DARPA is working on an embryonic project that would store your every verbal conversation on an Internet server, creating a searchable chat database that would represent the ultimate privacy killer.
Having failed to establish its infamous Total Information Awareness system, although the project was continued under numerous different guises, DARPA is attempting to create a world in which your every utterance is stored in perpetuity.
But don’t worry, the servers on which your conversations are stored will be owned by the individual or their employer, and the government promises to never access the information using their vast new $2 billion dollar spying hub in the middle of the Utah desert. Honest.
This is the latest on an important downward trend: the collapse of American media. A healthy Fourth Estate is essential to the running of a healthy democracy. I have written about this a number of times in the past, but this trend is gaining momentum, and should be of concern to every citizen.
This is the best assessment of the distorted behavior of Washington corporate media I have seen in some time. It explains why it is almost impossible, when you turn on the television, or open your paper, to get serious substantive news from American reporters, particularly those within the Beltway of Washington. And why I get so many of the reports I use in SR from overseas sources.
You are cordially invited to attend the 2013 Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference (OLKC) April 25-27, 2013 in Washington, D.C., USA. The OLKC annual conference provides a meeting point for those interested in the field and offers an excellent opportunity for leading scholars, young researchers, and scholar-practitioners to profit from discussion and lively exchange of ideas related to their theory, research and practice. Approximately 200 participants from all over the world are expected to attend this conference. The venue of the conference will be located at the GWU historic Foggy Bottom Campus in the heart of Washington, DC.
Keynote Speaker
We are pleased to announce our keynote speaker: Dr. Barbara Czarniawska. Dr. Czarniawska is Professor and Chair of Management Studies at Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Business, Economics and Law.
Theme
The theme of the OLKC 2013 Conference is: Translation, Transition & Transmission. The theme builds upon scholarly conversations around the dimensions of social knowledge and learning including translation, or how we interpret knowledge, transition, which involves evolution and recombination processes, and transmission, the dissemination and diffusion of knowledge across time and space. These dimensions of learning assist us in framing and exploring three key questions: how do we relate to each other, how do we know, and how do we socially integrate. This scholarly exploration has the potential to further serve as a foundation for translational research and transdisciplinary lines of inquiry to advance theory and research on social knowledge and learning and its impact on practice.
Forbes, Feb. 20, 2013: […] Last week one of the authors of the study from last year, Daniel J. Madigan from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station—along with five other scientists— published a new follow-up study. The main question that this new study wanted to answer: Would the migratory Bluefin tuna show up again a year later off the coast of California carrying radiation from Fukushima? The answer was yes. That means, ultimately, that there is still a high level of radiation in the waters near the Fukushima plant most likely because, as marine chemist, Ken Buessler, asserts, the plant is still leaking radiation into the ocean nearly two years later. […]
After the North American governments refused to fund testing, oceanographer Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the non-profit Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass, along with Nicholas Fisher, a marine sciences professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and other concerned scientists, managed to secure private funding for a Pacific research voyage. The results?
Cesium levels in the Pacific had initially gone up an astonishing 45 million times above pre-accident levels. The levels then declined rapidly for a while, but after that, they unexpectedly levelled off.
In July, cesium levels stopped declining and remained stuck at 10,000 times above pre-accident levels.
This means the ocean isn’t diluting the radiation as expected. If it had been, cesium levels would have kept falling.
The finding suggests that radiation is still being released into the ocean long after the accident in March, 2011.
FREE: Digital copy of the book to anyone willing to arrange for its translation into any language (already in Chinese), and posting to Amazon as a book in that language. Keep the money. Spread the ideas.
This is the core graphic I created several years ago when I realized that the mainstream focus on open source software and open data was neglecting everything else. Open Source Everything is the most powerful politicl, economic, and social concept we have, in my view. We need to go “all in” on all the opens, simultaneously.
Open Source is the only approach — human or technical — that is affordable, interoperable, and scaleable. It makes no sense, for example, to worship at the altar of Open Data if this is merely feeding very large and generally predatory commercial proprietary software empires that extract licensing and maintenance fees while also mutating and migrating Application Program Interfaces (API) to block natural evalution within the Open Source Ecology.
I apologize for the book not being free online in English (it is available for foreign language translation and those eversions will be free online). I accepted a publishing company and do not regret that decision because the editor, Kathy Green, cut the book in half, removed one syllable from most words, and generally added magic to the book that was beyond my means. It also put the book in bookstores via Random House.
GIVE THIS BOOK AWAY! Random House Special Markets will sell heavily discounted cases of the book, consider inserting your corporate sticker and then handing the book out at hacker or other special events. Call: Director, Premium Sales: 1-212-572-2329 General Inquiry: 1-800-800-3246
No Extracts Provided from”Epilogue: My Conversion Experience”
TRANSLATE THIS BOOK
The translation rights are mine. Volunteers are working on Chinese, French, and Spanish versions that will be free online. A commercial German edition is under discussion. Translated chapters will be posted here at Phi Beta Iota as they become available, and translators are publicly recognized for their gift of labor to us all.
I would be honored to be invited to visit any group in person or via Skype. Here is my bio page, my email is at the bottom of that page.
Apart from this specific concept for uplifting humanity and moving us all forward in creating a prosperous world at peace, I am very interested in helping any individual or organization or country advance their capabilities of holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering.
I can also speak to any of the 98 categories in which I review non-fiction books at Amazon, and will happily engage as an individual (not as a non-profit CEO) in political discussions including what I learned from my six-week run as a candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination in 2012.
The tale of what is going on in Syria reads something like this: an insurgency active since March 2011 has been funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and allowed to operate out of Turkey with the sometimes active, but more often passive, connivance of a number of Western powers, including Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. The intention was to overthrow the admittedly dictatorial Bashar al-Assad quickly and replace him with a more representative government composed largely of Syrians-in-exile drawn from the expat communities in Europe and the United States. The largely ad hoc political organization that was the counterpart to the Free Syrian Army ultimately evolved into the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (Syrian National Coalition) in November 2012, somewhat reminiscent of Ahmad Chalabi and the ill-starred Iraqi National Congress. As in the lead-up to regime change in Iraq, the exiles successfully exploited anti-Syrian sentiment among leading politicians in Washington and Europe while skillfully manipulating the media narrative to suggest that the al-Assad regime was engaging in widespread atrocities and threatening to destabilize its neighbors, most notably Lebanon. As in the case of Iraq, Syria’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was introduced into the indictment of al-Assad and cited as a regional threat.
If there was a model for what was planned for Syria it must have been the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or possibly the United Nations-endorsed armed intervention in Libya in 2010, both of which intended to replace dictatorial regimes with Western-style governments that would at least provide a simulacrum of accountable popular rule. But the planners must have anticipated a better outcome. Both Libya and Iraq have become more destabilized than they were under their autocrats, a fact that appears to have escaped everyone’s notice. It did not take long for the wheels to fall off the bus in Syria as well. As in Iraq, the Syrian exiles had no real constituency within their homeland, which meant that the already somewhat organized resistance to al-Assad, consisting of the well-established Muslim Brotherhood and associated groups, came to the fore. Al-Assad, who somewhat credibly has described[1] the rebels as terrorists supported by foreign governments, did not throw in the towel and leave. The Turkish people, meanwhile, began to turn sour[2] on a war which seemed endless, was creating a huge refugee and security problem as Kurdish terrorists mixed in with the refugees, and was increasingly taking on the shape of a new jihad as foreign volunteers began to assume responsibility for most of the fighting.
