Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2269 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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How can content curation be used in education to support and enhance the development of new media literacy skills? Paul Mihailidis from the Department of Marketing Communication at Emerson College in tandem with James N Cohen from the School of Communication at Hofstra University, have outlined six different ways in which content curation can be utilized as a key methodology to develop critical thinking, analysis and communication skills. Their analysis is based on the actual use of Storify, a content curation tool, for specific educational objectives. Useful as a reference framework for introducing content curation within pedagogical programmes. 8/10

Abstract: In today's hypermedia landscape, youth and young adults are increasingly using social media platforms, online aggregators and mobile applications for daily information use. Communication educators, armed with a host of free, easy-to-use online tools, have the ability to create dynamic approaches to teaching and learning about information and communication flow online. In this paper we explore the concept of curation as a student- and creation-driven pedagogical tool to enhance digital and media literacy education. We present a theoretical justification for curation and present six key ways that curation can be used to teach about critical thinking, analysis and expression online. We utilize a case study of the digital curation platform Storify to explore how curation works in the classroom, and present a framework that integrates curation pedagogy into core media literacy education learning outcomes.

Teaching Points (expanded upon in cited work):

Teaching point #1 – Where top down and bottom up meet

Teaching point #2 – Integrating mediums, messages, platforms

Teaching point #3 – Sources, voices, and credibility online

Teaching point #4 – Framing, bias, agenda and perspective

Teaching point #5 – Appreciating diversity

Teaching point #6 – Empowering civic values and civic voices

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2013/07/172013/07/17

Patrick Meier: Disaster Response Plugin for Online Games

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial

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Disaster Response Plugin for Online Games

The Internet Response League (IRL) was recently launched for online gamers to participate in supporting disaster response operations. A quick introduction to IRL is available here. Humanitarian organizations are increasingly turning to online volunteers to filter through social media reports (e.g. tweets, Instagram photos) posted during disasters. Online gamers already spend millions of hours online every day and could easily volunteer some of their time to process crisis information without ever having to leave the games they’re playing.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Read full article.

2013/07/172013/07/17

Eagle: NSA Reason for Existence — Is It To Snoop? Or Is It to Waste Tens of Billions of Dollars without Accountability?

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

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300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

NSA Snooping: The War on Terror Is America's Mania

A Commentary By Klaus Brinkbäumer

The NSA spying scandal shows that America's pursuit of terrorists has turned into a mania. Spying on citizens is as monstrous and unlawful as Guantanamo Bay and drone warfare. The German government's response has been woefully weak.

America is sick. September 11 left it wounded and unsettled — that's been obvious for nearly 12 years — but we are only now finding out just how grave the illness really is. The actions of the NSA exposed more than just the telephone conversations and digital lives of many millions of people. The global spying scandal shows that the US has become manic, that it is behaving pathologically, invasively. Its actions are entirely out of proportion to the danger.

Read full article (see also reader comments).

Continue reading “Eagle: NSA Reason for Existence — Is It To Snoop? Or Is It to Waste Tens of Billions of Dollars without Accountability?”

2013/07/17

Neal Rauhauser: Are Syrian and Iraqi Conflicts Merging? Is Iran Gaining a Corridor to the Mediterranean?

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Terrorism

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UN envoy: Iraq and Syrian conflicts are merging

That headline appeared in my inbox earlier and I have been dreading it. The Syrian civil war has spilled over into Lebanon, it’s encroaching on Turkey’s territory, and it’s set off troubles in neighboring Iraq, which are now merging into an end to end regional threat.

Let’s take a look at how things got this way. The Ottoman empire laid claim to Syria and Iraq between 1512 and 1566.

Phi Beta Iota: A well illustrated historical overview with an itemization of current country by country one liners.

2013/07/17

Winslow Wheeler: Global Hawk Corruption — Two Deep Looks

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Military

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Global Hawk (Block 30), one of the more obvious vampires sucking money out of the defense budget, has been disinterred from its coffin by corporate go-fers in Congress. The story of this high cost, low performance drone makes obvious that filibuster abuse and political dogmatism are not the only problems in Congress. Two really excellent pieces of work explain the gruesome details.

Aram Roston at the Defense News series of publications published on July 15 an excellent summary of the issues. Find the article and some useful side box material at http://www.airforcetimes.com/article/20130715/NEWS04/307150015/The-battle-over-Global-Hawk. Kudos to the editors at Defense News for allowing their corporate-ad-populated publication to release this excellent example of highly independent journalistic professionalism.

Richard Sia and Alexander Cohen at the Center for Public Integrity released on July 16 their own analysis, also truly excellent, that dives deep into the issues, especially the corruption surrounding Congress' action on Global Hawk/Block 30. Find it, also with important side-material and links, at http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/07/16/12969/huge-drone-could-not-be-grounded.

As an aside, I note that the CPI piece briefly cites Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), my representative in Congress last year, who “played a key role in blocking the retirement of Block 30 [Global Hawk].” Bartlett is also quoted in the CPI piece lecturing Members of Congress for putting pork above the national interest. Bartlett somehow forgot to mention that there is a significant Northrop-Grumman facility in his district, just a few miles from my house in Hagerstown, MD. But surely, that had nothing to do with his support for their product. Right.

An embodiment of all that is wrong with institutions like the House Armed Services Committee, where he presided over a major subcommittee, Bartlett was involuntarily retired in the 2012 elections.

2013/07/172013/07/18

Chuck Spinney: Larry Summers to the Fed?

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy

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The Return of Lawrence Summers, Mr. Spectacular Failure

Robert Scheer

Tell me it’s a sick joke: Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, the guy who tops the list of those responsible for sabotaging the world’s economy, is lobbying to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. But no, it makes perfect sense, since Summers has long succeeded spectacularly by failing.

Why should his miserable record in the Clinton and Obama administrations hold him back from future disastrous adventures at our expense? With Ben Bernanke set to step down in January, and Obama still in deep denial over the pain and damage his former top economic adviser Summers brought to tens of millions of Americans, this darling of Wall Street has yet another shot to savage the economy.

Stupid, Sexists, Sleazy -- What's Not to Like? — Stupid, Sexist, Sleazy — What's Not to Like?

Summers was one of the key players during the Clinton years in creating the mortgage derivative bubble that ended up costing tens of millions of Americans their homes and life savings. This is the genius who, as Clinton’s Treasury secretary, supported the banking lobby’s successful effort to make the sale of unregulated bundles of mortgage securities and the phony insurance swaps that backed them perfectly legal and totally unmonitored. Those are the toxic bundles that the Federal Reserve is still unloading from the banks at a cost of trillions of dollars.

But back on July 30, 1998, when he was deputy Treasury secretary, Summers assured the Senate agriculture committee that the “thriving” derivatives market was the driving force of American prosperity and would be fatally hurt by any government regulation of the sort proposed by Brooksley Born, the stunningly prescient chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Summers opined that “the parties to these kinds of contracts are largely sophisticated financial institutions that would appear to be eminently capable of protecting themselves from fraud and counterparty insolvencies. … ”

Consider the astounding stupidity of that statement and the utter ignorance upon which it was based. One financial CEO after another has testified to not knowing how the derivatives were created and why their worth evaporated. Think of AIG and the other marketers of these products that were saved from disaster only by the injection of government funds not available to foreclosed homeowners whose mortgages were wrapped into those toxic securities.

Read full article.

2013/07/172013/07/17

SchwartzReport: Reuters Exposed

Corruption, Media

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Part of the reason nothing is being done about climate change is the naked bias of some of the major corporate media institutions. This story is particularly pernicious, because Reuters is not a single newspaper, or television station but, like the Associated Press, a service used by almost all newspapers.

Reuters Exposed: Publication Openly Hostile To Climate Coverage, Top Editor Doubts Climate Science
KILEY KROH – Climate Progress