Unusual, Thoughtful–Ideal as McCain's Vice President, June 17, 2008
Jim Webb
The next President is going to have to tear down the US military, resurrect the atrophied civilian instruments of national power, and recreate the U.S. government in a manner that allows us to eliminate the debt and the deficit while waging peace and successfully nailing isolated organized crime, corporate corruption, and individual terrorists.
This means that a Democrat need not apply (less Senator Sam Nunn as either Vice President or Secretary-General for National Security, overseeing Defense, State, and Justice). As I put this book down I was thinking to myself, estranged Republican that I am: “this guy is too good to be a Democrat (or a Republican!).” I stand with Senator Hagel who is calling for a new party and an end to the two-party spoils system How about Bloomberg-Webb? Or Bloomberg-Powell with Nunn at Defense, Hagel at State, and Webb as Chief of Staff?
I take away one star because despite the candor and the reflective tone, the surprising but welcome comments against both the military-industrial complex and the prison complex (most of which is based on marijuana and is used to create slaves for the corporations running the prisons), the author did not offer a strategic framework.
He mentions Tony Zinni with favor, and he does a good job of suggesting that many generals did in fact try to talk the civilian leadership out of the elective occupation on attack, but I for one do not buy the latter. What they should have done was had Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz arrested and turned over to Congress, and told Dick Cheney to go fly a kite.
It is my personal view that the Democratic and Republican parties are dead. A new political demographic is emerging in America, one that demands multiple parties, an end to winner take all control of either the Executive or any half of Congress, and an end to “party line” treason.
Jim Webb is not a Democrat. He is, as Ike so famously said in answer to Marshall's question, an American. It is just possible we may have found a leader for a new era, an era that demands the leader engage all of us in conversation, and not lead so much as facilitate and nurture. See the images I load above.
Right now, Chuck Hagel, Joe Biden, and Jim Webb are people I respect, and I hope they, rather than the staff pukes that do not read and have never operated overseas, have the necessary influence to draw our new map of the world. Combine them with Joe Nye, Tony Zinni, and a handful of others who have not sold their soul to the beltway bandits, and we just might have what it takes to fight smart.
This is not a political book. This is more akin to public philosophy aloud.
Seminal Work, Broad Overview, Provocative on All Fronts, June 18, 2008
Christine L. Borgman
FINAL REVIEW 22 June 2008
This is not a technical book, it focuses more on the socio-political aspects of how knowledge is communicated among scholars. While it addresses fraud, it does not address the ideological war against science, high crimes and misdemeanors including deliberate lies to the public, or the nuances of “fog facts” and “lost history.”
The author brings to this effort past experience in the Alexandria Digital Earth prototype project, and the National Research Council's signposts in cyberspace inquiry.
It would be good to have other reviews.
Overview comment: The author has done an extraordinary job in designing this book–writing it must have been easy once the seven page outline of detailed contents was created.
My notes:
+ National Science Foundation (NSF) did not begin investing in cyber-infrastructure until 2006 (my first web site was created in 1994).
+ Grab this lady for the project. She integrates informaiton science, information psychology, information sociology, information politics, and information culture in a manner so well presented I don't mind the headache.
+ Cites G. C. Bowker on data diversity, and ends the book with the observation that search and retrieval across specialized data sources is till very difficult (See Stephen E. Arnold's chapter <Search panacea or ploy:
Can collective intelligence improve findability?>, URL in the comment.
+ Words and concepts covered by the author, with substantive citation, that I found particularly interesting:
– Data withholding
– Knowledge diffusion
– Consequences of misconduct
– Cultural memory
– Open standards
– Accidents
– History and sense-making
– Cultural boundaries of science (see Dick Klavans and Brad Ashfords' lovely Maps of Science web site)
– Knowledge lost
– Bibliometrics, data as capital
– Ecologies of knowledge
– Ethnography of infrastructure within communities
– Communities of learning, meaning, identity
– Internet Time and unreliability of search engines
– Geographies of the Internet (the project is mapping substnative knowledge)
– The end of isolated inquiry and isolated conclusions (far future)
– “outcomes” and “results” are not in this book–it is a survey
– book's major self-limitation is its exclusive focus on academia–the other seven tribes of intelligence (government, military, law enforcement, commerce, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions are not addresses at all)
– talk about data intensive science but unwitting of urgency of getting to real-time science (changes that used to take 10,000 years now take 3)
– no discussion of retrospective research
– dismissive of self-publishing
– pre-print lag times to publishing are worse than the government
– peer review is broken (as well as tedious)
– conferences not yet digital
– dissemination, diffusion, publicity, transparency, discourse
– search and dfiscovery very corrupt (see Arnold–less than 2% efficacy)
– publishers losing ground to online (greed is killing them as well)
– termporal patterns and pattern analysis of the aggregate knowledge
Heart of the book is the issue of open access combined with the immaturity of the content, tools, and architecture of the digital world of knowledge. Legal, cultural, and technical obstacles will not be settled soon.
I put this book down with two thoughts: it is a stellar piece of well-documented and well-conceived reflection–and it barely scratches the surface of what can and should be known about scholarship in the digital age, to include call centers in China and India able to teach their respective 1.5 billion poor populations one cell call at a time. Schools and universities are still in the industrial era, half advanced day care and half prison. Knowledge is no longer an academic domain–it is the world brain emergent, with eight tribes of knowledge ignoring one another in 183 languages we don't speak, with the cell phone, not the laptop, as the great equalizer and enabler of the wealth of networks.
Superb with Very Intelligent Conclusion, June 22, 2008
Gottfried Vossen; Stephan Hagemann
I borrowed this book from someone who knows a great deal about web directions, and I found it to be very very good. Although the authors do not reflect the tsunamis being created by Doug Englebart (Open hypertextdocument system or OHS) and Pierre Levy (Information Economy Meta Language or IEML), this is a very elegantly organized and presented book.
It forced me to question my here-to-fore blind expectations with respect to the Semantic Web where in practice the theory of seamless integration has not been realized. I was especially taken with the author's conclusion that we must continue to develop applications for smallish communities of practice where the human brain continues to be the primary searcher, sorter, and valuation or linkage agent.
Jim Bamford's book on the National Security Agency (NSA), Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, concludes that one day NSA may–after spending hundreds of billions more of our hard-earned wages, create the ultimate computer–one weighing very little, running on virtually no energy, and able to do petaflop calculations per second: THE HUMAN BRAIN.
I am among a handful of co-founders of the Earth Intelligence Network, and I will conclude this very favorable review with my opinion: the World Brain is emergent, and it is the end-users, as the co-authorrs of this book conclude, that will continue to be the primary content creators, content sharers, and content valuators.
As soon as China and India figure out they can create infinite wealth by handing out free cells phones and offering their respective 1.5 billion poor free information and education “one cell call at a time,” it will be game over for both American and European digital ambitions.
Machine learning has been over-hyped since the 1980's, and while I respect the computational mathematics being pioneered by Google, and various deep web or meta web endeavors, the reality is that search today stinks, yielding less than 2% of relevant information. I don't expect that to be resolved anytime soon. What I *do* expect is for humans empowered by relatively simple tools, to figure out how to do a national referendum from neighbood to nation=state, in 24 hours, and how to mobilize a public cabinet that posts a sensible slate of policies backed up by a balanced budget.
I've been thinking about publishing a book on health intelligence, and borrowed this from a colleague.
My contribution will be the image I created while thinking about what the book should look like–the inner square was co-created with another person.
This book can be summarized with three words: *corruption* killed health; *transparency* can heal us; and only we, the *patients* (or victims) can come together to demand resolution.
In the comment, where Amazon does allow URLs, I am pointing to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers report online, which documents 50% of all health costs as waste.
The author ends with very specific recommendations that are excellent as far as they go, but that ignore the 80% of solutions that are outside the existing hospital-pharmaceutical complex. The Japanese have started weighing and measuring their population–a population's health and vitality is the single greatest contributor to national power and prosperity, ergo, we need a “360” approach to national health, and I try to depict that in the image above.
I am adding this book to my list of excessively expensive books. I only list those books I would havb bought had the price been reasonable. It cost the publisher less than $5.00 to print this book. Amazon pays 45% of the retail price, so call it a $25 return. That is too much and completely contrary to the desperate need for making it easier for information to be shared.
I urge all authors to post free online copies of their work and to retain original copyright as we do at OSS.Net and Earth Intelligence Network.
I totally disagree with the reviewers that pontificate against this book. It is not a techno-geek book, or a philosophy book, it is simply a common sense overview that I personally consider to be educated, helpful to the point of essential. At $16, with the Amazon discount, this book is a bargain.
I started with the index, and immediately discovered Meta-Data had 18 lines.
The book opens with examples from Staples (“hacking the physical”) to Apple iTunes (end of bundling) and I am immediately charmed by the combination of an end to fraudulent store organization (Giant supermarket moves everything from one week to the next to force searching which increases impulse buying) and an increase in focus on serving the individual rather than serving up a “one size fits all” solution. Separately I am looking at Chinese medicine for a health intelligence book, and this resonates.
Early on one sees the author agreeing with Jean Francois Noubel (the end of the pyramidal organization) and Jim Rough (rise of the circle of citizen wisdom)–I myself enraged the secret intelligence mandarins by announcing in the 1990's that “in the age of decentralized information central intelligence is an oxymoron.” The author is one of the gurus of what is becoming known as the axis of Cognitive Science and Collective Intelligence (the Art), and he and another 54 authors are brought together in the first collective work of its kind, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace which is also free online in full pdf or chapter docs. Disclosure: I published the book–I do not know the author personally, but Jock Gill, a gifted communicator, exposed me to the author's earlier work on Open Spectrum, something that inspired my own informal views on “Open Everything” and unlike most of the other contributors that were identified by Tom Atlee or Mark Tovey (the editor), I personally sought his contribution to the book because of my very high regard for his “take” on all this.
I bought the book as a fan already, but the content easily validates my appreciation The discussion of first order pigeon-holing (the Weberian concept of bureaucracy applies), second order cross referencing (naturally limited and often wrong in early generations–Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal System are toast), versus unlimited tagging, chunking, clustering, socially-informed selection, and other aspects of the power of the collective, are all illuminated by this book.
I am further impressed early on with his stellar discussion of Mortimer Adler and the limitations of alphabetization. I was a penniless graduate student when I discovered the Great Books, and as a young officer, spent my first $700 acquiring a set. The Syntopicon that the author mentions in the book is better understood by the image I introduce above, something I created in 1979, my second of four analytic models (the first was on predicting revolution across all domains).
I have two notes at this point:
1) Truth or what can be known constantly changing, a fixed or slow to adapt “index” process cannot scale or survive.
2) 2008 election is already lost–neither candidate offers us what we deserve: listening instead of stump speeches; appointed cabinet and balanced budget now, as part of the campaign, instead of empty promises; and 24/7 interaction with all 65 political parties, instead of focusing on the one third that is their base and a slice of the middle third.
He emphasizes that knowledge is not top down, and with a tip of the hat to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and also facilitator for the nation-wide network of 27 separatist movements, I also post above an image of Epoch B “bottom up” leadership that none of our world leaders understand.
Page 80, discussion of Ranganathan (India) Colon Classification system impresses me. I think to myself, wow, needs to be integrated into Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language, or IEML.
The middle of the book discusses–engagingly, I feel–how the digital world enables infinite variations in relationships and labels that can in turn create infinite variations of just right, just in time, just enough visualizations.
Crowd tagging leads to sub-set clustering which leads to contextual sense-making.
He spend time on Wikipedia. I admire Jimbo Wales and try to attend the Wikimanias, but I have given up on Wikipedia because in the case of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) page, I had to give up–while the author would have me engage and patiently lead the recalcitrant along (I have 20 years experience with that in the real world) I have come to a different conclusion: I believe that anyone should be allowed to CREATE, but only master moderators should be allowed to destroy.
The summary of the book's message is offered by the author with four concepts:
1) Filter on the way OUT, not in (this is the difference between the read only publishing model, and the read-write Creative Commons model)
2) Put each leaf on as many branches as possible–unlike the physical world, each leaf can have infinite lives
3) Everything is meta data and everything can be a label (he provides a fine discussion of bar codes, RFIDs, and Thinglinks)
4) Give up control. He admires Wikipedia for doing precisely that. When I first started the modern OSINT movement in 1992, I coined the phrase, “Give up control to gain control” meaning that centralized intelligence had to give way to decentralized sharing and sense-making. The spies still don't get it, but public intelligence in the public interest is here to stay. A corollary here is that the best approach is to include all–optimize inclusiveness and diversity; and where there is conflict or disagreement, postpone exclusion or resolution, more data later will make it easier and easier to come back to…
The final section of the book deals with mapping the implicit, mining the clouds of tags, creating an infrastructure of meaning with infinite potential. I have a note: unites the eight tribes of intelligence (governmenbt, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions).
Other flyleaf notes:
+ Stupid works. Keep it simple and let it evolve on its own.
+ Bit by bit, not all at once. Provide for innovation at the intersections and on the margins
+ Kind of and sort of rule, not the black and white that did rule
+ I learn of Valdis Krebs and his concepts of social cartography
+ I am engaged with the discussion of information sprawl and natural typologies
+ The author concludes that the search for knowledge will constantly struggle between the simple and the complex (sources and methods).
+ Going meta is what is so cool about web ecology and evolution.
The author does NOT say this, but I mark his book down as being in favor of the human web of sense-making beating out the semantic web and machine learning schools.
Page 230, this is a quote that really grabs my attention: “It's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individual thinking out-loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity.” The rest of this page is equally good.
I am surprised to learn that the author holds a PhD in philosophy, and that he advised Howard Dean. I am not surprised to learn that he has been twice renewed as a fellow at the Berkman Center.
There are many others, most obvious. Please do see the two images I post above–I firmly believe that the last eight years were a gift from heaven, a necessarily catastrophic gutting of our Nation so that we might properly conclude that both political parties stink with corruption, and it is time we put We the People back into the Republic, 24/7. This book is a solid brick in our foundation for understanding why this is both possible, and necessary.
Superb Re-Discovery of Core Knowledge, Presents New Insights,
July 4, 2009
David N. Gibbs
At the age of 56, having been educated in the 1970's when political science created “comparative studies” as a ruse for avoiding field world and foreign language mastery in favor of statistical comparisons from afar, I am now quite accustomed to seeing each generation rediscover core knowledge.
Even more distressing for one who loves books as artifacts of human wisdom, is to see each generation re-discover knowledge known to earlier generations, without citation. Scholarship seems to be on a wheel making little forward progress, at least in the humanities.
This is a fine book. It is exceptional for both its clear-eyed understanding of the combination of evil and banal ignorance that characterizes those in power, whether of one party or another. In the 1970's, for the US Institute of Peace, I wrote that the greatest threat to peace was the cataclysmic separation of those with power from those with knowledge. This book manifests all of that brilliantly.
It is also exceptional in this era for being a clear-eyes appraisal of the evil of military intervention. This again is not new knowledge, but it is helpful to have this generation be reminded.
Great evil has been done “in our name,” for the basest of reasons. I pray that our rising generation of digital literati will not be as ignorant in power as those who now surround world leaders–sychophants, dilitants, and craven opportunists.
Unusual, Thoughtful–Ideal as McCain's Vice President, June 17, 2008
