One of the few in the financial media world confronting all the bullshit.
John Robb: Occupy as a Global Contagion for Good
Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom
OCCUPY NOTE 11/17/11 Contagion #ows
Occupy is an open source protest. That means it doesn't have a specific message. It is a container for may groups/motivations/passions held together by simplest of ideas: it is possible to permanently occupy of places of power. Anyone that tells you it needs to have a specific policy agenda is a) not an expert and b) still living in the 20th Century.
The Occupy approach, a permanent 24x7x365 geographically ubiquitous protest movement, may be about to zoom. Reinforcements are coming.
From where? Europe. However, this reinforcement isn't in the form of bodies on the street or money. It's VALIDATION (that the global financial/economic/
Continue reading “John Robb: Occupy as a Global Contagion for Good”
Review: This Changes Everything
4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration
Sarah van Geider et al.
4.0 out of 5 stars Annoying, But Recommended,November 18, 2011
As someone who has been following the Occupy movement since 17 September, and whose informal video (done by someone else) went viral from the front page of Reddit, I have a deep–very deep–interest in seeing Occupy achieve tangible results. I have intimately engaged with both the plethora of “demands” and the internal divisions among everyone from the anarchists to the free-riders.
This book is annoying because it is just a bit too slick and opportunistic for my taste. Use Inside the Book to see what you are getting. It is priced very reasonably (and cheaper if bought directly from YES Magazine) and it certainly deserves to be in any library intent on capturing as much about the Occupy movement as possible, but this is not a world-changing book nor does it actually help Occupy get anywhere specific.
In fairness, though, consider visiting the YES book sale site for paragraphs on each of the ten ways YES believes Occupy has changed everything; I will only list the ten blurbs without debating their merits.
NIGHTWATCH: Afghanistan – Nothing New Since 2001
04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, Peace IntelligenceAfghanistan: Afghanistan will likely plunge into civil and regional war if the United States does not leave a residual force of 20,000 to 30,000 troops in the country after 2014, along with significant economic aid, a senior Afghan opposition figure said Thursday. ‘The state will disintegrate' and Afghan security forces will break into factions, said Mohammad Hanif Atmar, a former minister in the government of President Karzai.
Comment: The above assertion is not true in part. A residual US force would be primarily a target that would be too weak to prevent a return to civil war. As for the prediction of civil war — or more accurately tribal war — there is no power on earth than can stop it, whether the US keeps soldiers in Afghanistan or not. It has never stopped.
Nothing has been settled since 2001, including the terms for the distribution of wealth among the tribes; the role of Islam in government; ethnic relations between North and South; the ultimate form of the state; and finally, security.
Event: 11 February 2012 World Information Architecture Day
Advanced Cyber/IO1 DAY. 14 CITIES.
World IA Day 2012 is about bringing the Information Architecture community together. We’re fostering links within local communities and on a global scale. We’re sharing information, ideas and research. And we’re doing it through unconventional, exciting and engaging IA events this February.
The first ever World IA Day focuses on Designing Structures for Understanding. On February 11, 2012, we’re hosting WIAD events in 14 cities across all corners of the globe. Learn from world-class IA minds, network, showcase new ideas and attend events tailored specifically to your community. We hope you’ll join us at an event near you this February!
Local Connections. Global Impact. World IA Day 2012
Tip of the Hat to Peter Morville at LinkedIn.
Robert Steele: Video 6 Minutes on Occupy and Election Reform
UncategorizedOwl: Visual Analytics – corruption, fraud, waste and abuse
Advanced Cyber/IO, Corruption, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process
Screen-friendly report: Visual analytics; Revealing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse 
For entities around the globe, identifying potential fraud and corruption activities in large volumes of data has historically been difficult and quite costly. More often than not, the rich insights within that data may be difficult to identify by traditional means and remain hidden.
Against this backdrop, practitioners are turning to visual analytic tools and techniques. Graphically representing and exploring data can bring clarity to executives’ concerns and to performance improvement opportunities.
Visual analytics tools and techniques, including social networking diagrams, link analysis, geospatial analysis and tree maps, can help to focus investigations on particular activities and connect disparate pieces of information to form a cohesive story. Entities should consider equipping their personnel to employ these techniques to meet the growing challenge of reducing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse in the enterprise.
Download the PDF below to learn more. Two versions are provided to accommodate your viewing preferences: a standard version for printing and a screen version for reading on your computer or mobile device.
Phi Beta Iota: This is not new–they are roughly fifteen years behind Dr. Bert Little, who pioneered this work for the Department of Agriculture, virtually eradicating crop insurance fraud ($4 million invested stopped $80 million a year in fraud). Dr. Little received a Golden Candle Award at OSS '94 and continues to do extraordinary detection of corruption with clever computing across the Texas A&M University System.
