The Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington, DC is now accepting applications for the position of 2013-2014 Yahoo! Fellow in Residence. The fellowship is supported by the Yahoo! International Values, Communications Technology, and Global Internet Fellowship Fund, which was established in 2007-08 at the School of Foreign Services (SFS) at Georgetown University with the help of a $1 million gift from Yahoo! Inc. Every year, the fund supports one fellow attached to the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD) and two junior fellows from the MSFS graduate program at SFS to do research on how international values apply to the development and use of new communications technologies. Additional information can be found on the Institute's website using the following links:
Published on Apr 17, 2012. This is the first half of an Occupy Chapel Hill Teach-In presentation by Dr. Sally Goerner with Mayor Randy Voller entitled Rethinking Capitalism: Replacing Trickledown with Healthy Networks. Examples of Democratic Free-Enterprise Networks (DFENs) and their deployment are illustrated.
Published on Apr 19, 2012. This is the second half of an Occupy Chapel Hill Teach-In presentation by Dr. Sally Goerner with Mayor Randy Voller entitled Rethinking Capitalism: Replacing trickledown with Healthy Networks. Examples of Democratic Free-Enterprise Networks (DFENs) and their deployment are illustrated.
Each session has a Cisco WebEx link for remote participation: enter your First Name, Last Name (surname), e-mail address, and the password: wsis – For technical problems, send a message to: assistance.wsis@gmail.com or call or text +33 (0)7 88 56 94 00.
As I understand it, the fundamental problem with secret intelligence is too much self-reference and too little peer review. Stated differently, any advice from a subordinate to a superior has two components — describing some observed system and wanting to please the boss. Peer review also has the usual human flaws but works pretty well in the academic community. Peer review, which requires openness/ transparency/ honesty, is a way of testing descriptions. Too little peer review and the self-serving aspects of advice-giving can seriously distort advice and over time the conceptual frames used to interpret events.
Now add in covert operations, including white, gray, and black propaganda, well-developed methods of regime change, assassination, etc. and one has a very potent, largely unregulated bureaucracy within the govt. Where is the oversight? To preserve secrecy the oversight must be internal, carried out by the honesty and patriotism of the participants and through political appointments. But organizations, as well as individuals, develop their own views and may feel that oversight, or a change in policy from the top, is uninformed, naive, misguided. The intelligence community may then decide to take matters into its own hands. Does this description adequately explain the “Bay of Pigs” events?
Some secret intelligence will probably always be part of politics, but certainly the vast majority should be open and subject to peer review. I think a “systems analysis” of intelligence operations would be helpful. The attached memo provides some larger context.
THE ROLE OF CYBERNETICS IN SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SECURITY POLICY
By Stuart Umpleby
I am representing the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) in the AAAS Consortium of Affiliates for Security Policy (CASP). I speak for myself, but as a past president of the Society and a member of the Board of Trustees for several years, I think my views are similar to those of other members of the ASC. Before I address the questions that were posed to CASP members, let me first provide some history on the field of cybernetics. A series of ten conferences on “circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems” was held in New York City in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When Norbert Wiener published his book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, the conferees adopted “cybernetics” as a shorter title. Although the early applications of cybernetics were in electrical engineering, computer science, and robotics, more recent applications have been in psychotherapy, management and the philosophy of science. Current research at meetings of the American Society for Cybernetics usually focuses on second order information activities, e.g., studies of the process of design, the management of high performing research teams, conceptions of how to regulate the global economy, and suggestions to improve science policy by studying the history of the development of ideas.
Yahoo Business & Human Rights Program, Friday, September 28th, 2012
Change Your World (Cambia Tu Mundo), Yahoo!’s Business & Human Rights Summit that took place on September 12th and 13th in Mexico City is an excellent example of what I mean. For a day and a half, women from different countries, backgrounds and experiences in Latin America shared their dreams, lives, challenges and proved that new technologies and the Internet are incomparable tools of empowerment.
I won´t go over the event’s program nor the participants. (Links to them are available here and here). What I want to do is highlight the wonderful lessons I learned after participating in Change Your World.
1. Women are a driving force towards equality in the world. Yes, women represent not only 50% of the world population, they represent half of the idea and proposal creators. Many don´t know it, but new technologies can help them be heard and allow their proposals and ideas to be included in the development and prosperity of their communities, countries…. and therefore… of the planet.
2. Digital literacy of women in Latin America must be considered a priority for policy makers. Even though Spanish is the third most important language on the Internet with 182,379,220 users, there is lack of content created and written in it. If you add the lack of women´s voices as content creators in the region, the figures are worrisome. We cannot allow nor permit the addition of this marginalization to the many other kinds of marginalization women face (education, health, financial, justice and so on).
3. Women and the Internet can be a creative explosion. Throughout the sessions one thing was absolutely clear: the participants demonstrated in various and creative ways how the Internet can be used to support not only good causes, but very practical economic, social and political outcomes. The Internet can be a democratization tool to help build and consolidate new realities where women´s interests and needs can be not only expressed but included.
FA: What lessons did you learn in your Iraq and Afghanistan tours?
SM: In Iraq, when we first started, the question was, “Where is the enemy?” That was the intelligence question. As we got smarter, we started to ask, “Who is the enemy?” And we thought we were pretty clever. And then we realized that wasn't the right question, and we asked, “What's the enemy doing or trying to do?” And it wans't until we got further along that we said, “Why are they the enemy?”
General Stanley McChrystal, USA (Ret.)
On drones:
SM: And although to the United States, a drone strike seems to have very little risk and very little pain, at the receiving end, it feels like war. Americans have got to understand that. If we were to use our technological capabilities carelessly–I don't think we do, but there's always the danger that you will–then we should not be upset when someon responds with their equivalent, which is a suicide bomb in Central Park, because that's what they can respond with.
And further on:
SM: The whole point of war is to take care of people, not just to kill them. You have to have a positive reason that protects people or it's wrong.
And also:
SM: But if you go back in history, I can't find a covert fix that solved a problem long term.
Analysis of the educational background of those engaged in the selection of the new Pope
Explanation
The election of a successor to Pope Benedict XVI in March 2013 raises the question as to the range of “disciplines” which might be called upon (or valued) by the members of the College of Cardinals, namely by those cardinals recognized as being allowed to engage in the selection process.
The following table is an extract from that presented in Wikipedia (Sortable list of living cardinals). For this purpose, the list has been sorted by ascending age in order to enable exclusion of those members of the College of Cardinals who cannot engage in the electoral process of the Papal Conclave.
