Public Intelligence Blog

David Isenberg

Open Access to Scientific Information

By Adrian Janes

Source: House of Commons Library (UK)

Overview:

Open Access (OA) to scientific publications could provide more effective dissemination of research and thus increase its impact.

The costs and benefits of different models of providing OA to publications need to be considered if a comprehensive shift to OA is to be financially sustainable.

OA to research data could enable others to validate findings and re-use data to advance knowledge and promote innovation.

Sharing data openly requires effective data management and archiving. It also presents challenges relating to protecting intellectual property and privacy.

Expanding access to scientific information requires researchers, librarians, higher education institutions, funding agencies and publishers, to continue to work together.

+ Direct link to document from this page (PDF; 351 KB)

See Also:

1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (An Alternative Paradigm)

1992 AIJ Fall ‘New Paradigm” and Avoiding Future Failures

1992 Steele (US) From School House to White House

Chris Pallaris

Creative Thinkering

Resurrecting your natural creativity through inspiring techniques and practical examples

Michael Michalko

Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking

Aspects of creative thinking that are not usually taught.

LIST ONLY – read full article for expansions.

1.  You are creative.
2.  Creative thinking is work.
3.  You must go through the motions of being creative.
4.  Your brain is not a computer.
5.  There is no one right answer.
6.  Never stop with your first good idea.
7.  Expect the experts to be negative.
8.  Trust your instincts.
9.  There is no such thing as failure.
10.  You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.
11.  Always approach a problem on its own terms.
12.  Learn to think unconventionally.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  They left out the following:

1.  Everything is connected.
2.  Understanding true costs as a concept is fundamental.
3.  Cultural lenses matter.
4.  Understanding history is a strong foundation for shaping the future.
5.  The best thinkers are not necessarily the best teachers or doers.
6.  Trust is the fuel for all of the above – transparency & truth build trust.

Who? Mini-Me?

Occupy 9/11 is emergent. This film, loaded on 1 February 2011, is now going viral. At 2:28:42, this is one of the best documentaries on the topic, and it is free online.

YouTube War by Deception 2011

Phi Beta Iota:  This is an extraordinary contribution.  It is highly recommended for students as well as adult learning clubs; it provides the best “overview” in one place.

See Also:

9-11 Truth Books & DVDs (33)

DefDog

Deja vu — over and over again.

In Kim’s Death, an Extensive Intelligence Failure

By MARK LANDLER and CHOE SANG-HUN

New York Times, December 19, 2011

EXTRACT:

For South Korean, Chinese and American intelligence services to have failed to pick up any clues to this momentous development — panicked phone calls between government officials, say, or soldiers massing around Mr. Kim’s train — attests to the secretive nature of North Korea, a country not only at odds with most of the world but also sealed off from it in a way that defies spies or satellites.

Read full story.

Phi Beta Iota:  There is a huge disconnect between how the US secret intelligence community spends money, and what it produces.  4% “at best” of what a major commander needs to know, and nothing for everyone else.  Until the secret world has leadership focused on requirements definition, collection management, holistic analytics, multinational information-sharing and sense-making, and direct constant support to decision-makers at all levels across all issue areas, it will continue to administer (not mange, not lead) the world’s most expensive Potemkin Village.

See Also:

Graphic: Tony Zinni on 4% “At Best”

Graphic: Intelligence Maturity Scale

Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

2008 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2006 INFORMATION OPERATIONS: All Information, All Languages, All the Time

2002 THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political

2000 ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World

Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Connecting the Dots: Finding Patterns in Large Piles of Numbers

Atlantic, 16 December 2011

A new program can find and compare relationships in complicated data without having to be asked specific queries

Are there subtle patterns lurking in data that can foretell of a coming financial-system crash? What can explain the variations in sports-star salaries? How about the complex relationship between genes and certain diseases? Scientists in various fields have been searching for better ways to analyze large piles of data for such patterns, but the difficulty has always been that they need to know what they’re looking for in order to find. A new software program, described in the latest issue of Science, is designed to find the patterns in data that scientists don’t know to look for.

David Reshef, one of the scientists behind MINE, as the program is called, explains, “Standard methods will see one pattern as signal and others as noise. There can potentially be a variety of different types of relationships in a given data set. What’s exciting about our method is that it looks for any type of clear structure within the data, attempting to find all of them. … This ability to search for patterns in an equitable way offers tremendous exploratory potential in terms of searching for patterns without having to know ahead of time what to search for.” MINE compares different possible relationships (including linear, exponential, and periodic)  and returns those that are strongest.

On MINE’s website, the program is available for download.

Who? Mini-Me?

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) rose to prominence in an era of uncontested budget growth (including a borrowed trillion dollars a year) and uncontested airspace.  That era is now over.

There will still be a place for mico-UAVs, especially in direct support of small unit operations, but neither the US military nor the US secret intelligence world consider infantry solutions to be “expensive enough” to be worth doing well.

For those who lack the sophistication to hack control over a UAV and force its undamaged landing, Electromagnetic Pulse rays remain the generic counter-measure that will proliferate rapidly.

NIGHTWATCH:

Point and Shoot...

Pakistan: Any unmanned aerial vehicles, including US UAVs, entering Pakistani air space will be treated as hostile and shot down per a new defense policy, a senior Pakistani official said on 10 December.

Comment: Pakistani forces lack the capabilities to execute the directive as announced, but the loss of one or two drones would be enough to curtail the program because of the expense from multiple aircraft losses. The program is not sustainable in contested airspace. This declaration has been coming for a very long time.

Algeria-US-France: For the record. US and French unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) will not be allowed to fly over Algeria’s southern airspace to counter weapons smuggling from Libya, according to El Khabar newspaper. Algeria will increase its reconnaissance of UAV air surveillance operations.

Comment: The Iranians will be quick to disseminate any insights they developed in downing a US reconnaissance drone. Algeria might not yet have Iran’s insights but it is showing that it is open to Iranian help.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

See Also:

DefDog: Iran Hijacks US Drone Shows Film + RECAP

Dolphin: Their Drones, Our Drones, and EMP Rays

Robert David STEELE Vivas

This is fascinating at multiple levels.  Neither Google nor Facebook have been effective at helping humans “make sense,” now it appears that Twitter–perhaps combined with Hypothes.is–just might be a hair away from creating the skeleton of the World Brain.

Twitter Just Fired A Cannonball At Facebook And Google+

Matt Rosoff

Business Insider, 8 December 2011

Twitter is revamping the service with personal Twitter profile pages, a new timeline that includes rich media and other related informationembedded into tweets, and easier search for information based on @ symbols (usernames) and hash tags.

Talking at Twitter’s unfinished new headquarters building in San Francisco, founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo explained that the changes are meant to make Twitter more accessible to everybody.

Their three goals:

• Expose the “universe within every tweet.” Tweets aren’t just 140 characters — there’s also context like retweets and replies, and embedded content like videos, images, and songs. Today, accessing this material still feels like opening a “side drawer,” said Costolo.

• Make Twitter less obscure to use. Today, the @ and # symbols are too obscure — people don’t know what they mean. This contributes to a lot of people visiting Twitter but not really participating actively. The redesign surfaces these symbols and makes them the gateway to find out more infrmation about people and topics on the surface.

• Share it with everybody. The world has 7 billion people. Most of those people are “not yet on Twitter,” said Costolo. The redesign will roll out to mobile devices simultaneously, and is streamlined to load up to 500% faster.

The trick is doing this without adding too much complexity. As Dorsey put it, “simplification is the key here.”

DefDog

An outstanding piece of bargaining power for Iran with both Russia and China….don’t expect UN sanctions anytime soon…..

Updated 11 Dec 2011 to add more stories with photos and comment.

Iran won’t return U.S. drone it claims to have

Iran Shows Video It Says Is of U.S. Drone

Zakaria and Baer: Downed U.S. drone an intel catastrophe

Phi Beta Iota:  Variants of this stuff are for sale at Brookstone and Best Buy. The US has consistently refused to be serious about emission control, downlink security, and real-time processing.  This is a “disaster” only to the degree that it reveals–once again–how immature the US “intelligence” archipelago of fiefdoms actually is.

Iran shows film of captured US drone

BBC, 8 December 2011

Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border.

Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.

US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.

However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.

Click on Image to Enlarge

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim.

Iran’s Press TV said that the Iranian army’s “electronic warfare unit” brought down the drone on 4 December as it was flying over the city of Kashmar, about 140 miles (225km) from the Afghan border.

Nato said at the weekend that an unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week when its operators lost control of it.

Pentagon officials have said they are concerned about Iran possibly acquiring information about the technology.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Our first impression has been that Iran has downed the UAV with an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) beam.  This is much cooler.  As with the Taliban in Afghanistan able to hijack the downlinks, the Iranians simply hijacked the entire aircraft.  From where we sit, the Chinese (who ride electric power circuits into “isolated” computers) and the Iranians [Persians, more PhDs per capita than most] are laughing at us, while the Russians simply ignore us.  Newsflash for the Pentagon: our technology is not that great.  Classifying the idiot vulnerabilities does not work–something we have been pointing out for twenty years.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

See Also:

Dolphin: Their Drones, Our Drones, and EMP Rays

Journal: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones

Journal: Gorgon Stare (All Eyes, No Brain)

Journal: Running Interference On Interference

Journal: U.S. Air Force–Remote from War & Reality

Theophilis Goodyear

Equal Voice! Break the Corporate Mega-Media Dictatorship by Reintroducing the Wagner-Hatfield Amendment

The Wagner-Hatfield Amendment was a proposed amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, sponsored by senators Robert F. Wagner, Democrat, of New York and Henry D. Hatfield, Republican, of West Virginia. The amendment would have reserved 25% of all radio stations for non-profit radio broadcasters, including universities. The amendment was enthusiastically supported by educators. Of course it was vigorously attacked by the for-profit radio lobby.

The amendment almost passed but was defeated. If the amendment were reintroduced and passed, it would effectively break the corporate mega-media monopoly. Universities would be more likely than corporations to give alternate voices a chance to be heard.

Using the internet to challenge the corporate mega-media view of things is an admirable use of the internet. But why should we accept that inherent disadvantage? Reintroduce the Wagner-Hatfield amendment and pass it, and the disadvantage will disappear overnight. There were no TV stations when the amendment was proposed. But today it would have to include them to be fair. If universities had their own TV stations they could reach far more people than the average blog. And if they had of had equal access to media since 1934, American history might be quite different.

“Equal Voice” should become an issue of emergent democracy. The average voter doesn’t have an equal voice even with their elected representatives, because campaign contributions talk louder. And media outlets have an even louder voice than politicians, who are limited to C-SPAN and periodic coverage by mainstream media of things like press conferences and State of the Union addresses. The public voice is effectively stifled by the arrangement.

No. Equal voice needs to mean equal access to media! That’s the only way voters will ever be able to effectively challenge a system that is stacked against them. All we need is a little volume so that our voices can be heard as loudly as the collective voice of mega-media corporations. The Wagner-Hatfield amendment might be just the crowbar we need to pry an opening in the iron wall of corporate mega-media control and give disenfranchised American voters the voice they have long been denied.

Who? Who?

Screen-friendly report: Visual analytics; Revealing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse

For entities around the globe, identifying potential fraud and corruption activities in large volumes of data has historically been difficult and quite costly. More often than not, the rich insights within that data may be difficult to identify by traditional means and remain hidden.

Against this backdrop, practitioners are turning to visual analytic tools and techniques. Graphically representing and exploring data can bring clarity to executives’ concerns and to performance improvement opportunities.

Visual analytics tools and techniques, including social networking diagrams, link analysis, geospatial analysis and tree maps, can help to focus investigations on particular activities and connect disparate pieces of information to form a cohesive story. Entities should consider equipping their personnel to employ these techniques to meet the growing challenge of reducing corruption, fraud, waste and abuse in the enterprise.

Download the PDF below to learn more. Two versions are provided to accommodate your viewing preferences: a standard version for printing and a screen version for reading on your computer or mobile device.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is not new–they are roughly fifteen years behind Dr. Bert Little, who pioneered this work for the Department of Agriculture, virtually eradicating crop insurance fraud ($4 million invested stopped $80 million a year in fraud).  Dr. Little received a Golden Candle Award at OSS ’94 and continues to do extraordinary detection of corruption with clever computing across the Texas A&M University System.