The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Open Source Everything
TWITTER HASH: #openall
ARCHIVE OF DAILY HIGHLIGHTS: http://tinyurl.com/OSE-ALL
ROOT POST: http://tinyurl.com/OSE-ROOT
THE BOOK: http://tinyurl.com/OSE-Steele
THE PERSON: http://tinyurl.com/Steele2012
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHTS: All Opens Below Line Includes Autonomous Internet, Crowd-Funding/Sensing/Sourcing, and Transparency, Truth, Trust, & True Cost
Continue reading “20120726 Open Source Everything Highlights”
Expanding our capacity for “unitary democracy”
Below are highlights from Jane Mansbridge's IN CONTEXT article “Unitary & Adversary: The Two Forms of Democracy”, which was itself an excerpt from her book BEYOND ADVERSARY DEMOCRACY (1983) which has had a significant impact on my thinking.
I often use Mansbridge's distinction between (1) “unitary democracy” based on consensus arising from conversations about common interests shared by people who know each other and (2) “adversary democracy” based on majority votes among competing interest groups who may think they have little reason to take each other seriously.
Mansbridge clearly believes that adversary democracy must necessarily predominate in large complex societies where people don't know each other. However, she also believes its toxic effects should be ameliorated by the practice of unitary democracy at local levels and in official governing bodies, as well as through more cooperative forms of economics.
I think the landscape of democratic possibilities she was observing in the 1960s and 70s has been transformed by modern social technologies – conflict resolution, group process, organizational development, networked communications, journalism, multi-media storytelling and, especially, social microcosm design. These technologies are making it possible to bring unitary democracy to more issues and greater scales than ever before.
When I say “social microcosm design”, I'm referring to our ability to select groups of 10-1000 people whose diversity accurately reflects the diversity of a whole population or community. We are increasingly able to convene such “fair cross-section minipublics” in face-to-face conversation. Once we do that, we can apply powerful group processes – advanced forms of dialogue, deliberation, choice creating, etc. – to this smaller group in ways that evoke, reflect and activate the highest collective intelligence and wisdom of the population from which they were drawn.
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Expanding our capacity for “unitary democracy””
Huh?
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We discovered a brief film clip of one of Tesla's demonstrations. It is embedded in the trailer for Dr. Steven Greer's movie-in-progress Sirius,, beginning at 53 seconds in and lasting until 57 seconds. By rapidly double-clicking the pause button you can watch it in slow motion. No explosive phenomena are apparent to me, but the structure does seem to be made of metal. See if it doesn't remind you of anything.
Click start. Then use mouse to move to 50-53 seconds, see the tesler enery pulverize rocks — very similar to what happened to the World Trade Center towers when combined with controlled demolitions. http://www.sirius.neverendinglight.com/
See Also:
Social startup VoteIt wants to make decision-making simpler
Ever been in one of those interminable meetings or email conversation loops where everyone has an opinion but no one is willing to make a decision? Then you’ll appreciate a new social platform called VoteIt that aims to make the process of reaching informed consensus easier.
VoteIt is far more than just an online polling platform, like the ones that are found in Yahoo! Groups. By offering structure around the topic at hand, it aims to keep a conversation or debate on topic and relevant — essentially preventing tangential discussions that can derail the decision-making process. It encourages input and new ideas from participants, but only that that are related to the original conversation.
Here are a couple of examples of how the platform has been used:
The screenshot below gives you a sense of how a VoteIt conversation can be structured:
Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change
The purpose of PeaceTXT is to use mobile messaging (SMS) to catalyze behavior change vis-a-vis peace and conflict issues for the purposes of violence prevention. You can read more about our pilot project in Kenya here. We’re hoping to go live next month with some initial trials. In the meantime, we’ve been busy doing research to develop an appropriate monitoring and evaluation strategy. As is often the case in this new innovative initiatives, we have to look to other fields for insights, which is why my colleague Peter van der Windt recently shared this peer-reviewed study entitled: “Mobile Phone Technologies Improve Adherence to Antiretroviral Treatment in a Resource-Limited Setting: A Randomized Con-trolled Trial of Text Message Reminders.”
Full post below the line. Original source.
Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change”
Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge
I have been writing and blogging about “information forensics” for a while now and thus relished Nieman Report’s must-read study on “Truth in the Age of Social Media.” My applied research has specifically been on the use of social media to support humanitarian crisis response (see the multiple links at the end of this blog post). More specifically, my focus has been on crowdsourcing and automating ways to quantify veracity in the social media space. One of the Research & Development projects I am spearheading at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) specifically focuses on this hybrid approach. I plan to blog about this research in the near future but for now wanted to share some of the gems in this superb 72-page Nieman Report.
In the opening piece of the report, Craig Silverman writes that “never before in the history of journalism—or society—have more people and organizations been engaged in fact checking and verification. Never has it been so easy to expose an error, check a fact, crowdsource and bring technology to bear in service of verification.” While social media is new, traditional journalistic skills and values are still highly relevant to verification challenges in the social media space. In fact, some argue that “the business of verifying and debunking content from the public relies far more on journalistic hunches than snazzy technology.”
I disagree. This is not an either/or challenge. Social computing can help every-one, not just journalists, develop and test hunches. Indeed, it is imperative that these tools be in the reach of the general public since a “public with the ability to spot a hoax website, verify a tweet, detect a faked photo, and evaluate sources of information is a more informed public. A public more resistant to untruths and so-called rumor bombs.” This public resistance to untruths can itself be moni-tored and modeled to quantify veracity, as this study shows.
Full post less two graphics below the line. Original post.
good indication…” that we are out of our minds
Information Security Oversight Office 2011 Cost Report
Phi Beta Iota: The cost, totalling $12 billion, is as good as a deceptive bureaucracy can provide. Our own estimate based on other sources over time is that it is closer to $15-20 billion, and this is without considering the cost of lost productivity, lost critical access to multiple data bases (the National Counterterrorism Center, for example, should be included in any calculation of the cost of idiocy, along with half or more of the cost of the Department of Homeland Security and half the cost of the Pentagon). Then of course one has the complex cost of dereliction of duty across all the Cabinet functional areas. Good people trapped in a bad system that is totally lacking in both intelligence and integrity.
Continue reading “Penguin: Official Report on 2011 Cost of Intelligence “Security””
