EXTRACT from today's HONG (email only, not online or indexed by intent):
The big news is the emergence of open source search options. Until recently, open source search was not main stream. Today, open source search solutions are main stream. IBM relies on Lucene/Solr for some of its search functions. IBM also owns Web Fountain, STAIRS, iPhrase, Vivisimo, and the SPSS Clementine technology, among others. IBM is interesting because it has used open source search technology to reduce costs and tap into a source of developer talent. Attivio, a company which just raised $42 million in additional venture funding, relies on open source search.
We have completed an analysis of a dozen of the most interesting open source search vendors for a big time consulting firm. What struck the ArnoldIT research team was:
One of the advantages of working at QCRI is that I’m regularly exposed to peer-reviewed papers presented at top computing conferences. This is how I came across an initiative called “Seriously Rapid Source Review” or SRSR. As many iRevolution readers know, I’m very interested in information forensics as applied to crisis situations. So SRSR certainly caught my attention.
The team behind SRSR took a human centered design approach in order to integrate journalistic practices within the platform. There are four features worth noting in this respect. The first feature to note in the figure below is the automated filter function, which allows one to view tweets generated by “Ordinary People,” “Journalists/Bloggers,” “Organizations,” “Eyewitnesses” and “Uncategorized.”
The second feature, Location, “shows a set of pie charts indica-ting the top three locations where the user’s Twitter contacts are located. This cue provides more location information and indicates whether the source has a ‘tie’ or other personal interest in the location of the event, an aspect of sourcing exposed through our preliminary interviews and suggested by related work.”
ROBERT SHARPE, Policy Analyst, Common Sense for Drug Policy – The Baltimore Sun
This is the truth that is becoming increasingly apparent.
WASHINGTON — If the goal of marijuana prohibition is to subsidize Mexican drug cartels, prohibition is a success (“The nonsense of marijuana busts shown,” Nov. 11). The drug war distorts supply and demand dynamics so that big money grows on little trees. There is a reason you don't see drug cartels sneaking into national forests to cultivate tomatoes and cucumbers. They cannot compete with legitimate farmers.
If the goal of marijuana prohibition is to deter use, prohibition is a failure. The United States has double the rate of marijuana use as the Netherlands, where marijuana is legally available. Spain legalized personal use cultivation and has lower rates of use. Portugal decriminalized all drugs and still has lower rates of use than the U.S. If anything, marijuana prohibition increases use by creating forbidden fruit appeal.
Thanks to honest public education, tobacco use has declined, without any need to criminalize smokers or imprison tobacco farmers. This drop in the use of one of the most addictive drugs available has occurred despite widespread tobacco availability. The only clear winners in the war on marijuana are drug cartels and shameless tough-on-drugs politicians who've built careers confusing the drug war's collateral damage with a plant.
Special Comment: Feedback from brilliant Readers conveys concern that Israel is presented as justified in its retaliation and not as the instigator of the latest round of attack exchanges.
In the NightWatch experience, causality takes about 20 years to determine with any confidence. Survival in the neighborhood requires that the intelligence and special operations forces of all parties constantly are at work all the time. Thus, escalation is always a political decision, often related to political maneuverings and calculations in Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Iran or Israel that cannot be known from open source channels.
Both sides of this conflict are fighting as they must or can. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and others Palestinian groups have no weapons to attack Israel except rockets. As for Israel, the day it fails to fight asymmetrically, that is the day it submits to national suicide. Asymmetrical tactics have nothing to do with justice.
Conflicts often bring clarity to political struggles. The US has unequivocally backed Israel's right of self-defense, which implies endorsement of the Israeli interpretation of events. However, a look into the exchanges of attacks in September and October and earlier clouds the determination of who shot first.
For NightWatch that question is less interesting than what comes next. This is the first major combat action between Arabs and Israelis since the Arab Spring uprisings changed governments in Tunisia, Egypt and, arguably, Libya. New Arab governments will be judged on their reaction to it.
It contains ominous portents because Hamas would have been reluctant, if not unable, to engage Israel in this fashion were Mubarak still in power in Egypt. It has rallied Muslims of all sects and ethnicities, and as far away as Malaysia and Indonesia to denounce Israel and state their support for the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.
Thus one ripple effect of this fighting is that it shows that hostility to Israel can unite Muslims across national, ethnic and sectarian divides. The emergence of pro-Islamist governments in previously secular states always has contained the potential for the emergence of a greater threat to Israel than has been the case in many decades.
Another ripple effect is that the US outreach to Muslim countries has been undermined by the decision to take sides, supporting Israel as acting in self-defense. Arabs do not agree with that view of events and will distrust US diplomats in the future. Some Arab commentators have criticized the US for not restraining Israel.
A third ripple effect is that the Israel-Gaza crisis has displaced the Syria crisis as the headline news item around the world. International attention on Syria has been refocused on Gaza. The fight in Syria is less consequential than the fighting in Gaza because the Gaza fight risks regional conflict in ways Syria does not.
This does not appear to be accidental and appears to benefit Iran. At this point, however, Iranian instrumentality in provoking a proxy fight between Hamas and Israel remains only a working hypothesis.
01) The authors are connected, admired, and conversant with the great minds of Silicon Valley (Eric Schmidt offers a very strong blurb) and even more importantly, this book both represents the best from those minds, and has clearly had as positive effect in getting this particular meme (“intelligent governance”) considered.
02) The authors force attention to a fundamental flawed premise in the West, that any form of democracy (even if corrupted beyond recognition) is preferable to any form of dictatorship (the authors refer to China as a mandarinate). As someone who grew up in Singapore and has the deepest admiration for Minister-Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and the professionalism of the Government of Singapore (it employed my step-mother from New Zealand for many years, ultimately as head of the Department of English), I am among the first to suggest that the West falls short, but I would point to Singapore and the Nordics and BENELUX as my preferred alternative, not just hybrid, but rooted in ethical evidence-based decision-making. I would also note that the West has actively supported 40 of 42 dictators for the last fifty years — integrity is NOT a strong suit for our so-called Western democracies.
03) The book is strongest — no doubt as the publisher and the authors intended — in relation to the impact of social networks as feedback loops helpful to governments, whether democratic or mandarinate, that are capable of LISTENING. Chapter 4, “The New Challenges of Governmance,” is certainly suitable as a stand-alone assigned reading. The authors are heavily reliant on David Brin (I am a fan of his) but distressingly oblivious to Howard Rheingold, Tom Atlee, Jim Rough, Harrison Owen, and a host of others that have spent — primed by Stewart Brand — decades thinking about deliberation and consensus-building. Having said that by way of balance, this chapter strikes me as the heart of the book, and it gets high marks for pointing out that Google and all other options today are not facilitative of deliberative dialog.
