Public Intelligence Blog

Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Digital Education

Antonio M. Battro and Percival J. Denham

Digital Education is clearly a labor of love. At the same time it is a thoughtful and sophisticated discussion of the shape of education in the future.

Howard Gardner

The purpose of this book is to provide a panorama of the application of new digital technologies in education as the century comes to an end. In some cases we have described instances where this technology has already been implemented with great success, in others we discuss promises that have still to be confirmed. We also hope to awaken “critical enthusiasm” for an effective and beneficial implementation of the best technology in the service of education and the individual.

. . . . . . .

This book is also the product of permanent collaboration with many teams of professionals in various disciplines. To all of them we convey our sincere acknowledgement and our wishes for success, as the seeds planted with so much effort have now begun to bear fruit. In addition, this grounding in our personal, generational and regional experience has enabled us to process a wide range of information from countries where this technology is more developed, with which we have maintained close and rewarding links during all these years.

CONTENTS

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John Steiner

The brain science behind economics

Paul Zak, a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, talks about the genes
that can make or break a Wall Street trader, and about the chemical that
helps us all get along.

Eryn Brown

Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2012

Neuroscience might seem to have little to do with economics, but over the last decade researchers have begun combining these disparate fields, mining the latest advances in brain imaging and genetics to get a better understanding of the biological basis for human behavior.

Paul Zak is a pioneer in this nascent field of neuroeconomics. In a recent paper published in the journal PLoS One, he examined genes that may predict success among traders on Wall Street. His forthcoming book, “The Moral Molecule,” will explore how a chemical in the brain called oxytocin compels cooperation in society.

Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University, discussed this work with The Times.

Read full interview.

Phi Beta Iota:  Convergence is upon us.  Most universities do not get this, but a couple are struggling to change recalcitrant faculty and force the break-down of silos and the reconstitution of unified knowledge.  We are at the very beginning of most interesting times.

See Also:

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Got Crowd? BE the Force!

How Children’s Toys Reflect What’s Next in Technology & Education, March 5, 2012, PRAGMATIC VISIONS | by Jim Brazell 

[Editor’s note: This is the first in a new column series from the pragmatic visionaries at the Thornburg Center for Professional Development for edtech digest]

“The availability of technologies to youth is its own instructor.” –Nobelist Herbert A. Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001), Author of Science of the Artificial and a Father of Artificial Intelligence

EXTRACT:  TOYS MIRROR WHAT’S NEXT IN TECHNOLOGY

In the same way that Erector Sets were patterned after the technologies of the third phase of the industrial revolution, the LEGO MindStorms kits reflect the structure of emerging technology and careers in the 21st Century. In 2006, Nano Quest from FIRST Robotics enabled students to program LEGO robots to mimic biological, chemical, and physical systems across  micro-, meso-, and nano-scales.

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Jon Lebkowsky

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (AC Clarke)

My pal David Pescovitz at the Institute for the Future blogged recently about the IFTF “Multiverse of Exploration Map,” an overview of the six big stories of science that will play out over the next decade:

Decrypting the Brain,
Hacking Space,
Massively Multiplayer Data,
Sea the Future
Strange Matter, and
Engineered Evolution.

“Those stories are emerging from a new ecology of science shifting toward openness, collaboration, reuse, and increased citizen engagement in scientific research.” A followup post includes a video of Luigi Anzivino from The Exploratorium talking about the relationship of magic and neuroscience.

See Also:

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)

MIT Online vs. Your Local College: How Will Web Learning Stack Up?

Alan Jacobs – Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College. He blogs at ayjay.tumblr.com.

The Atlantic, 23 February 2012

The success of e-education depends on whether universities can design online environments that are conducive to learning.

In one of my first posts here at the Atlantic, I wrote about universities and the problem of credentialing. If a school like Stanford offers online classes to non-Stanford students, and those students learn a great deal, then what is that learning worth? Or, to be more precise, what might a potential employer think that that learning is worth, in the absence of a formal credential like a grade or a degree?

Well, as Megan McArdle has reported here recently, at least one university, MIT, is moving towards making a kind of credential available for people who take and pass its online courses. The plot, then, is definitely thickening. And some questions are beginning to loom in my mind.

. . . . . . .

That’s going to be the key to the future of online learning: not whether universities simply film their best lecturers, or place all their course materials online, but whether they find an optimal design for online learning.

But of course, as I suggested in my earlier post, it may not be universities who first figure this out: it may be educational entrepreneurs like Sebastian Thrun. If so — and depending on what kinds of intellectual property claims people like Thrun can make and sustain — universities may find themselves playing a futile game of catch-up.

The ones best placed to avoid such an unfortunate turn of events are, of course, the wealthiest universities, and if they are willing to invest a lot of money, time, and energy, then they may well end up, as McArdle suggested in her post, ruling the roost even more confidently than they do now. But I’m not yet convinced that many of our most prestigious institutions are in this particular game to win it.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Rote education is in a massive nose-dive.  As hackers have known so well for over twenty years, schools are now 20% relevant, 80% a waste of time.  As the same time, the government has failed to plan for the economy, the society, or the global information-sharing and intelligence matrix.  Secret intelligence consumes (in the USA) $80 billion a year while yielding 4% “at best” for a few, nothing for everyone else.  Research has similarly poor relevance and return.  The entire knowledge system is hosed.  This is our core challenge.

See Also:

Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truth-Telling

300 Million Talons...

How the Public Schools Keep Your Child a Prisoner of the State

Karen De Coster

LewRockwell.com, 31 January 2012

Public education, in its current state, is based on the idea that government is the “parent” best equipped to provide children with the values and wisdom required to grow into intelligent, functional adults. To echo what former first lady Hillary Clinton professed, these public school champions believe “it takes a village” to cultivate a society of competent human beings.

As Hebrew University historian Martin van Crevald points out in his book, The Rise and Decline of the State, nineteenth-century state worshippers who wanted to impose a love of big government ideals upon the youth popularized the archetype for state-directed education. Additionally, there was an overall appetite for discipline of the “unruly” masses that reinforced the campaign to take education out of the hands of individuals. After all, the self-educated masses might resist government decrees, and this kind of disarray would be undesirable in the move toward building a powerful, controlling state apparatus. Prussia’s Frederick William I and France’s Napoleon discerned this, as did a legion of other despotic rulers throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In a recent article published on the American Daily Herald “Dumberer and Dumberest,” Glenn Horowitz writes:

If you’re not familiar with it, the Prussian system was a teaching methodology designed to stamp out good little worker bees assembly-line fashion, trained to be complacent with their station in life and compliant with every demand of the State. An elite of those better educated but still proven unquestioningly loyal to the State were promoted to lead the proletariat, rewarded with elevated status and material success commensurate with their skills and the zeal they demonstrate in supporting the system. It specifically avoided developing creativity and independent thought, reasoning these were skills the worker classes didn’t need in their roles as mass produced labor.

Modern education is built upon a foundation set forth by tyrants. What is most disquieting about the public education mindset is that those who believe most strongly in it are convinced that there are no other suitable alternatives to the compulsory schooling provided via the public domain. The egalitarian core belief of these public education proponents is that society is responsible for obtaining, maintaining, and paying for the process of equally developing young minds.

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David Isenberg

Our Secret American Security State

The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012

Steve Coll

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State
by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
Little, Brown, 296 pp., $27.99

Intelligence and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform
by Paul R. Pillar
Columbia University Press, 413 pp., $29.50

Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda
by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker
Times Books, 324 pp., $27.00

What is the American intelligence bureaucracy good for? The question is difficult to ask in a serious way in Washington because it risks raising the hackles of career intelligence professionals and their political sponsors at a time when spy agencies remain under pressure to combat resilient if diminished international terrorist groups and to monitor and check Iran’s nuclear program, among other challenges. Yet a serious, transparent review of the intelligence system’s strengths and limitations is overdue.

The past decade has witnessed one of the most egregious misuses of intelligence in American history—the Bush administration’s distortion of information about Saddam Hussein’s terrorist ties and unconventional weapons, in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. It has also seen a surge of paramilitary activity and covert action that has included the operation of secret prisons, the use of torture, and targeted killing. The Obama administration ended officially sanctioned torture, but it has refused to allow official inquiries into how it occurred, and the administration has increased the number of covert, unacknowledged targeted killings through the use of armed, unmanned aerial drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

In all, a president who might have challenged the American intelligence bureaucracy and given it a new direction has instead maintained and even expanded what he inherited. Nor has Congress reviewed the hasty organizational reforms it enacted after September 11 or reckoned in depth with the problems exposed by the Iraq disaster. The vital questions that seemed to be begged after the Bush era—about the intelligence system’s scope, effectiveness, costs, outsourcing, legal justifications, and vulnerability to politicization—have remained largely unaddressed.

. . . . . . .

After September 11, newspaper Op-Ed pages were full of recommendations for radical departures in American intelligence, changes that might place new emphasis on lean and adaptable operations. There was much talk of a long-term development of “human sources of information”; of the need for risk-taking and the bold penetration of what are known in the intelligence agencies as “denied areas,” such as Iran and North Korea. Some of that ambition has been fulfilled; it is difficult to measure how much, since so much of the detail of post–September 11 covert action and intelligence collection remains secret.

. . . . . .

What is plain, nonetheless, is that the larger story of the American intelligence system is one of continuity. The bureaucracy has defended itself from outside investigation and oversight and has followed many of the trajectories set during the Eisenhower years. The relative strengths of tactical American intelligence tradecraft today include innovative technology, vacuum cleaner–like collection of electronic data worldwide, computer algorithms that sort valuable information from noise, and the bludgeoning effects on adversaries of huge if wasteful spending. These methods look very similar to those of the anti-Soviet intelligence system. The bureaucracy’s weaknesses—inefficiency, ignorance of local cultures, revolving doors, self-perpetuation, vulnerability to political pressure, and an overall lack of accountability—are deeply familiar, too.

Read full article with registration.

Phi Beta Iota:  The New York Review of Books is retarded.  Search for the article to read the full piece without their demand for registration.  We note with interest that most of these themes were clearly addressed by Robert Steele in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), but “blacked out” by the sycophantic media including Steve Coll and David Ignatius.  It is a rare day when a mainstream media person gets this real–Mr. Coll now administers the New America Foundation, a front for the Obama Administration that receives taxpayer funding it has not earned.   This sudden “conversion” by Mr. Coll may be a preamble to a very large but still insufficient and ineffective cut of secret intelligence just prior to the election.  Neither Mr. Coll nor the Obama Administration are interested in intelligence with integrity–only profiteering from the commonwealth while flim-flaming the public with theatrics.

See Also:

Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP

The purpose of high school should be to prepare EVERY individual for further learning, whether it be inside the classroom or outside. The way I see it, there are 3 categories of learning that a student in K-12 ought to master in order to progress for further learning: creativity, critical thinking, and memorizing knowledge(I fail to find a term that encapsulates this idea in a more functional manner).

Creativity generally happens when one either A. Lacks the knowledge/experience about a subject to conform to standards set by experience from themselves or others, or B. Learns how to work in unintuitive, possibly “random” solutions to a given problem. Kids have an inherent advantage in this area because of a lack of life experience. Therefore, it is an ABSOLUTE MUST that kids be given creative expression from the time they are in Kindergarten all the way up through 12th grade. As they gain life experience they should be in the habit of thinking in creative ways, and further utilizing techniques for thinking creatively, some of which are described in Scott Thorpe’s book “How to Think Like Einstein: Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius”.

Next is critical thinking, which kids also have an advantage in age. However, unlike creativity, they are not born with the skills. Rather, they have to be taught how to think this way, and they need to learn and develop this skill to the point that it becomes second nature. There are various ways to do this, examples might be: mathematical word problems, analysis of literature or anything else you may derive open-ended questions from, even games like Chess or Sudoku. Creativity and critical thinking would show apparent connections by middle school if not earlier. It not only allows an individual to come up with an answer to a problem, but it challenges that individual to use logic to analyze and improve existing solutions to make them smarter and more efficient. Early grades can be focused in developing creativity and critical thinking individually to make them routine and intuitively utilized, while later grades can be focused on combining and using them together to come up with many possible creative, sound, rational ideas to a given complex problem.

Memorizing knowledge I don’t believe should be a focus until at least 7th grade. This would only serve to discourage creativity and critical thinking among the younger kids by essentially being told “this is what smart people think so they must be correct”. 7th grade and beyond, kids can receive reading assignments and things of the sort that require them to obtain knowledge and combine it with creativity and critical thinking to build on what is already there. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel, however you should know how it works first. This part of the learning would also require teaching how to find and discover information. By the time you graduate, you should know how to find information that you’re looking for, use creative techniques to discover new ideas, and use critical thinking to logically apply the best ideas into the best solution possible.

The school system as it is today is about 90% memorizing knowledge, 10% critical thinking, and 0% creativity.(I say 0% because any positive gains made from the few artistic and creative classes out there are canceled out by the complete creative discouragement in other areas) It is an institution that is happy to dumb down the curriculum in order to achieve higher graduation rates and make it look like the school and teachers are succeeding. Teachers often try the best they can but get no support from parents, and when kids refuse to learn there is no recourse. Many parents are unable to support their children academically if they are low income and juggling full and/or part time jobs, some parents have made choices to abuse drugs or alcohol and are unable to handle that responsibility.

I believe the school system needs to be the responsibility of the community as a whole, community centers run by either volunteers or non-profits that connect with the teachers to help struggling students with either homework or a safe environment for those with a rough home life. Community centers can reach out and connect with parents and EVERYONE can be responsible for their children’s education.

I’ll briefly touch on the topic of college by saying that, tuition could possibly be paid for students in part or in full by taking scientific advancements made by a college, putting them in the public domain, and utilizing them to save money. The money saved by increased efficiency can serve to pay for college tuition to encourage further advancements. An example might be that a college figures out a method of filtering salt water into drinkable water, thus decreasing the cost of water by the government, and the excess funds saved by the new technique can be redirected towards college tuition. I have no clue about numbers on this but I’m thinking it could be at least partially viable and utilizing colleges for the public interest could be absolutely valuable in restoring our country and solving the problems it faces.

See Also:

• Education (General) (130)
• Education (Universities) (58)

In summary:  US took ten years to make an issue of two Pakistani fertilizer factories that are the primary source for all Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) killing and maiming in AF.  Taliban gets what it wants in AF school programs, Iran makes progress in AF, SY and on the side with Saudi Arabia.

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Steven Aftergood

Charter of Open Source Org is Classified, CIA Says

Open Source Works, which is the CIA’s in-house open source analysis component, is devoted to intelligence analysis of unclassified, open source information.  Oddly, however, the directive that established Open Source Works is classified, as is the charter of the organization.  In fact, CIA says the very existence of any such records is a classified fact.

“The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request,” wrote Susan Viscuso, CIA Information and Privacy Coordinator, in a November 29 response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Jeffrey Richelson of the National Security Archive for the Open Source Works directive and charter.

“The fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is currently and properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure,” Dr. Viscuso wrote.

This is a surprising development since Open Source Works — by definition — does not engage in clandestine collection of intelligence.  Rather, it performs analysis based on unclassified, open source materials.

Thus, according to a November 2010 CIA report, Open Source Works “was charged by the [CIA] Director for Intelligence with drawing on language-trained analysts to mine open-source information for new or alternative insights on intelligence issues. Open Source Works’ products, based only on open source information, do not represent the coordinated views of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

As such, there is no basis for treating Open Source Works as a covert, unacknowledged intelligence organization.  It isn’t one.

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