney: Strategy? Or Stupidity on a Grand Scale?

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Officers Call, Strategy

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Professor Brenner gave me permission to distribute and post the attached essay. Without saying so, he describes a way that seems tailor-made to systematically violate just about all the criteria for a sensible grand strategy.

Chuck Spinney

The Blaster

27 OCTOBER 2013

NSA DOES THE GRAND TOUR

by Michael Brenner, PhD

Professor of International Affairs

University of Pittsburgh

mbren@pitt.edu

NSA returned to center stage last week thanks to revelations that it has tapped the phones of European leaders. The resulting ruckus raises three questions: why? how far will the targeting governments go in demanding redress? how will Washington respond? In considering them, I look at the political/psychological underpinnings of the Euro-Americans relationship.

2013/10/28

SchwartzReport: The Rapid Decline of the USA

Communities of Practice, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

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For someone of my age who grew up at a time when America was viewed by the world as a society to be emulated, the last 30 years have been very painful. So painful, I think, that rather than face the truth we tell ourselves lies. Politicians, from the President on down engage in systematic lying about the truth of American society today. Here's some truth.

Can You Guess the 10 Best Countries For Women? Hint: the U.S. Isn't One of Them
JODIE GUMMOW – AlterNet (U.S.)

The report, which ranks 136 countries, determines its findings across four primary areas including economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, political empowerment and health and survival, ranking the United States 23 rd on the list for 2013, HuffPost reported.

We are metaphorically eating our young. This report about homeless students is the kind of thing one expects to read about a third world country.

The Number Of Homeless Students In The United States Hits A Record
SCOTT KEYES – Think Progress

During the 2011-12 school year, there were 1,168,354 homeless students enrolled in preschool or K-12, a 10 percent increase over the previous year. A total of 55.5 million students were enrolled in preschool or K-12 that year, meaning nearly 2 percent of all students were homeless.

This brain drain trend started about 18 months ago and, as this report describes, is gaining momentum. This is the other end that begins with homeless students.

Brain Drain: Funding and Industry Leave America, Followed by Top Minds
PATRICK HENNINGSEN, Investigative Journalist – RT (Russia)

Two fundamental building blocks for any modern technological, progressive economy are discovery research and scientific investigation. By their nature, these two pursuits carry a much slower return on the investment. In the past, the US could afford to be patient because its thriving industrial sector was a magnet for the word’s talent and investment – which is why successive governments have routinely placed their dollars there. That engine which used to power the US juggernaut has been disassembled and shipped overseas.

I have more and more readers writing me to tell me about poverty that they are observing or, sometimes, experiencing.

Billionaires’ Row and Welfare Lines
CHARLES M. BLOW – The New York Times

This disconnecting is particularly acute among young people. Measure of America, a project of the Social Science Research Council, recently released a study finding that a staggering 5.8 million young people nationwide – one in seven of those ages 16 to 24 – are disconnected, meaning not employed or in school, ‘adrift at society’s margins,” as the group put it.