The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Jonathan Keats, conceptual artist and experimental philosopher, reminds us that the heart of progress resides within the curious amateur: those of us who are not encumbered or restrained by the rigidity and dogma of professionalization. This important fact is often forgotten and/or actively suppressed in technocratic plutocracies where the cult of the expert serves to disempower the public.
Oversight: Crowdsourcing the NSA's surveillance programs
Geek comedian Tom Scott imagines citizen volunteers accessing the real-time data store of spy agencies to help keep the country safe.
Imagine that the NSA and the U.K.'s GCHQ opened their databases and tools to public volunteers to aid them in the search for terrorists. Tom Scott, who is described as a British geek comedian, programmer, and presenter, produced a video, “Oversight: Thank you for volunteering, citizen,” that imagines ordinary citizens accessing the databases of everything about everyone to assist governments in their surveillance activities.
Scott's “Oversight” program lets ordinary citizens click on potential threats as they are logged, such as an e-mail with the words “blowing things up” in it; view the information; and add information to spy agency databases.
Who Are They? What Do They Want? Why Do They Fight?
This paper presents the results of 78 in-depth interviews conducted with self-identified Afghan insurgents. If the interviewees are indeed representative of broader Taliban sentiments, then the future of Afghanistan is grim. It appears that only the return of a ‘pious’ Islamic government will satisfy them.
Download: English (PDF · 84 pages · 1.0 MB)
Author: Andrew Garfield, Alicia Boyd
Series: FPRI Monographs and Essays Issue: 3
Now Two States Pursue Truly Affordable Education
Maryland may soon join Oregon in exploring solutions to the crisis of student debt and unaffordable education.
Education is supposed to be a human right. But the United States puts people into deep debt to pay for it. Short of taxing billionaires or dismantling bombers (both of which we're all, I hope, working on), what's the solution?
The state of Oregon has passed a law creating a commission to study a plan called “Pay it forward. Pay it back.” See Katrina vanden Heuvel: An Oregon Trail to End Student Debt.
This is not a plan to make education truly free, and that would probably be ideal. But this is not, I think, a step that would move us away from that goal — in the way that strengthening but tweaking the private health insurance system arguably moves us away from a single-payer solution.
This is, however, a plan that makes college tuition at state universities initially free.
Continue reading “David Swanson: Two US States Focus on Free/Affordable Education”
Radical Visualization of Photos Posted to Instagram During Hurricane Sandy
This data visualization (click to enlarge) displays more than 23,500 photos taken in Brooklyn and posted to Instagram during Hurricane Sandy. A picture’s distance from the center (radius) corresponds to its mean hue while a picture’s position along the perimeter (angle) corresponds to the time that picture was taken. ”Note the demarcation line that reveals the moment of a power outage in the area and indicates the intensity of the shared experience (dramatic decrease in the number of photos, and their darker colors to the right of the line)” (1).
Read full article with additional graphics.
Phi Beta Iota: Each dot is an actual photograph with time and space tag. It is the first step toward streaming video from aggregated individual hand-held camera shots.
Posted: 02 Aug 2013 04:47 PM PDT
After a record setting year and an exciting conference season, no one can argue that open source is on the rise with no immediate signs of stopping. JavaWorld is in agreement and covers the latest open source news in their article, “Open Source Races to the Top.”
Their story begins:
“Last week’s OSCON conference served to remind us that open source software is setting the pace. We’ve come a very long way from the old saw that ‘open source doesn’t innovate.’ Instead, you might ask: Is innovation in enterprise software happening anywhere else other than in open source land?”
Open source is leading in innovation, but OSCON helped to prove that open source leads in other areas as well. From security to implementation to cost-effectiveness, open source leaders like LucidWorks are proving that open source is the total package. LucidWorks products can be implemented on-site, in the Cloud, or in a hybrid format. LucidWorks marries the best of open source with what organizations see as the safety and security of proprietary, and customers are very satisfied.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 7, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
The Washington Jerkocracy Strikes Again
