Public Intelligence Blog

Chuck Spinney

My close friend Mike Lofgren writes an important essay describing the nature of ‘truth’ in the Orwellian echo chamber that is closing the American mind in the 21st Century.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has appropriated $806 billion for the direct cost of invading and occupying Iraq. Including debt service since 2003, that sum rises to approximately $1 trillion. The White House estimates the number of U.S. military wounded at 30,000; the web site icasualties.org states that U.S. military fatalities from the Iraq war now stand at 4484. It is impossible to estimate precisely the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, but they are frequently cited as being in excess of 100,000. There are now around two million internally displaced Iraqis in a country of 30 million inhabitants. As United States armed forces (but not up to 17,000 State Department employees, contractors and mercenaries) leave the country, Iraq is plunging into a sectarian and ethnically-fueled political crisis. Even if it survives that crisis and remains a unitary state, it will almost certainly be pulled closer to the orbit of Iran, our bogeyman du jour.

In view of the crippling costs both human and financial as well as the strategic and moral disaster the invasion of Iraq precipitated, what sort of verdict do you think our leaders – leaders representing a presidential administration ostensibly opposed to the invasion and promising hope and change – bother to offer us? While junketing in Turkey on December 17, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the press the following:

“As difficult as [the Iraq war] was, I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.”

One’s only reaction to this statement is to blink in disbelief and wonder: is Panetta that stupid, or does he think that we, the supposedly self-governing citizens of this country, are that stupid?

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Howard Rheingold

Institute for Social and Network Literacy

Life Skills for Knowledge Citizenship

Notes on cultivating a personal learning network

Explore — it’s not just about knowing how to find experts, co-learners, but about exploration as invitation to serendipitous encounter.

Search – Use Diigo, delicious, listorious, to find pools of expertise in the fields that interest you.

Follow candidates through RSS, Twitter. Ask yourself over days, weeks, whether each candidate merits continued attention.

Always keep tuning your network, dropping people who don’t gain sufficiently high interest; adding new candidates.

Feed the people you follow if you come across information that you suspect would interest them.

To find expertise, also use scholarly tool, scholar.google and freeware “Harzing’s Publish or Perish” shell of it.

Engage the people you follow. Be polite, mindful of making demands on their attention. Put work into dialogue if they welcome it.

Inquire of the people you follow, of the people who follow you. But be careful. Ask engaging questions – answers should be useful to others.

Also, use the fractal branching effect- when you find someone worth following, see who they follow, lather, rinse, repeat.

Respond to inquiries made to you. Contribute to both diffuse reciprocity and quid pro quo.

Howard also Recommends:

Goodbye Information Overload: Strawberryj.am Digs Out The Best Links From Your Twitter Connections

Howard Rheingold

Announcing a new Rheingold U course: Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation

For the past ten years, I’ve worked with Institute for the Future to track the emergence of a new story about how humans get things done together. The old story of survival of the fittest, competition, rational self-interest is changing as new knowledge comes to light about cooperative arrangements and complex interdependencies in cells, ecosystems, economies, and humans. In 2005, I delivered a TED talk about this subject; the video has been viewed more than 182,000 times. In the same year, I co-taught a seminar at Stanford with Andrea Saveri of Institute for the Future, “Toward a Literacy of Cooperation.” This six week Rheingold U course builds on the texts, videos, and other materials developed over the past ten years. Under my direction, co-learners will inquire, collaborate, discuss, co-construct knowledge about the building blocks and conceptual frames of a new literacy of cooperation. The course will run September 30 – November 11

The syllabus
The schedule of live meetings

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Berto Jongman Recommends...

Featured Article

The Emerging Global Mind

Noetic Now, Issue Fourteen, September 2011

by Tiffany Shlain

Fifteen years ago I founded the Webby Awards. I was fascinated by how the Internet was connecting people all over the world in new and unexpected ways. I have also been struck by the many conversations about the problems of our day that view them as separate challenges—whether the environment, women’s rights, poverty, or social justice. It has become increasingly apparent to me that when you perceive everything as connected, it radically shapes your perspective.

The concept of interdependence isn’t new; it’s been around since the dawn of humanity. For two-hundred-thousand years, we’ve been connecting through networks both natural and technological. Interdependence has long been a tenet of Eastern philosophy and indigenous cosmologies. But the recent addition of the Internet has added a new layer, which connects us in a fresh way, giving the world a new type of central nervous system. Something happens in one place, and we can see it, feel it, and do something about it almost instantaneously.

Safety copy below the line (original URL is inconsistent)

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John Robb

JOURNAL: Open Source Education

A couple of years back I asked (in the article “Industrial Education” which is worth a read):

“An Ivy League Education for less than $20 a month.  Why not?”

At the time there were only a smattering of course materials online.  That’s changing.  It’s coming.  Here’s an example of a class that signed up 56,000 people in two weeks.

Free Online Class on Artificial Intelligence

Another example of a highly scalable education product: Codecademy

The way to repair and revitalize modern civilization is on the horizon.  It follows a simple dictum:

Localize production.  Virtualize everything else. 

With the above, we see the virtualization of formal education (books were the first wave).

Some other thoughts on this:

• It can drop costs by 3 orders of magnitude.  $20 a year instead of $20,000.
• It means that the best instructors teach almost everyone.  Why not the best?

Phi Beta Iota:  There is actually a much larger variant of free online education, and that it the YouTube 2-5 minute micro-class revolution, in which citizen experts create concise lectures on single specific micro-knowledge, for example, a type of algebra problem, or mixing hydoponic solutions, etcetera.

Free Online & RECAP Links Below the Line

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Douglas Rushkoff

Program Your Own Money

Douglas Rushkoff

Reality Sandwich

EXTRACT:

Yes, we are watching something melt down. But I’d argue the thing that’s dying is not business itself, but a financial parasite — a speculative marketplace that no longer funds business but instead seeks to extract value from healthy commerce. More a funds vampire than an infuser of needed capital, the investment industry has been exposed as a drag on business. The future of commerce looks bright to me because it may be unencumbered by the weight of this non-productive capital.

. . . . . . .

Once we accept the fact that the money and banks we have grown accustomed to using are not the only ways to generate capital, we liberate ourselves and our businesses from a finance industry that has enjoyed a monopoly over our commerce for much too long. They have not only abused our trust through corrupt self-dealing, but abused their privilege through systemic usury. Businesses are only obligated to support their employees, owners, and customers — not an entire finance industry.

Read full article…

Koko

Can George Soros, Michael Bloomberg save New York’s troubled young men?

CSM, 4 August 2011

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a $127.5 million plan Thursday to help young black and Hispanic men. The effort includes money from financier George Soros and his philanthropy.

Education

Socioeconomic and Health issues

Employment

Incarceration

Read more….

Koko signs:  Smart men both, but neither of them has a holistic understanding of system design.  In the jungle, connectivity matters.  King of the Reflexive Practice Jungle, Dr. Russell Ackoff, would say this is a magnificent example of doing the wrong thing righter.  Paying to connect these young men to a broken system makes no sense–funding them to build a new system to displace the broken one–now that is reflexivity.  Good intentions, bad design.  We have just two questions.

1.  Has anyone asked the young men what they want?

2.  In the context of a city failing the resilience test and likely to experience near-catastrophic unemployment in the middle class over the next ten years, is there a strategy for resilience?

See Also:

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Startup Aims to Get the Poor Online With Phone Numbers

By Stephen Lawson, IDG News

U.K. startup Movirtu plans to help 3 million or more people in poor countries use mobile services by giving them personal phone numbers, not phones.

Working with a U.N.-affiliated initiative called Business Call to Action (BCtA), Movirtu will offer the numbers, which it calls mobile identities, through commercial carriers in developing countries in Africa and South Asia. People in those countries who typically borrow phones from others will be able to log into the carrier’s network and use their own prepaid minutes and bits of data.

The service is called Cloud Phone, though it operates within a carrier’s own infrastructure rather than on the Internet as a classic cloud service would. Having a personal mobile identity can save users money in two ways, according to Ramona Liberoff, executive vice president of marketing, strategy and planning at Movirtu. First, they can use mobile services without buying a phone, which is a luxury even at US$15 or $20 for people making $1 or $2 per day.

Second, the cost of prepaid service from a carrier typically is less than what consumers in those countries pay someone to borrow a phone, she said. Though it’s customary in many of these countries to lend a phone to someone in need, the borrower is also expected to pay the lender for the usage. The average savings from using regular prepaid service instead is estimated at about $60 per year, Liberoff said.

The service will help people to use mobile banking, insurance and farming assistance services as well as make phone calls, Liberoff said. Some of these services currently can only be delivered to individuals and not to someone sharing a phone. Personal mobile identities could be a boon to NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that want to use mobile technology.

Read more….

See Also:

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Venessa Miemis

This post is a contribution i made to Shareable magazine’s new ebook – Share or Die. hope you enjoy my story.

Share or Die

It’s October 2010, and I’m reclined in an all expenses paid seat in business class on a flight to Berlin. I’m going there for two weeks to collaborate on a video project with a couple of artists I met online, then flying to Amsterdam to present the video to a room full of bankers at the largest financial services conference on the planet. I’m not a media producer, nor do I work in the financial industry. All I can think to myself is “How the hell did I get here?”

. . . . . . .

Now I see this life as an Epic Adventure, with each of us in control of being the hero of our own personal mission. Here are three big insights I’ve had these past few years that make me confident in this belief:

Your community already exists, and is waiting for you.

Your vision already exists – it is a shared one.

The tools of empowerment already exist, and are ready to be wielded.

The pieces you need really are there, they’re just often hard to recognize. I went through a long phase of utter despair and hopelessness, and had no idea how to move forward. Only after putting myself out there with authenticity and a beginner’s mind did I see I was surrounded by a community of change agents with the heart, the vision, and the capacity to act.

As we all move forward in building the kind of society we want to see and the lives we want to lead, we realize more and more that everything is interconnected and we can go further by connecting, collaborating, and amplifying each other’s efforts than by stubbornly trying to reinvent the wheel.

We’re all in this together. Find your tribe and go change the world.

Read full post….

Tom Atlee

GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCE MOVEMENTS, DECLARATIONS AND DAYS

by Tom Atlee

It is so good to celebrate INdependence Days in the United States and the many other countries that have successfully gained and defended their independence from colonial rule.

For countries as well as individuals, independence is a dramatic move from dependence into a more self-defined, self-created life.

The next developmental step takes us into greater INTERdependence – bringing ourselves into increasingly mutual, peer, give-and-take relationships with others.

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