Extraordinary, Reasonably Priced, See Table of Contents & Image, August 21, 2008
Bhavani Thuraisingham
I gained access to this book free, via the sponsor of our non-profit's first year of operations, or I would not have bought it. It must certainly be in the library of any university or college with ambitions to educate those who will lead the next wave moving us toward Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. It is however reasonably priced and I recommend it for both library acquisition and deep reader purchase.
The publisher has been responsible about posting useful information (see inside the book, the second active link below the cover on this page) so I urge anyone asking that this work be acquired, at this price, print and attach the table of contents to their requisition.
The book is very well-organized with ample white space and excellent illustrative graphics and figures. I particularly liked the positioning of the references at the end of each chapter rather than grouped at the end.
Most of what we are reading these days are research reports that are outrageously priced and really should be affordable books and also free online, but most authors are too willing to give away their intellectual property for a pittance at tis time. Personally, I am betting on humans linked with low cost information sharing and group sense-making tools, and I am NOT holding my breath for automated fusion, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or machine sense-making.
See the image I have loaded under book cover for a sense of the nuances Earth Intelligence Network is exploring.
Essential Reference, Slightly Disappointing for Me Personally, August 21, 2008
Chaomei Chen
I had already decided to grade this a four instead of five, in part because it makes me cranky when world-class authors such as the author of this book neglect other world-class pioneers because of their unwillingness to do a proper search outside their own narrow boundaries. I refer of course to Dick Klavens, Brad Ashford, and Katy Borner, whose Maps of Science are online and spectacular. Even Eugene Garfield, the inventor of citation analysis, gets short shrift.
That aside, the book is an essential reference. While it makes the needed point, that first generation visualization was about showing structure and relationships, and second generation visualization needs to be more dynamic and depict evolutionary and revolutionary changes and mutations (and I would add, provide early warning of anomalies and emergent patterns).
The last chapter, 8, on Detecting Abrupt Changes and Emerging Trends, is very interesting, but heavy on mathematics, and lacking in great detail, which reminds me this is really an overview text, and should be valued in that light. Two examples of fraud detection that I have personally seen as representative of the power of visualization include Dr. Bert Little's discover of $79 million in crop insurance fraud among roughly seven insurance agents and 20+ specific farmers; and the brilliant work of Dr. Simon J. Pak and Dr. John S. Zdanowicz who found $5o billion a year in import-export tax fraud (and Colombian coffee cans marked one pound and weighing 1.5 pounds) through their exploitation of public Department of Commerce databases.
For myself, I put the book down thinking to myself, citation analysis is all well and good, but how do we integrate co-visualization of content, geospatial, money (e.g. “true costs” of each aspect or attribute)?
The author is brilliant, and the cover quotes are phenomenal. Instead of my favorite quote for Thomas Jefferson (“A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry”) the author uses one new to me, but I love it, “If all Americans know all the facts, they will never make a mistake.” Join that with Abe Lincoln's “cannot fool all of the people all of the time” and you have the Republic at its finest.
Reminding me of Dick “Vice” Cheney, the cover features also John Huxley's quote, “Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct.”
I list the table of contents for this marvelous (and very well-priced) huge (644 8.5 x 11 inch pages) volume. The publisher should have done this.
There are some troubling variations in the melange of what is covered for any given issue–some have Supreme Court ruling (e.g. abortionj others have pages of statistics. Standardization would have helped. Here are the topics covered, and I have not seen a finer single point of reference anywhere:
Aboriton
Affirmative Action
AIDS
Business
Communism
Courts
Supreme Court
Crime and Punishment
Death Penalty
Defense and the Military
Demographics
Disabilities
Drug and Alcohol Use
Economy
Educaiton
Elections
Energy
Environment
Family
Farm Policy
Federal Government
Feminism
Foreign Policy
Gay Rights
Global Warming
Gun Control
Health Care
The Homeless
Immigration
Labor
Media
Muslims
Political Correctness
Poverty
Race Relations
Regulation
Reparations
Social Security
Taxes
Terrorism and Home Security
Tort Reform
Trade
Welfare
Miscellaneous (from Girls of Clinton–guess which Clinton–to ….
Easily one of the most exciting parts of the above are the quotes with footnotes. This is a *killer* political research book.
Following the majority of the book are lists that are alone worth the price of the book and I am using them:
Senate Scorecard (Electoral Reform does not appear in this book)
Congress
100 Differences
Why Conservatives Hated the Clinton Administration
Why Liberals Hated the Reagan Administration
Celebrities (including quotes and contributions where available)
Economists
Books
Gore Misstatements (if McCain is a total idiot, Lieberman may be the first person in history to cost BOTH parties a presidential win)
Russell Kirk's Principles
Political Leaders of the Past
Political Talk Shows (with telephone numbers)
Lobbying and the Media
Polling Companies
Political Magazines
Political Groups
People
Federal Bureaucracy
Glossary
The Index is cursory, another reason I left it at four despite the deep respect I have for this endeavor.
Here is the book I would like to commission from him, covering at least five parties (Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, Reforms, and of course Independents):
THREATS
Poverty
Infectious Disease
Environmental Degradation
Inter-State Conflict (including votes on defense budget)
Civil War
Genocide (including votes against intervention in Rwanda)
Other Atrocities (including votes against victim rights)
Proliferation (including votes for US nuclear arms industry)
Terrorism
Transnational Crime (should include white collar corporate crime)
POLICIES
Agriculture
Diplomacy (including votes against beefing it up)
Economy
Education
Energy
Family
Health
Immigration
Justice
Security (including water and food security, job security, etc)
Society (including subversion of our Christian culture)
Water
CHALLENGERS (including Senate and White House ignorance and neglect):
Brazil
China
India
Indonesia
Iran
Russia
Venezuela
Wild Cards (e.g. Congo, Malaysia, South Africa, Turkey)
I am an admirer of Paul Ray and a few others, I link to some below, but I am finding in this author real promise for enlightening all citizens, online, and exposing the platitudes being offered by Obama and McCain for what they are: empty promises with no foundation in a balanced budget or a serious (credible) story on where the revenue will come from. I for one believe that Gordon Norquist should demand a pledge to eliminate all individual income taxes and institute the Tobin Tax on all Federal Reserve transactions.
Put online, with an EarthGame(TM Medard Gabel), and all budgets online in advance of votes and without permitting secret earmarks, and we get our Republic back. Superb effort, it can be improved upon, and this needs to be done NOW.
Brilliant in Isolation, Annoying for Self-Referential Insularity, August 24, 2008
C.K. Prahalad
This book is certainly worth reading, and especially by those executives that do not read much (the ones with the big egos and short attention spans). I admire the authors, but I am also increasingly annoyed by the annoying self-referential insularity that charactizes “star” authors who seem to not have read much by anyone else. Publishers need to begin demanding a proper literature search and more due diligence in “connecting” the reader to dots created by others.
Let's be crystal clear: Stewart Brand, the original editor of the Co-Evolution Quarterly and the Whole Earth Review, and the founder of the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference, did more inthe 1970's and 1980's for the concept of co-creating value that this pair will ever achieve.
More recently, in the 1990's and the past ten years, Collective Intelligence, the Power of Us (a Business Week cover story 20 June 2005 that the author's do not deign to notice), Wisdom of the Crowds, Smart Mobs, and so on, have all focused on the core concept of co-creation of value.
This book loses one star for its pretentions as an immaculate conception of a core concept that has been understood by the rest of us for the past forty years.
Now, having vented in defense of other scholars and practitioners that the authors should have respected, here are my flyleaf notes that easily warrant a solid four.
+ Roadmap for business leaders that does a superb job of showing how strategy and business processes both need to receive more respect as well as deliberate management.
+ Every individual must be treated as a singular client, and no firm has the resources to do it all–being able to connect the single client with a need and the single third party able to meet the need may be the ultimate business process.
+ Most interesting to me, as a deep admirer of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, the book that showed me my final calling as intelligence officer to the public, for which I and 23 others created a non-profit, the authors drop the one billion extreme poor from their client list, and focus only on the 4 billion above that line.
+ Properly embraced, these four billion are billed by the authors–accurately and wisely in my view–as a major source of innovation and need that can power the global economy by 2015.
+ Role of Information Technology (IT), which Paul Strassmann has demonstrated is often a negative return on investment, is to bridge the gap between strategic intent and “capacity to act.”
+ Analytics in this book are primarily mathematic and data mining of existing digital information, with a token reference to external information. “Intelligence,” “decision support,” “competitive intelligence,” and “commercial intelligence” are not terms to be found in this book. The authors appear to be oblivious to the existence of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) founded in 1986 and just now beginning to reach its potential.
+ The authors place great emphasis on the importance of the individual employee and customer, and again arouse my ire as they fail to refer back to such giants as Wilensky, Carkhuff, or Cleveland (see list of 10 books they either have not read or have chosen to forget).
+ Global standards plus local effectiveness is the key to mobilizing four billion new consumers.
+ They emphasize the importance of understanding the “hidden costs of the inflexible and archaic internal systems that exist in most firms.” They might also have thought to cite Ben Gilad on how most information reaching CEOs is late, biased, subjective, incomplete, and often wrong.
+ The three core concepts for the manager in a hurry to retain are: first, treat all others (consumers, employees, suppliers, regulators) as co-equals; second, do continuous analytics; and third, be ready to be turn on a dime. Efficiency is TIRED, flexibility (which means some redundancy) is WIRED.
For myself the real eye-opener in this book was the several case studies of what FedEx and others are doing with the detail that they amass from making their entire system transparent–not only are they tracking every package, but also every link and every inquiry–and then making sense of that to offer new services to specific INDIVIDUALs. I also appreciated the references to IBM's “ecosystem” of individuals and talents, and the emphasis on how many complex tasks can be “de-skilled” and migrated to very low-cost largely uneducated individuals, spreading the wealth while reserving the higher loads for increasingly scarce “full operational capability” programmers and managers.
I liked the authors' reference to A. V. Dhamakrishnan of Ramco India, and his focus on “evidence-based management” (page 165. I am considering publication of a work by many others on Health Intelligence, and the term I have found that rocks the health industry every time is “evidence-based medicine.”
The authors conclude that social networks are now moving into business-oriented collaboration platforms, and provide a listing of offerings that is long and interesting but not at all complete. Visit ArnoldIT.com for the real edge of the IT envelope.
This is a very fine book. It may be that publishers need to commission the literature survey, and then identify others to write forewords and afterwords that connect the dots. In no way do I demean the brilliant building block provided by this book–I am simply irritated that it hangs in space as an immaculate conception with no respect demonstrated for the considerable work by others–and to publish a book in 2008 and not even note the Business Week cover story of 20 June 2005 on “The Power of Us,” sorry, but that merits a spanking all by itself. Due diligence, anyone?
As reluctant as I was to engage with this author and this book, I have to confess that it is an essential point of view. The author and the “facts” as well as the “context” all require very rigorous filters, and cannot be taken at face value.
That having been said, I am one of those who was at first enthusiastic about Obama and then fell back for multiple reasons including the centrality of Dr. Bzezinski as his primary foreign policy advisor (Bzezinski is the guy who gave Pakistan the go on the Sunni nuclear bomb, and it is that, not the USA, that drives the Iranian Shi'ite nuclear program); the arrogance and unwillingess to meet in the center; the dependency on the Democratic party mafia; the one way “I talk you listen” attitude; and lastly, the gutless selection of a good but old man, Joe Biden, when curbing his insecurities and ego to select Hillary Clinton would have won it in a walk.
Below are reviews that will help put this book in context:
In my view, America must vote for the team most likely to have both the strength to force the military-industrial complex to redirect jobs and production lines from war to peace (reform CAN be job and revenue neutral from district to district) and the strength to break the backs of both party mafias and restore participatory democracy. Only you can decide the answer to that objective, but I hope you all agree it is relevant.
“The United States today finds itself threatened bhy three interlocking crises. The first of these crises is economic and cultural, the second, political, and the third military. All three share this characteristic: They are of our own making.” (p. 6)
+ Book is a call to arms for citizens to put our own house in order–lest we miss this point, the author places “Set thine house in order” on the first page (2 Kings, chapter 20 verse 1).
+ The author credits the left, in general, with advancing rights and liberties in the USA.
+ He points out how we have been drowning in red ink from 1975 (and in fairness to the right, I believe we can now recognize that Bill Clinton's “surplus” was based on Wall Street fraud and fantasy, postponing our reconciliation with reality and the truth).
+ The author explores how the demise of the Soviet Union created a great deal of instability, including in particular in Central Asia but also elsewhere.
+ He explicitly identifies President Ronald Reagan's “Tanker War” (the reflagging of Kuwaiti ships) as setting the stage for today, and points out that not only was Iraq rather than Iran behind most of the attacks, but this also created the American delusion that it could force the oil pipe to stay open.
+ He slams Clinton and Albright for various good reasons.
+ Great quotes:
– “Long accustomed to thinking of the United States as a superpower, Americans have yet to realize that they have forefeited command of their own destiny.” (p. 65)
– “Rather than confronting this reality head-on, American grand strategy since the era of Ronald Reagan, and especially through the era of George W. Bush, has been characterized by attempts to wish reality away. Policy makers have been engaged in a de facto Ponzi scheme intended to extend indefinitely the American line of credit.” (p. 66)
+ The author joins a wide range of others in condemning all Washington institutions: DYSFUNCTIONAL.
The author points out that the ideology of national security is the key CONTINUITY across BOTH the dysfunctional parties.
On page 85 he addresses the cult of secrecy and the manner in which virtually all of our governmental agencies (not just the spies and the White House) evade public accountability.
The author addresses how our politicians and our senior civil servants and flag officers (generals and admirals) have come to feel IMMUNIZED from public accountability.
I smile on page 91, when John F. Kennedy concludes on the basis of the Bay of Pigs that he was set up, and that CIA is not only incompetent, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff are either stupid or untrustworthy, or both.
He spends some time on the bureaucracy as the enemy of Presidents, and I would beg to differ. Our bureaucracy's are quite valuable, but only if we respect their deep and broad knowledge.
On page 113 I am fascinated to see Nitze's contribution described as a “model” in which the enemy is demonized, “options” are offered that manipulate the decision, a “code language” is used to sway the public, and panic is promoted to sweep away reasoned inquiry. Then he caps this by pointing out that Wolfowitz is the heir to Nitze.
The author begins drawing to a conclusion by pointing out that we have been distracted from the real lessons of the Iraq war, and this begins the very rich final portion of the book.
LESSON ONE: Ideology of national security poses an insurmountable obstacle to sound policy making
LESSON TWO: Americans can no longer afford to underwrite a government that does not work.
LESSON THREE: The Wise Men concept is moose manure. “To attend any longer to this elite would be madness. This is the third lesson that the Iraq War ought to drive homo. What today's Wise Men have on offer represents the inverse of wisdom. Indeed, to judge by the reckless misjudgments that have characterized U.S. policy since 9/11, presidents would be better served if they relied on the common sense of randomly chosen citizens rather than consulting sophisticated insiders.” p 122-123.
He offers three illusions that took rote post Viet-Nam:
1) That we reinvented war in its aftermath (naturally, emphasizing extremely expensive stuff that does not always work)
2) That we could achieve “full spectrum warfare” while ignoring counterinsurgency and small wars and gendarme and so on.
3) Civilian and military leaders and staffs learned to make nice and work together. NOT SO.
Three more lessons that he caveats:
1) Civilians screwed up Iraq BUT our generals were mediocre and subservient
2) Commanders need more leeway BUT in fact they did not lack for authority, they lacked for ability (and I would add, integrity)
3) Need to repair the gap between the military and the public by reinstituting the universal draft BUT draft is not a good idea because it perpetuates the large one size fits all military
FINAL LESSONS:
1) War is war and we cannot simplify it or second guess chaos and friction
2) Utility of the Armed Forces is finite
3) Preventive war is lunacy
4) We have lost the art of strategy
I strongly recommend this book for the War Colleges and for thinking adults who may be very concerned about who is giving advice to the two presidential candidates: “the Wise Men” and the young wanna-be “wise boys” who are trying so desperately to be adults but do not read much and have not spent much time in the real world.
Best Depiction of Worst Case, Needs Sense of Best Case, September 12, 2008
Rick Shenkman
I cannot improve on the reviews by Kerry Walters and Retired Reader, in that order. I was drawn to this book by the fact that it is the “other” book that readers buy when considering Joe Trippi's great book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything which will be out in a new expanded and revised edition at the end of this month (September 2008).
I am continually shocked by the ignorance and apathy as well as the growing obesity of the American people, and this book has shaken me to the roots. To not know three branches of government, and to be violently opposed to immigrants who do, turns my world upside down.
What I want to do here, subordinating my contribution to those of reveiewers Kerry Walters and Retired Reader, is list 9 books that illuminate 1) why our blue collar population is devastatingly sidelined; and 2) what the rest of us who have NOT sold out, are trying to do about it. Each of the books I list I have reviewed, and linked to other books.
There are so many others–consider using my lists for broad exploration. I really admire the critical mass that reviewers now provide, especially those that provide summative reviews, not just critical reviews.
Extraordinary, Reasonably Priced, See Table of Contents & Image, August 21, 2008
