Not listed on Amazon, but available via the web from the UK, is Ben Gilad's book Blindspots, which I continue to regard as the single best work for a CEO willing to consider the possibility that their information is inevitably filtered, biases, incomplete, and late.
Good Intentions, Some Misrepresentation, July 5, 2008
Arnaud de Borchgrave
The basic idea being executed by CSIS is sound: identify top experts and get them to discuss the terrorist threat and particularly how it is morphing and developing.
Unfortunately, CSIS does not do citation analysis, and builds its networks the same way the US intelligence community does, drawing on a limited number of individuals known to the expert in charge.
Also unfortunately, CSIS does not do multi-lingual capture and analysis, something the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS)/Open Source Center (OSC) is finally trying to get a grip on, but they lack the expert linguists across the 12 variants of Arabic and the other 32 languages necessary to fully map socio-economic and ideo-cultural mass movements and micro-gangs.
At 84 pages this rates four stars for good intentions. In the comment I provide a URL for the Earth Intelligence Network. At the menu item labeled EarthWiki, the Amazon reader can see the top authorities identified by citation analysis for all ten of the high-level threats facing humanity (terrorism is ninth, and not as a threat but rather for its potential in causing mass casualties).
Brilliantly Conceived and Executed, Totally Absorbing, July 5, 2008
Helmut K. Anheier
Half the book is text and half superb illustrations and charts.
The publisher has failed to provide a table of contents, the easiest way to make it instantly clear to any prospective purchaser that this book is quite unusual in its scope and weight.
This is the first book in a series, the next two will focus on culture and economy, and then on culture and politics.
Close to 50 contributors, and a process of conferences in advance of the book's preparation, assure the quality and diversity of this offering.
Chapters 1-6 are introductory, each by different authors or pairs of authors, focusing on approaches and developments in the cultural dimension of conflicts and tensions.
Chapters 7-13 discuss different regional realities, including China and how the US cultural wars went global (no focus on the global class war in this book).
Chapters 14-17 discuss tensions; chapters 18 & 19 values, and chapters 20-22 migration into respectively, the USA, Argentina, and Malaysia.
Chapters 23-27 introduce the concept of culture as a tool for preventing and resolving conflict and are followed by a massive resource section, the cultural indicators suite.
My word limit prevents me from doing this book full justice. I hope someone else will provide a good overview and review of the second half of the book where the indicators are developed. While similar to Banks & Textor in the 1970's, and to many of the “State of ….” Graphical and Visual Atlases, I found this book to be completely engrossing and extremely worthwhile. Worth every penny. A signal contribution.
Have Ordered Book to Do It Justice, Initial Reaction is Pooh, July 12, 2008
Michael Heller
EDIT of 11 August 2008: Not going back to the book. Glad I gave it four stars to begin with, brilliant on one idea in narrow context, but disappointing in relation to immoral capitalism, breaches of political trust, true costs, cradle to cradle, the power of we, and so many other bigger ideas, just not going to do this a third time.
EDIT of 19 July 2008: After a second pass, I see one idea that I did not recognize at first: that unlike MEGA-ownership (e.g. destruction of all family farms), it is MICRO-ownership that the author addresses. HOWEVER, this is largely a specious distinction for two reasons: first, all the patents tend to be owned by MEGA organizations (including one recently created to do just that–buy patents as a basis for litigation); and second, micro-ownership by micro-people is easily resolved with money. I continue to see a lack of strategic perspective on how to restore the Commonwealth of the Republic by firing Congress, having a second Constitutional Convention, creating an amendment that restricts personality protection to individuals born in the USA of at least one citizen-parent, and so on. In the middle of a Hackers on Planet Earth conference, so the detailed dissection will have to wait a week.
EDIT of 15 July 2008: I have spent an hour with this book. It is a strange mix of interesting detail, facile assumption, grotesque naivete (or disingeneousness), along with some robust ignorance, topped off with extraordinarily detailed property law discussions to the exclusion of all else. The INDEX does not list the words Corruption, Crime, Culture, Ethics, Politics, Public Interest, or White House. Congress has five (I am *not* making this up) references. There is no bibliography, something I find especially annoying. The author is oblivious to key references (for example, in his discussion of spectrum, he makes no mention of the single most important reference in recent time, David Weinberger on “Open Spectrum.”)
Case in point: the author goes on about how 25 more runways would solve all our air traffic congestion problems. He evidently has no clue, or does not wish to dilute his point, about the alternatives to “hub” airline travel, among which NASA and (now DayJet) include point to point aviation; and of course high-speed trains,as well as a restoration of home rule, eat local, and so on.
At first serious glance (one hour), this book fails to factor in white collar crime, organized crime, political crime, or public ignorance. To his credit the author states, in a rather low-key fashion, that the extension of copyright may not be in the best interests, but the reader must struggle to find harsh detailed references about how Disney and the music and film industries have orchestrated billion dollar corruption and mass deception campaigns to steal from the public.
Bottom line: when I finish reading this and dissecting it, I am sure it will be a weak four. My original pre-evaluation remains valid. Should it be weakened by a full reading of this book, I will be the first to say so.
SIDE NOTE: The rapid posting of several rather shallow reviews is not unusual, what *is* unusual is the equally rapid number of positive votes for reviews that generally lack specificity or any evidence of familiarity with broader literatures and larger contexts. Could the publisher be stacking the deck? Am interested in a co-reviewer willing to dialog as we dissect this book together. My email is bear/oss.net.
—original pre-assessment below—
This book is getting enough traction, but strikes me as very out of touch with a broad range of libertarian, collective intelligence, and citizen home rule, to the point that I expect my own review will be negative.
Let's start with corporate personality. The limited liability of corporate officials who have looted one fifth of the financial value, funded two dysfunctional parties, and the limited accountability of public officials who have sold public land and public spectrum to corporations below market value, while refusing to invest in local education and welfare, are all part of a massive decline of the Republic.
Of course too much private ownership is bad for the economy. Duh.
I read a lot, so my angst and my presumed annoyance with this book and its putative naivete about how we can free innovation may be more aggressive than many might think the author deserves. Who does he think sold off bandwith rather than supporting open spectrum, and how much were they bribed to betray the public interest?
I won't mention the books I have written, edited, or published, but I will say that I stand in shock and outrage as America (the portion that reads–NASCAR folks do not, see my review of Hunting with Jesus) is tillated by this “cool idea.” Cool? It was cool in the 1970's when Limits to Growth, Global Reach, Silent Spring, and all the other classics came out. The problem is that We the People allowed money to talk while abdicating our role as armed and informed, to keep government honest.
I'll go with Lawrence Lessig on eliminating corruption, Yochai Benkler on the wealth of networks, Mark Tovey on collective intelligence, Jim Rough on Society's Breakthrough, and on and on and on (true cost, natural capitalism, triple bottom line, buy-cott).
A full review by next week-end. For now, based on multiple reviews and what the publists have shared, this book merely annoys.
Home rule. Eat local. Take back our open spectrum (see comment for my “Open Everything” keytone to Gnomedex 2008. I am scheduled to appear at the last meeting of Hackers on Planet Earth 18-20 July, in New York City.
We do not lack for good ideas. We lack for outraged citizens (Lou Dobbs does not count unless he learns the ten high-level threats and twelve core policies that he must address), honest politicians, and accountable corporations. And all of those live or die on how inert we are in both our thinking and our buying habits. We are a dumb nation led by a crooked government with war criminals in charge of the Executive. Bah humbug.
Volume II came in the mail today, and reminded me that I really got a kick out of the skill that went into developing each chapter by a different author–it takes enormous skill to distill entire bodies of literature into roughly ten pages–in both of these volumes.
This document is available FREE as a PDF download, see the comment for the URL. US Government publications are paid for by the public and consequently free online.
Since it is free and can be reviewed in detail online, I do not itemize the way I usually do. The Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (AWC SSI) is one of the finest places for anyone to access a wide range of free monographs covering all strategic topics relevant to the US Army and the Joint military-civilian strategic challenges and opportunies.
I have many lists relevant to this topic and would be glad to see greater public interest in how one defines national interests, and then develops national policies that are truly in the public interest.
Fifteen Years of Extreme Hacking on the Edge, Under-Priced!, July 19, 2008
Emmanuel Goldstein
I am attending Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in NYC this week-end, and have just spent time with this volume. Unlike the individual issues, all of which I have had in my possession over the years, this volume is HUGE, readable, indexed, and priceless. I mean that–PRICELESS.
The publisher is to be saluted for not only putting a great deal of effort along with the editor, the founder of 2600 Magazine and also of the HOPE conference, for making this volume a true reference work. I was immediately impressed by the selection of “best of the best,” the organization of the material, the index, and the fact that the publisher moved away from the micro-print that was used to keep costs down on the volume of knowledge being transmitted in the individual journal issues, and instead went for a high-end glossy, “just right” white space presentation that should be in every Information Technology library across the country, and is also a collectible for anyone who pretends to know anything at all about information INsecurity.
If you got this far, this lovely volume, easily worth $60, is a real value at the much lower price being offered, and I hope enough people buy it to occasion a reprint or a second volume.
It merits comment that this is not just a volume of hand-picked items from a single journal. The editor and his closest colleagues created a community of over 30,000 hackers (whom I have always said are like astronauts on the edge with the “right stuff”) and this volume LITERALLY represents the 30,000 who were decades ahead of the US Government, which is still–as are corporations and public utilities–largely stupid about information system security, to include our Supervisory Control and Direction (SCADA) systems, all of them on the Internet.
For a really good time on what the Chinese know and can do that we cannot, see my Memorandum, easily found online, <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>. They brought Dick Cheney's plane down over Singapore in Feburary 2007, and when he got off to stretch his legs, told him exactly what they could do, and what the US would not be allowed to do. Thus did the power of the information age move East.
There are two sets of hackers: these, and the ones who came out of the Homebrew Garage Club (Lee Felsenstein, Eric Hughes, etc) and tended to created businesses rather than live free. Bill Gates is certainly in that number, as are Stewart Brand and others. The most famous Free/Open Hacker in the first group is Richard Stahlman, whose book on the origins of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) is most recently complemented by Yochai Benkler's book on Wealth of Networks. With a tip of the hat to Nat at O'Reilly, open source software is Darwinism, while malware and proprietary software are Intelligent Design that is not so intelligence. VISTA by Microsoft is the biggest scam in history, for the first time forcing documents to be uniquely tied to the Microsoft operating system and not processable anywhere else. It is time for Microsoft to die, or come to its senses and put its money into F/OSS while monetizing the transactions. Bill Gates has called F/OSS communist. In my view, that makes Bill Gates a fascist. My money is on F/OSS.
Best in Class Overview–Follow On Volume Warranted, July 23, 2008
Duke Center for Integrative Medicine
Below I list links to two other “alternative” or natural medicine books, and above I post a slide that I created as I contemplate a new book on Health Intelligence.
Unlike the other two books, this book is an overview book that integrates both conventional and “alternative” or natural medicine as commonly developed by both the Chinese (more structured, easier to access and exploit) and the Indian (more verbal and not as documented).
For this book to come out of Duke University (the “Harvard” of the South, but a powerhouse in its own right) is easily worth a fifth star, as Duke appears to be, along with the University of Washington, one of a tiny handful of institutions that is committed to balancing a very unreliable, wasteful, and often deceptive “conventional” medicine program (big phrama and lots of elective surguries that are not evidence-based), with natural cures including lifestyle and behavior or preference patterns that have been proven over centuries in China and India, but deliberately repressed, censored, subverted and scorned by the American Medical Association, which exists largely to protect a very badly broken medical “practice” that is closer to witch doctoring than it is to evidence-based holistic health.
I am very pleased to see that the publisher and Amazon have made it possible to “look inside” this excellent book, so my normal remediation is not necessary. This book is a “class act” in every possible sense of the word, from content to organization to presentation to glosary and index. It is true that “encyclopedia” may not be completely appropriate, “overview” might be a better term, but I have to give all those associated with this book real credit for taking the giant leap forward in integrating Part I, a Catalog of Health Conditions with Part II, Complementary & Alternative Therapies.
The book earns one of its stars for its emphasis on Prevention. I fear that more critical reviewers are missing the paradigm-shift in the forest due to their micro-focus on a specific condition about which they have deep knowledge. I regard this book as a true pioneering endeavor, one with huge credibility, and one extremely meritorious and worthy of follow-up.
The volume I would really like to see next from Duke would examine the true costs to society, and the true costs to heal (with an emphasis on the cost of prevention and the cost of natural cures), for each of the diseases covered in volume one. If we can articulate, in cold hard proven numbers, the costs, the common sense of the public will take us to the next leve.
