Public Intelligence Blog

Robin Good

OpenTopic is a news curation service which allows you to aggregate, monitor and filter any number of sources and to publish and share your selected ones to you selected outlets: from your WordPress site, to your social media channels and to your email newsletter engine. Within OpenTopic you can create one or more “Topic” dashboards. These are essentially display pages that aggregate incoming fresh content from the sources you specify. You can jump from one Topic dashboard to the next at the click of your mouse. To curate stories you simpy select the ones that are relevant to your audience and you are provided with an editing module to modify and personalize the story content. At this point you can also select on which one of your outlets (Channels) that story will be published and you can customize the story differently for each one of them. There is even an option that allows you to set-up some form of automated curation, by giving you the option to set up a set of simple rules, which when match, will trigger the publishing of a news story. OpenTopic allows you to hook up to an extended number of possible Channels, making it easy for you to post from one location to your web site, RSS feed, social media and newsletter. Last but not least, OpenTopic integrates a full analytics service, capable of reporting and showcasing the performance of your curation work across stories and distribution channels. My comment: Excellent tool for social media and community managers, as well as web marketing specialists in need to support effectively the finding of relevant news on a topic and the easy publishing to different channels from a centralized platform. Easy to use.

Request an invite here:  opentopic

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Michelle Monk

Here is what they have as of today.  An extraordinary effort that should soon become automated.   You won’t find these on LinkedIn!  Click for individual Venn diagram similar to the Keystone Pipeline shown below.,

Nominally Good:

AFL-CIO

The Rest:

Comcast   .   Defense Contractors   .   Disney   .   Enron   .   Fannie Mae   .   General Electric   .   Goldman Sachs   .   Green Energy   .   Keystone Pipeline   .   Media   .   Monsanto   .   Motion Picture Association of America   .   Oil Industry   .   Pharmaceuticals   .   Planned Parenthood   .   Social Networking Sites   .   Tobacco Industry   .   Walmart

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Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine this being done at every level of government from the municipality on up, across every policy domain, with whole systems analytics, true cost economics, and all trade-offs clearly visible. This is where we are going.  Humanitarian technology and Open Source Everything (OSE) are going to empower the public in a manner no government or corporation can conceive or achieve.

Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Julian Assange In Conversation With John Pilger

An extended interview with Julian Assange recorded during filming of John Pilger’s latest film The War You Don’t See.

The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders, in politics and journalism.

The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.

The US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Julian Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the first world war, or one of the war on terror conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice.

Judicial experts describe the jury as a deliberate set up, pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and other pillars of American power.

Phi Beta Iota:  From a professional intelligence point of view, the two take-aways are 01) that insider sources for WikiLeaks are proliferating, and 02) such sources are virtually guaranteed total anonymnity for their one-time or limited “donations.”  US military now serving or having recently served in Afghanistan and Iraq appear to be the predominant source group.

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Jean Lievens

Monica Anderson is CEO of Syntience Inc. and originator of a theory for learning called “Artificial Intuition” that may allow us to create computer based systems that can understand the meaning of language in the form of text. Here she discusses the ongoing paradigm shift – the “Holistic Shift” – which started in the life sciences and is spreading to the remaining disciplines. Model Free Methods (also known as Holistic Methods) are an increasingly common approach used on “the remaining hard problems”, including problems in the domain of “AI” – Problems that require intelligence. She illustrates this using a Model Free approach to the NetFlix Challenge. Her website provides some background information.

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Who? Who?

This is the latest extended piece by David DeGraw.

I: Unprecedented Wealth
II: Debt Slavery
III: Mental Slavery – Conditioned Consciousness
IV: The Spectrum of Thinkable Thought
V: Behaviorism & Assembly Line Intelligentsia
VI: Totalitarian Minds Inside the All-Consuming Cult
VII: Free Your Mind
VIII: Cyberspace Underground Railroad

“For the past 35 years, with technological advancements, there has been an explosion in production and profits, in wealth creation. That unprecedented increase in wealth, as many of you know, has gone to the top economic 1%. Most of it, the lion’s share of it, went to not even the top economic 1%, but to the top one-hundredth of one percent, to the modern day aristocracy. After analyzing the most recent data, here’s the headline: US millionaire households now have $50 trillion in wealth. They have $39 trillion in legally accounted for wealth, and an estimate of $11 trillion hidden in offshore accounts. Let that sink in for a moment… 50 TRILLION DOLLAR$. Most people cannot even comprehend how much $1  trillion is, let alone $50 trillion. One trillion is equal to 1000 billion, or $1,000,000,000,000.00. Only one-tenth of one percent of the population makes one million dollars a year, and, again, most of that wealth is in the top one-hundredth of one percent. To show how consolidated the wealth is, even in the upper most portion of the top one percentile, the richest 400 people have as much wealth as 185 million Americans combined; that’s only 400 people with as much wealth as 60% of the entire US population.

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Rickard Falkvinge

Can Bitcoin Bring Down (What’s Left Of) the US Economy?

Swarm Economy:  Bitcoin represents a significant threat to the currency domination of the USA, which is the only thing propping up the nation’s status as a worldwide superpower. Following the USA’s defaulting on all its international loans on August 15, 1971, the US trade balance has been maintained using a combination of military threats and telling people to buy US dollars just to fund the ongoing consumption of the USA. Where other world currencies have failed to challenge the USD, and therefore this mechanism of maintaining US economic dominance, bitcoin may succeed.

EXTRACT

What would happen if the US were one day unable to continue its overspending? We would see a mighty crash of the global economy, but more importantly, the US would come down in a Soviet-style collapse, only much worse due to structural differences. (To understand these differences, consider the fact that public transport kept running through the Soviet collapse, and that most families were well-prepared for food shortages. In the US, you would instead have people stranded in suburbs with no fuel, food, or medicine – only lots of weapons and ammo. See Orlov’s collapse gap for more on this structural difference.)

Enter bitcoin, which can break the cycle of borrowing and overspending.

As we observed, the key reason that people are forced to buy US Dollars today is that it’s the international mechanism of exchange of value. If you want a gadgetoid from China or India, you need to first buy US dollars, and then exchange the US Dollars for the gadgetoid. But as we have seen, bitcoin far outshines the US Dollar in every aspect as a value token for international trade. Using bitcoin is cheaper, easier, and much much faster than today’s international systems for transfer of value.

Pretty much everybody I’ve spoken to who is involved in international trade would switch to a bitcoin-like system in a heartbeat if they were able to, venting years of built-up frustration with the legacy banking system (which uses the USD). If that happens, the US won’t be able to find buyers for its newly-printed money that keeps its economy propped up (and its military funded).

If the cycle of dollar lock-in breaks, the United States of America comes crashing down. Hard. It would seem inevitable at this point, and bitcoin may be the one mechanism that breaks the cycle.

Read full post.

300 Million Talons…

Will Crushing Student Loans and Worthless College Degrees Politicize the Millennial Generation?   (May 31, 2013)

The existing social and financial order is crumbling because it is unsustainable on multiple levels. The central state is not the Millennials’ friend, it is their oppressor.No generation of young people is ever politicized by hunger in distant lands or issues of the elderly. It’s no rap on youth that self-interest defines what issues have the potential to radically transform their political consciousness; the transformative cause must reveal the system is broken for them and that it intends on sacrificing their generation to uphold the Status Quo.

The Millennial generation, also known as Gen-Y (Gen-Y comes after Gen-X), is generally defined as those born between 1982 and 2004.

The oldest Millennials were children during the first Iraq War in 1991 (Desert Storm) and just coming of age in 2001 (9/11 and the war in Afghanistan) and the start of the second Iraq War (2003).

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The Millennials have entered adulthood in a era characterized by permanent low-intensity wars and central-bank/state managed financial bubbles–2001 to the present. In other words, the only experience they have is of centralized state mismanagement on a global scale.

The gross incompetence of the government and central bank–not to mention the endless power grabs by these centralized authorities–has not yet aroused a political consciousness that the system is irrevocably broken, not just for older generations but most especially for them.

Anecdotally, it appears the Millennial generation is still operating on the fantasy that all they need to do to get a secure, good-paying job and a happy life is go to college and enter the Status Quo machine of government/corporate America.

There are two fatal flaws in this fantasy: the $1+ trillion student loan industry and a transforming economy. The higher education industry in the U.S. operates as a central state-enabled and funded cartel, limiting supply while demand (based on the fantasy that a college degree has critical value) soars. This enables the cartel to keep raising prices even as the value of its product (a diploma) sinks to near-zero.

Read full post with more graphics and links.

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Here is the abstract of a research paper, that is one of the first things I ever saw that seriously considered the E-government trend, and how it is going to impact citizens. It was published two years ago and, recently a reader sent it to me, and I read it again. I want you to notice how little has changed in the three year! s since it was published. Why is that, do you suppose?

Ask yourself: Why don’t we have such a system?

Misplaced Trust? Exploring the Structure of the E-Government-Citizen Trust Relationship
FORREST V. MORGESON III, DAVID VANAMBURG and SUNIL MITHAS – Journal of Public Adminstation Research and Theory

Abstract

A growing body of research focuses on the relationship between e-government, the relatively new mode of citizen-to-government contact founded in information and communications technologies, and citizen trust in government. For many, including both academics and policy makers, e-government is seen as a potentially transformational medium, a mode of contact that could dramatically improve citizen perceptions of government service delivery and possibly reverse the long-running decline in citizen trust in government. To date, however, the literature has left significant gaps in our understanding of the e-government-citizen trust relationship. This study intends to fill some of these gaps. Using a cross-sectional sample of 787 end users of US federal government services, data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index study, and structural equation modeling statistical techniques, this study explores the structure of the e-government-citizen trust relationship. Included in the! model are factors influencing the decision to adopt e-government, as well as prior expectations, overall satisfaction, and outcomes including both confidence in the particular agency experienced and trust in the federal government overall. The findings suggest that although e-government may help improve citizens’ confidence in the future performance of the agency experienced, it does not yet lead to greater satisfaction with an agency interaction nor does it correlate with greater generalized trust in the federal government overall. Explanations for these findings, including an assessment of the potential of e-government to help rebuild trust in government in the future, are offered.

Jean Lievens

Managing collective intelligence – Toward a New Corporate Governance

by Olivier Zara

In a production economy, value creation depends on land, labor and capital. In a knowledge economy, value creation depends mainly on the ideas and innovations to be found in people’s heads.

Those ideas cannot be forcibly extracted.

All one can do is mobilize collective intelligence and knowledge. If knowing how to produce and sell has become a basic necessity, it no longer constitutes a sufficiently differentiating factor in international competition. In the past, enterprises were industrial and commercial; in the future, they will increasingly have to be intelligent.

The intelligent enterprise stands on three pillars: collective intelligence, knowledge management and information and collaboration technologies and needs the vital energy of intellectual cooperation.

Managing collective intelligence implies a radical change that will naturally elicit a lot of resistance. But we’re talking about a social innovation. Once it is in place, once the resistance has subsided, no one will want to go back to the way it was! As always, the problem lies “not in developing new ideas but in escaping from the old ones.” Keynes.

Complete in English with Graphics:  2013-05-28 managingcollectiveintelligence

Comment and Selective Graphics from English Below the Line

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