An early claim in the video is that DeBeers ran/has run the most successful fraudulent PR since Hollywood's “golden age” by getting everyone to think of diamonds as unique and rare to this day. “Blood diamonds” has been the more recent counter-message example that I can think of.
Eagle: GMO Toxins in 98% Unborn Babies
01 Agriculture, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, True Cost
GM food toxins found in the blood of 93% of unborn babies
By Sean Poulter
UK Daily Mail, 20 May 2013
GM firms claimed toxins were destroyed in the gut
Toxins implanted into GM food crops to kill pests are reaching the bloodstreams of women and unborn babies, alarming research has revealed.
A landmark study found 93 per cent of blood samples taken from pregnant women and 80 per cent from umbilical cords tested positive for traces of the chemicals.
Millions of acres in North and South America are planted with GM corn containing the toxins, which is fed in vast quantities to farm livestock around the world – including Britain.
However, it is now clear the toxins designed to kill crop pests are reaching humans and babies in the womb – apparently through food.
It is not known what, if any, harm this causes but there is speculation it could lead to allergies, miscarriage, abnormalities or even cancer.
To date the industry has always argued that if these toxins were eaten by animals or humans they would be destroyed in the gut and pass out of the body, thus causing no harm.
Food safety authorities in Britain and Europe have accepted these assurances on the basis that GM crops are effectively no different to those produced using conventional methods.
Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Three.
Crowd-Sourcing
Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Three.
Swarm Management: If the last chapter was about the first six to eight days of the swarm’s lifecycle, this chapter is about the first six to eight weeks.
While the effective swarm consists almost entirely of loosely-knit activists, there is a core of people – a scaffolding for the swarm – that requires a more formal organization. It is important to construct this scaffolding carefully, paying attention to known facts about how people work in social groups. Without it, the swarm has no focal point around which it can… well, swarm.
Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month
1. Understanding The Swarm
2. Launching Your Swarm
3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats (this chapter)
1. Understanding The Swarm
2. Launching Your Swarm
3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats (this chapter)
Tom Atlee: State Banks, Debt Renunciation, Other Populist Cures
03 Economy, 09 Justice, 11 Society
Dear friends,
Below is an excellent summary of a very high leverage economic system change opportunity – state banks. A single example already exists in the U.S: the little-known but revolutionary state-owned Bank of North Dakota.
State banks simultaneously address the problems of unemployment, lack of financial resources for state and local governments (including rising government debt), and the economic inequity generated by Wall Street's colonization of our economy.
The essay below also alerts us to the dangerous erosion of democracy represented by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement currently being negotiated behind closed doors.
State banks are no long term cure-all for the economic disruptions likely from climate change, resource depletion (especially peak oil), and various technological developments.* But they constitute a powerful sea change in our current economic business-as-usual, reducing dangerous concentrations of social power and buying us time to co-create more sustainable economics, politics and governance.
The article below features the work of Ellen Brown, who is showing up more and more in economic innovation circles, especially in efforts to revolutionize our financial systems. I've recently seen two other remarkable articles by her:
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: State Banks, Debt Renunciation, Other Populist Cures”
Reflections on Information Pathologies & Organizational Intelligence — Why Predictive Analytics on Industrial Era Data is Fraud, Waste, & Abuse
All Reflections & Story Boards, IO Impotency
Coherent, the Force is….
Restrictive Control and Information Pathologies in Organizations
Wolfgang Scholl* Humboldt-University, Berlin
Although the relation of power to knowledge is an often discussed theme, a psychological and sociological scrutiny of the issue is lacking. A new conceptual and theoretical approach to this issue is presented here that distingushes between restrictive and promotive control. Restrictive control is a form of power exertion in which one actor pushes his wishes through against the interests of another actor. In contrast, if an actor influences the other in line with his or her interests, this is called promotive control. Information pathologies, i.e., avoidable failures of distributed information processing, are introduced as an inverse measure for the quality and quantity of knowledge production. It is hypothesized that restrictive control has negative consequences for the production of new or better knowledge, because it induces information pathologies that in turn lower the effectiveness of joint action. These two hypotheses are tested in a study on 21 successful and 21 unsuccessful innovations with a dual qualitative and quantitative approach. The interpretive analysis of interviews with the main actors of each innovation case as well as the statistical analysis of questionnaire responses by the same actors strongly corroborate both hypotheses. Methodological problems, theoretical perspectives, and practical consequences are discussed. The second half of this century has seen the transition from industrial to informational societies.
The coming century will see communication and information processing becoming even more important for the handling of any issue in politics, in the economy, or in private affairs. The amount of information produced is I want to thank Irene H. Frieze and the anonymous reviewers for their many helpful comments as well as Iain S. Glen for improving my German English.
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wolfgang Scholl, Institute of Psychology, Humboldt-University, Oranienburger Str. 18, D-10178 Berlin, Germany [e-mail: wscholl@psychologie.hu-berlin.de].
Patrick Meier: Automatically Extracting Disaster-Relevant Information from Social Media
Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial
Automatically Extracting Disaster-Relevant Information from Social Media
My team and I at QCRI have just had this paper (PDF) accepted at the World Wide Web (WWW 2013) conference in Rio next month. The paper relates directly to our Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response (AIDR) project. One of our main missions at QCRI is to develop open source and freely available next generation humanitarian technologies to better manage Big (Crisis) Data. Over 20 million tweets and half-a-million Instagram pictures were posted during Hurricane Sandy, for example. In Japan, more 2,000 tweets were posted every second the day after the devastating earthquake and Tsunami struck the Eastern Coast. Recent empirical studies have shown that an important percentage of tweets posted during disaster are informative and even actionable. The challenge before is how to find those proverbial needles in the haystack and to do so in as close to real-time as possible.
So we analyzed disaster tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy (2012) and the Joplin Tornado (2011). We demonstrate that disaster-relevant information can be automatically extracted from these datasets. The results indicate that 40% to 80% of tweets that contain disaster-related information can be automatically detected. We also demonstrate that we can correctly identify the type of disaster information 80% to 90% of the time. Because these classifiers are developed using machine learning, they get more accurate with more data. This explains why we are building AIDR. Our aim is not to replace human involvement and oversight but to significantly lessen the load on humans.
Nick Eftimiades: New Course Intellience & National Security in the Undiscovered County
Academia, Ethics, Government
New King’s College Course on Intelligence and National Security
Posted by neftimiades on March 31, 2013
Posted in: espionage, future, intelligence, national security, security, technology. Tagged: future, futurism, intelligence, national security, security. Leave a Comment
This is a new graduate course I will be teaching for King’s College War Studies Department beginning autumn, 2013. The course is called Intelligence & National Security in the Undiscovered Country . It will be a 20 credit Master’s Degree course on the future of intelligence and national security. The course description is DRAFT.
Module Description:
Consider for a moment the words of William Shakespeare who characterized our fear of the future in Hamlet. “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of” Hamlet tells us that it is better to suffer the ills of the day than to travel to the Undiscovered Country. What will the future bring for intelligence and national security and are we prepared for it?
The concept of a nation state is changing. Globalization, regional alliances, global and regional environmental and economic issues, telecommunications, changing demographics, and integrating social value systems are altering the nation state. The idea of what it means to “defend ourselves” decades from now will be dramatically different from what it is today. New constructs for national security necessitate new intelligence and military capabilities. Defending a nation may become an exercise in cyber warfare, global policing functions, nation building and support, small unit combat operations, and exerting diplomatic, political, and economic influence. As the emphasis in national security capabilities changes so too will the intelligence functions supporting them.
