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Journal: Microsoft, Kinect, & Hackers

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, IO Technologies, Policies, Real Time, Threats, Topics (All Other)
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Innovators like Oliver Kreylos were eager for the Xbox Kinect, but not to play games. He uses it to capture live 3-D images.

With Kinect Controller, Hackers Take Liberties

Mr. Kreylos, who specializes in virtual reality and 3-D graphics, had just learned that he could download some software and use the device with his computer instead. He was soon using it to create “holographic” video images that can be rotated on a computer screen. A video he posted on YouTube last week caused jaws to drop and has been watched 1.3 million times.

Philipp Robbel combined an iRobot device and the new Microsoft controller that can recognize gestures. He calls it the KinectBot.

Mr. Kreylos is part of a crowd of programmers, roboticists and tinkerers who are getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do. The attraction of the device is that it is outfitted with cameras, sensors and software that let it detect movement, depth, and the shape and position of the human body.

Mehmet S. Akten uses the system to draw in 3-D.

Phi Beta Iota: Microsoft took a few days to “get it” but their “final answer” is exactly right: “Anytime there is engagement and excitement around our technology, we see that as a good thing,” said Craig Davidson, senior director for Xbox Live at Microsoft. “It’s naïve to think that any new technology that comes out won’t have a group that tinkers with it.”  Kudos as well to the New York Times for a lovely piece of useful inspiring reporting.

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Worth a Look: Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction

Worth A Look
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Berto Jongman Recommends...

Review

‘ – brings to the table a completely diff erent set of analytical tools and source materials which will supplement existing theories and thus greatly enrich our understanding of jihadism.' – Dr Thomas Hegghammer, Harvard University –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

” The Jihadis' Path to Self-Destruction brings a completely different set of analytical tools and source materials to supplement existing theories, greatly enriching our understanding of jihadism.” — Thomas Hegghammer, Harvard University

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Journal: Web Archipelago of Babel

Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time, Reform, Technologies, Tools
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Jon Lebkowsky Home

Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web

I’ve found myself giving cautionary talks on the future of the Internet, or possible futures, plural – the real danger that the Internet and the World Wide Web that operates on it will become less open, perhaps become fragmented, balkanized into closed networks that no longer cooperate, filled with walled gardens with various filters and constraints, and no longer be a platform with low barriers to entry and assurance that if you connect something, anyone anywhere in the world will have access to it. The Internet would no longer be the powerful engine for innovation and communication it has been.

Tim Berners-Lee, who created the World Wide Web, writes about this in Scientific American, saying that some of the web’s “successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.”

If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.

Read Berners-Lee’s important longer piece, “Long Live the Web.”

My next scheduled talk about the future of the Internet is January 5 at noon, at Link Coworking [Austin, TX].

Phi Beta Iota: The paradigm is power is “rule by secrecy” and fragmentation.  The web and all that suggests for human connectivity is its anti-thesis.  2012 appears to be the year of convergence, confrontation, and emergence.

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Worth a Look: Webinars on Internet Use

Worth A Look
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Webinar Series & Certificate Programs

These programs include a series of six 90-minute webinars.  Those who test successfully within 15 days after the sixth webinar will be awarded a Certificate of Completion suitable for framing.  The test consists of 100 true or false questions derived from the six webinars.

Enrollees whose schedule does not provide for live participation may purchase the complete package of six videos and six slide sets for $275.  Those who purchase the videos and test successfully also will be awarded a certificate.

The cost of attending the six webinar series is $275.  We offer a $30 per person discount for groups of three or more participants in a single registration.  Attendees receive a PDF file containing the webinar slides, with web links embedded in slides, emailed to them after the webinars.

The following webinars make up the Advanced Internet Research series:

  • Advanced Internet Search
  • Free Public Records via Internet
  • International Information Gathering via Internet
  • Internet Information Management
  • Internet Privacy & Personal Data Removal
  • Social Networking for Professionals

The following webinars make up the Internet For Investigators series:

  • Advanced Internet Search
  • Free Public Records via Internet
  • Internet Information Management
  • Internet Privacy & Personal Data Removal
  • Link Analysis & Personal Data Removal
  • Social Networking for Professionals

Please see below for descriptions, dates and times of the webinars.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Webinars on Internet Use”

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Journal: Our Normal Approach is Useless

Corruption, Methods & Process
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Seth Godin Home

Our normal approach is useless here

Perhaps this can be our new rallying cry.

If it's a new problem, perhaps it demands a new approach. If it's an old problem, it certainly does.

Phi Beta Iota: From Gandhi to Einstein to Ackoff and Fuller, and now Tom Atlee, the point is obvious to most of us–just not to those in power who see that the lack of integrity is working for them, never mind the rest…

See Also:

Reference: Changing the Game

Reference: Changing the Game II

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Journal: Deficit Reduction Plan Hoses Everyone BUT the 10% at the Top

03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
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Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

Hint: if you are in lower 90% of income earners, just look in the rear view mirror — because S-B is about to sell you the same ideological snake oil that got America into its current economic mess.

My good friend Jeff Madrick, a old fashioned liberal in the best sense of the term, dissects the Simpson-Bowles cape-job in the article attached below.

In my opinion, the litmus test for measuring the seriousness of the Simpson – Bowles recommendations will be what if anything the commission recommends for containing the Pentagon's out-of-control  budget.  At a minimum, the defense budget  should be frozen (for reasons cited here) in current dollar terms until the Pentagon can pass the audits legally required by the Chief Financial Officer Act of 1990, not to mention the the letter and original intent of the Accountability and Appropriations Clauses of the Constitution — a document that every officer in the US government has taken an unconditional oath to protect and uphold.

My personal view is that the Pentagon's budget can and should be placed on a downward path glide path of 2-3% reduction per year in current dollars.  One way for doing this, while forging a more sensible and responsive national military strategy, is described here.  But, of course, that kind of hard decision making is simply not going to happen in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac.  Indeed, even the generous constraint of a current dollar freeze to a defense budget, which is now at the highest level since the end of WWII, is likely to be a pipe dream, because as Jeff points out, the evidence to date suggests that Simpson – Bowles is likely to give the Pentagon a free ride … again.  Maybe we will be surprised, but don't bet your diminished net worth on it.

Chuck Spinney

Is Simpson-Bowles Balanced? Take a Look at its Supporters.

New Deal 2.0 11/18/2010

Jeff Madrick

http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/11/18/is-simpson-bowles-balanced-take-a-look-at-its-supporters-27552/

The enthusiasm from moderate to hardcore conservatives for the deficit reduction plan underscore what’s wrong with it.

Read rest of original article…

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Review: Reflexive Practice–Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Public), Leadership, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Priorities, Public Administration, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
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Amazon Page

Kent C. Myers et al

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond 5 Stars–a Foundation Work

November 20, 2010

In combination with the other books that I am reading this week, the first by David Perkins, Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education, the second by Curtis Bonk, The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education, this book I have read in galley form, by Dr. Kent C. Myers [strategist and process historian, a disciple of Russell L. Ackoff] with contributed chapters from a number of other individuals, gives me hope.

This is an extraordinarily diplomatic and measured book, a book that can nudge even the most recalcitrant of know-it-all stake-holders toward the “aha” experience that what they are doing [doing the wrong things righter] is NOT WORKING and maybe, just maybe, they should try Reflexive Practice (or at least begin to hire people that think this way).

This is *the* book that could-should lead to the first-ever Secretary General of Education, Intelligence, & Research, IMHO. THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest, done with Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) was a proponency book. This book by Dr. Myers et al is a praxis book absolutely up there with the other 6 Star and beyond books that I recommend.

For a magnificent companion book, Will Durant's 1916 doctoral thesis, I strongly recommend Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition. The intermediate books would of course be Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path and Russell Ackoff's Redesigning Society (Stanford Business Books).

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