Public Intelligence Blog

Got Crowd? BE the Force!

The Three Things You Need to Know About Big Data, Right Now

Patrick Tucker

World Future Society  March 11, 2012

Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies

Okay. You got me. I can’t really tell you everything you need to know about big data. The one thing I discovered last week – as I joined more than 2,500 data junkies from around the world for the O’Reilly Strata conference in rainy Santa Clara California—is that nobody can, not Google, not Intel, not even IBM. All I can guarantee you is that you’ll be hearing a lot more about it.

What is big data? Roughly defined, it refers to massive data sets that can be used to predict or model future events. That can include everything from the online purchase history of millions of Americans (to predict what they’re about to buy) to where people in San Francisco are most likely to jog (according to GPS) to Facebook posts and Twitter trends and 100 year storm records.

Phi Beta Iota:   Big data is most important for what it can tell you about true cost and whole system cause and effect, inclusive of political corruption and organizational fraud.  These are past and present issues, not future issues.  We design the future based on the integrity present today.  This is why “open everything” matters.

With that in mind, here’s the three most important things you need to know about big data right now:

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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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Robert David STEELE Vivas

One of our contributors passed this to me and asked me to comment in relation to the alarm that Winn Schwartau, Bill Caeli, Jim Anderson, and I sounded in 1994, in writing, to Marty Harris, then head of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).

First, the item.

From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later

Mark Clayton

Christian Science Monitor, 22 September 2011

Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that attacked and damaged an Iranian nuclear facility, has opened a Pandora’s box of cyberwar, says the man who uncovered it. A Q&A about the potential threats.

EXTRACT:

CSM: How would you characterize the year since Stuxnet – the response by nations, industry and government?

LANGNER: Last year, after Stuxnet was identified as a weapon, we recommended to every asset owner in America – owners of power plants, chemical plants, refineries and others – to make it a top priority to protect their systems…. That wakeup call lasted only about a week. Thereafter, everybody fell back into coma. The most bizarre thing is that even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Siemens [maker of the industrial control system targeted by Stuxnet] talked about Stuxnet being a wakeup call, but never got into the specifics of what needed to be done.

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Seth Godin

Back to (the wrong) school

Click on Image to Enlarge

Original Online (.doc 1 page)

Marcus Aurelius

British press report, unusually thorough, but miss the core point: why so many sent into combat in a single very old, very slow transport helicopter.

Special forces helicopter shot down in Afghanistan was on a mission to rescue U.S. Army Rangers

Daily Mail, 7 August 2011

• Chopper brought down in rocket attack was on its way to aid other elite troops fighting militants
• Names of American victims begin to be released
  
• Twenty-two of the dead soldiers were from elite Seal Team Six
• At 30 deaths in total, it’s highest number of U.S. casualties in one incident
• Seven Afghan soldiers die in the crash
• President Obama mourns this ‘extraordinary sacrifice’
  
• Afghan president sends condolences to Obama

Read more–includes video and map.

Phi Beta Iota:  DoD has not had a global engagement strategy nor a mature joint/multinational acquisition strategy that we know of….the Services have refused to work together and fought for budget share rather than for capabilities relevant to reality and to the safety of the individuals actually going into combat (4% of the force that gets 80% of the casualties and 1% of the budget).  In a word, DoD lacks integrity at the policy and acquisition levels such that no degree of operational excellence can overcome.  The top speed of the Chinook is 185 mph but that is when it is empty, flying below 6,000 feet, and on a delightfully warm not humid day.  These people were sent to their death because DoD does not have the integrity to plan for combat helicopters capable above 6,000 feet.  Sending them into combat like that is the equivalent of sending a SWAT team into a gang fight aboard a train of golf carts.  SHAME!

See Also:

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Tom Atlee

Dear friends,

I have worked for several months to develop the ideas in this article and to articulate them in an accessible way.  They are fundamental understandings underlying the co-intelligence vision of a wiser democracy.

If the ideas intrigue you, you can find a longer version with more detailed guidelines and references online.  I wrote the abstract below to make it easier for you to see the whole pattern at once.  I hope you find both versions interesting and useful.

Coheartedly,
Tom

============

GUIDELINES FOR MAKING WISER DECISIONS ON PUBLIC ISSUES

by Tom Atlee

As a civilization we have tremendous collective power, but we don’t always use it wisely.  We can make good decisions, but we face messy, entangled, rapidly growing problems with complex, debatable causes.  Efforts to solve one problem often generate new ones.  We need more than problem-solving smarts here.  We need wisdom.

A good definition for wisdom here is

the capacity to take into account
what needs to be taken into account
to produce long term, inclusive benefits.

To the extent we fail to take something important into account, it will come back to haunt us.  But often we only realize we overlooked something long after our decision has been implemented.  Certain practices – because they lead us to include more of what’s important – can help us meet this challenge.  Here are eight complementary ways to do this.  The more of them we do, and the better we do them, the wiser our collective decisions will be.
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New Botnet, Now 4.5 Million Machines Strong, is ‘Practically Indestructible’

Today in cyber threats: more than four million Windows PCs have been commandeered by a botnet that cybersecurity experts are calling nearly “indestructible.” Known as TDL-4 (it’s the fourth iteration of the malicious program), this particular little nuisance hides in places security software rarely checks and speaks with other infected machines and their overseers in a novel encrypted code. Some are calling it the most sophisticated threat out there today. Watch your back, Stuxnet.

Read rest of story….

Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the known fact that the US Government ignored documented warning from Winn Schwartau, Jim Anderson, Bill Caelli, and Robert Steele in 1994, what we have here is the culimination of fifteen years in which governments continue to operate as Industrial Era hierarchies, choosing secrecy to protect incompetence rather than multinational sharing to achieve resilience–they are as a result inept beyond belief.  The cloud–given the plethora of proprietary and therefore generally insecure hardware and software–is not going to be cleaned up on the present course, where spam is 75% of all email despite the best (isolated) efforts of all concerned.  M4IS2, anyone?

See Also:

Journal: Army Industrial-Era Network Security + Cyber-Security RECAP (Links to Past Posts)

Search: Steele USMC C4I 1990′s

Open Source Ecology — 50 Open Source Tools for Resilience

Industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale….it just requires open source design.  A single DVD is a civilization starter kit.

Interactive Transcript

About The Speaker

About This Talk

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that’s only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

Winslow Wheeler

There are a set of documents at the DOT&E website which offer DOT&E insights into the reason for why about 40 programs have experienced delays — and costs.  These documents relate to a Tony Capaccio story in today’s Bloomberg News (below).

The document titled “Updated DOT&E Input on Program Delays” (at the DOT&E link shown above) identifies various specific reasons for the problems programs experience — different from most of the explanations from contractors and other system advocates in and out of the Pentagon.  (Eg. for the F-35:  Fly rates per month lowered to more realistic projections (from 12 max for all variants and venues to 10 max for CTOL/CV flight sciences, 9 max for STOVL flight sciences, 8 max for all mission systems); increased planning factors for re-fly and regression (up 15% for flight science, 10% for mission systems); more time required for software development and incremental builds.”)

Beyond the F-35, the various systems described in the analysis are typically more obscure programs (eg. AIM-9X 8.212 Software Upgrade) but there are also a few better known ones, such as LCS, which is described in “fly before buy,” Congress and the Navy want to rush ahead of testing to buy 4 LCS in the 2012 HASC DOD Authorization bill for $1.8 billion in production costs.

Availability of complete mission packages will be delayed until at least 2015.

Instead of withholding production of untested systems with clear and obvious development problems, Congress and the Pentagon are intent on business as usual.  The LCS is a good example: instead of “fly before buy,” Congress and the Navy want to rush ahead of testing to buy 4 LCS in the 2012 HASC DOD Authorization bill for $1.8 billion in production costs.

Some will think the DOT&E analysis and documents to be obscure and too “in the weeds” to pay much attention to.  Instead, they offer a major part of the explanation for why hardware costs and delays are so out of control, and they offer a stunning view into how little is being done about that.

BloombergNews.com, June 13, 2011

Weapons Testers Found Not to Blame for Procurement Delay