Influential British parenting website Mumsnet was instrumental in bringing down scandal-ridden News of the World. Bill Coles reports from London on the remarkable grassroots campaign.
Tell Your Members of Congress to Cosponsor the Shareholder Protection Act
The Shareholder Protection Act proposed by Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) would empower shareholders to vote on whether to allow corporate executives to spend corporate money on political campaigns. Shareholders — not the CEO and not the board of directors — are the real owners of any publicly traded corporation, and the decision should be theirs.
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — Among the paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne's 1st Brigade Combat Team, there's a sinking feeling the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will fade away. Instead of an exciting and challenging combat tour, they'll be relegated to the dread “garrison life” here at Fort Bragg.
. . . . . .
Garrison life can be more dangerous than living in Afghanistan. In a major study released last year, the Army reported that a small but growing number of soldiers who perform credibly in combat turn to high-risk behavior at home, including drug abuse, drunk driving, motorcycle street-racing, petty crime and domestic violence.
The study, commissioned by Gen. Peter Chiarelli, assistant chief of staff, estimated that 40,000 soldiers are using drugs illicitly, and misdemeanor offenses are rising by 5,000 cases a year. Among the growing number of Army suicides — which soared past the civilian rate and reached a record 300 cases last year — almost half had never deployed from garrison.
In addition to the suicides, the Army study noted there were 107 fatal accidents among its active-duty soldiers and 50 murders in 2009, part of an ugly toll of 345 active-duty, non-combat deaths — about 100 more than were killed in combat that year.
For several years a group of faculty members, students, and people from off campus met once a month to discuss “complex systems”. Later we decided to discuss “reflexive systems” as the next step in the systems sciences.
The systems sciences and cybernetics provide a general theory of perception, cognition, learning, adaptation, and understanding, whether these phenomena occur in human beings, groups, organizations, nations, or machines. Just as physics provides a fundamental theory of matter and energy, which is used in the various fields of engineering, cybernetics may one day be seen as providing a fundamental theory of information and regulation for the fields of the social and design sciences .
Reflexivity is similiar to second order cybernetics. Both emphasize including the observer in what is observed. Cybernetics has already had an impact on a wide range of fields – computer science, robotics, engineering, biology, psychology, management, sociology, political science, economics and the philosophy of science. As a transdisciplinary field cybernetics serves as a catalyst for further developments in many fields.
The group meets from September to April except December.The presentations and discusssions take place at The George Washington University, from 10 a.m to noon in Funger Hall, 2201 G Street NW, Washington DC (coffee available, lunch afterwards).
Israeli intelligence services managed to stop dozens of European pro-Palestine activists from flying to Israel, by gathering open-source intelligence about them on social media sites, such as Facebook. According to Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, intelligence gathered on Facebook formed the basis of a blacklist containing over 300 names of European activists, who had signed up on an open-access Facebook page of a group planning nonviolent actions in Israel this summer.
Israeli intelligence agencies forwarded the names on the lists to European airline carriers, asking them not to allow the activists onboard their flights, as they were not going to be allowed into the country. This action prompted airline carriers to prevent over 200 activists from boarding scheduled flights to Israel. Israeli security officers detained over 310 other activists, who arrived in Israel on several European flights last week. Of those, almost 70 were denied entry to the country, while more detentions are expected to take place later this week, according to Israeli Interior Ministry spokeswoman Sabine Hadad.
During the detention operation, at least two flights into Israel, from Geneva, Switzerland, and Rome, Italy, were diverted to a secluded area of the Ben Gurion International Airport, which is located a few miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Once there, they were boarded by armed Israeli security officers, who detained several activists onboard the airplanes before allowing the remaining passengers to disembark. Witnesses also reported the presence of hundreds of police officers at Ben Gurion during the detention of the activists. Characteristically, only one of a 40-strong pro-Palestinian activist contingency onboard an EasyJet flight from London, UK, was able to enter Israel, while 39 were detained and sent back to the UK.
The Future of Management Strategies, Workforce Integration and Disruptive Technologies that Inspire Rapid Innovation and Enhance Performance and Profitability
People the world over aspire to participatory democracy. Yet the democratic planning and design of social systems, from local urban projects to national health care, is threatened by our institutional inability to engage stakeholders in dialogues that result in effective collective design and commitment.
A Democratic Vision for All Stakeholders The Agoras Institute promotes a democratic transformation of civil society and government by empowering the capacity of client organizations and educators to produce breakthroughs in the collective confrontation of multidimensional wicked problems. Our immediate mission is to establish and nurture new Agoras of the 21st century – global centers of democratic participatory design and education – in areas of critical socio-political importance or demand.
What are Agoras?
With each shift in human social communication and technology, the means for wise engagement must evolve. In ancient Athens, all citizens could meet face to face in the public arena. Today, our arenas are globally distributed, with unmanageable relational and problem complexity. The Institute supports client organizations with tools, practices, and training to support engagements for addressing projects of high sociotechnical complexity.
At this critical juncture of the evolutionary process of humanity, there cannot be conscious evolution without the capacity to explicate through dialogue the wisdom of the people in the Agoras of the 21st Century Global Village.
Alexander Christakis
Phi Beta Iota: Includes software being tested and scaled. See the slideshow by Tom Flanagan.
