Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2666 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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yoda with light saber — Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Tim Brown, October 9, 2012

A show curated by John Cary of Public Interest Design has just opened in San Francisco at the Autodesk Gallery. It is a must if you are interested in design and the social sector. The exhibit features many of the organizations that contributed to the design labs at this year's Clinton Global Initiative conference, which I wrote about here last week. It is a great chance to see some of the creative approaches designers are taking to create impact beyond the world of business as usual.

One of things I love about several of the projects is that they invite involvement by many beyond professional design fields. Parklets—i.e. mini-parks inserted into public streets and parking bays—are popping up in cities beyond their birthplace in San Francisco. Code for America is encouraging software designers and developers across the country to tackle civic design challenges such as the Adopt-a-Hydrant app. TEDx has already become a global phenomenon, but TEDx-in-a-Box enables under-resourced communities to have everything they need to hold their own TEDx conference.

You can see a great infographic explaining more of the exhibit's content here: exhibition.publicinterestdesign.org.

The show itself is elegantly inserted into the already wonderful Autodesk Gallery. For anyone fascinated by how contemporary design gets done, the gallery is a cornucopia of digital models, prototypes, and special effects clips.

Phi Beta Iota: Governments should never have centered on money — that led to abject absolute corruption. Centering governments on public interest design is a very powerful meme, and also consistent with the end of “government” as a monopoly, and the emergence of “governance” as an M4IS2 function.

2012/10/19

Yoda: Stop Rote Education, Begin Apprenticeships

03 Economy, 04 Education

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Learn work, work learn. Not sit, BE.

Old and New Models for Tackling the Skills Gap

Tim Brown, October 18, 2012

I got the chance to talk on NPR last year about ideas to deal with the jobs crisis. My perspective then, as it is now, was that education is the key. I don’t just mean a good high school education, which is obviously critical. I mean having the right set of educational choices when it comes to training for employment. One way to encourage this is by re-energizing apprenticeships, which have largely faded away over the last few decades in America. Why have apprenticeships faded away? I think it is because they have failed to keep up with many of the new fields that offer the best employment opportunities. I question why there are not more apprenticeships available in software development or design or even entrepreneurship. These disciplines, amongst many others, are ones that benefit from hands-on learning rather than conventional teaching. Universities are not necessarily the best place to train for these skills—in countries like Germany, a combination of training in the workplace with some supplementary college attendance has proven to be a very successful model.

Apprenticeship represents a mutual commitment between trainees and employers and ultimately benefits both. The retreat of apprenticeship has coincided with a change in attitude of many employers away from investing in the education of their workforce, toward an expectation that the education system should ‘manufacture’ the right ‘product’ for them to employ. I believe that if employers recommitted to the idea of apprenticeship they would reap significant rewards not only in terms of better trained employees, but also a less transactional, more purposeful workplace with significantly higher engagement and loyalty.

I recently came across a startup that, in the absence of a resurgence of apprenticeship, is letting prospective employees take matters into their own hands and train themselves before applying for a job. LearnUp, founded by Alexis Ringwald and Kenny Ma, lets employers post the training materials they usually use once they have employed someone. Applicants can then ‘learn up’ on the job before they apply, making them more competitive as applicants and reducing training time for employers. Companies like Whole Foods, KPMG, and Gap already have training programs available there. This seems like a great example of an innovative educational model that can reduce the skills gap and give those looking for employment a better shot at getting the jobs they want. What other innovative models exist for reducing the skills gap?

2012/10/19

SmartPlanet: Air = Energy

05 Energy

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Air power: UK company pulls gasoline from the ether

There is definitely something in the air in Britain.

Earlier this month, I told you about a UK technology that would turn air into electricity.

Now from the same country comes a company that says it has pulled 5 liters (1.3 U.S. gallons) of gasoline from the ether over the last 3 months, the Daily Telegraph reports. And get this: Air Fuel Synthesis says its process also removes CO2

Read full article.

2012/10/192012/10/19

SmartPlanet: Open Mind = Resilience

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

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Defining ‘resilience’ as an innovation strategy

By Reena Jana | October 18, 2012, 5:51 PM PDT

CAMDEN, ME — On a chilly October day, a stone’s throw from a postcard-perfect New England harbor and across from an adorable town square, a group that included chief executives, grad students, physicians, public-school educators, activists, scientists, and artists gathered. Some members of this diverse crowd, assembled for the annual PopTech conference from October 17-20 at the Camden Opera House, were from large companies such as Nike, Google, and Procter & Gamble. Others were the twentysomething founders of start-ups that no one has ever heard of–yet. Or they were academics, investors, designers, engineers.

They came to listen to, and mingle with, the head of a public school for pregnant girls in Detroit; a Paralympic World Cup snowboarding gold medalist; an Icelandic childcare specialist; and a bank robber/hacker turned neuroscientist, among many others. While this roster is only a tiny sample of the PopTech speaker list, it offers a taste of the broad spectrum of voices and stories presented on the Opera House stage. As varied as they are, they all share the common theme of “resilience.” It is a topic that is gaining momentum not only as a coping strategy in an age of economic uncertainty and dramatic natural disasters, but also as an innovation strategy, too. And the first day of PopTech offered a number of lenses from which to understand the concept, which is also the conference’s theme.

“Resilience is the ability to recover, persist, or even thrive under disruption,” Andrew Zolli, curator and executive director of PopTech, said in his opening remarks.

“It’s not the same thing as robustness. It’s not the same thing as redundancy. It’s not about reserves. And it’s not about real-time information,” Zolli continued.

Read full article (safety copy below the line)

Continue reading “SmartPlanet: Open Mind = Resilience”

2012/10/182012/10/18

Search: concentrated map of terrorists in us

Searches

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American-Jihad-Map-JPEG — Click on Image to Enlarge

Here is the map created using information from Steve Emerson, the original US counter -intelligence pioneer on Islam-centered crime and terrorism in the USA. This map only covers Islamic nodes — it does not include other religions that have their own brands of terrorism.

Graphic: A Short Story-Terrorism as a Boil

Steven Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (Free Press, 2003)

2012/10/182012/10/18

Jim Spoher: IBM’s Version of M4IS2 Centered on Universities

Knowledge

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Dr. Jim Spoher (born c. 1956) is a computer scientist leading the development of a new science of service systems, often known as Service Science, Management and Engineering. He has been the Director of IBM Global University Programs since 2009. Between 2003 and 2009, he was the Director of Almaden Services Research with IBM at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He was a driving advocate of the Service Science, Management and Engineering initiative across companies, governments and academics. Jim's research group received IBM awards for modeling customers and mapping global service systems including performance measures, costing and pricing of complex, inter-organizational service projects, analytics and information service innovations, process improvement methods, and innovation foresight methods, amongst others.

IBM T Shaped People Cover — Click on Image to Enlarge

Jim works with service research pioneers from diverse academic disciplines and he advocates for Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED) as an integrative framework for global competency development, economic development, and advancement of science^.Spohrer was the Chief Technology Officer for IBM Venture Capital Relations between 2000 and 2002. He was a Distinguished Scientist in Learning Research at Apple Computer between 1989 and 1998, where he was a coinventor receiving 9 patents. Dr. Spohrer received a Ph.D. in Computer Science/Artificial Intelligence from Yale University in 1988. He graduated with a B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1978.

Briefing Slides: IBM T Shaped People 20120731 v2

Phi Beta Iota: This is one of the most intelligent useful briefings we have ever encountered.

See Also:

M4IS2

21st Century Intelligence Core References 2007-2013

Search: solutions for prosperous world

2012/10/18

John Steiner: Michael Bloomberg Super-PAC – Fourth Ring in the Bloomber Circus

Politics

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Bloomberg Starts ‘Super PAC,’ Seeking National Influence

Seeking to reshape a national political debate he finds frustratingly superficial, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York is plunging into the 2012 campaign in its final weeks, creating his own “super PAC” to direct millions of dollars in donations to elect candidates from both parties who he believes will focus on problem solving.

Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire and a registered independent, expects to spend from $10 million to $15 million of his money in highly competitive state, local and Congressional races. The money would be used to pay for a flurry of advertising on behalf of Republican, Democratic and independent candidates who support three of his biggest policy initiatives: legalizing same-sex marriage, enacting tougher gun laws and overhauling schools.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Bloomberg could have been president in 2012, but his “tribe” may have made clear to him that the cost to him and his family would be very high. His existing three-ring circus (IndependentVoting.org, NO LABELS, and Americans Elect) has consumed vast amounts of money with nothing tangible to show for it EXCEPT (and perhaps the whole point) a severe dilution of small party effectiveness. This fourth ring is absurd–nothing more than a means of cherry-picking a critical mass that can be brought together for a handful of “favors” in the future. There appears to be a real lack of integrity and coherence in this latest move by Bloomberg. Opportunity lost. Again.