Public Intelligence Blog

Jean Lievens

Revolutionize Corporate Learning: Beyond Formal, Informal, Mobile, Social Dichotomies

by Marcia Conner on May 10, 2013

A report for business decision makers interested in abolishing traditional corporate training functions, creating instead vibrant modern collaborative cultures. Why? The corporate learning field is in dire need of bravery, insight, creativity and boldness. It has been stuck in an antiquated rut for too long. Full classrooms and smile-sheet summaries only indicate employees can successfully sit through training, not that these strategies demonstrate value or engender growth in competitive organizations. With a nod toward early twentieth-century innovations, moving the art world toward natural forms, the corporate education function should aim to become learning nouveau. The people responsible for fostering education throughout organizations ought to consider becoming artists. Here’s how. [Additional information at http://www.marciaconner.com/learning-nouveau/]

Paul C. Hoffman

The Art of Appreciating – The Courage to Receive

• Do you have trouble letting in the good around you?

• When someone says or does something nice to you, do you get all squirmy and suspiciously nervous? Do you uncontrollably and immediately go to standard cultural programming ["Deny. Minimize! Deflect!!"] even when there’s no need for it? You see yourself ending up invalidating your friend’s experience and making community building that much harder, when in fact it’s clear this actually serves no one?

• If your “nutrition barrier” is hyper-active and preventing you from letting in to metabolize the very things that you want and need most? Yet even knowing this does not stop you from invoking it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Berto Jongman

Mediation Perspectives: “Infrastructures for Peace” – Useful Jargon?

Owen Frazer

ISN Blog, Monday, 15 April 2013

Every academic and professional field has its jargon. While often criticized, jargon has its uses. It serves as a kind of shorthand, allowing us to communicate complex or multiple concepts in short phrases or single words. But it does have its downsides. Excessive use of jargon renders meaning incomprehensible to non-specialists. Even between specialists it may lead to misunderstandings when users and audiences have different conceptions of what the term refers to. Worse, it can be used as a kind of tick-box or name check, allowing users to communicate the sense that they are engaging with the concepts underlying the jargon without necessarily genuinely doing so. We are therefore rightly wary when a new term comes along; asking ourselves whether there is a need for it in our vocabulary.

The field of peacebuilding and conflict transformation is no stranger to jargon. A new term pushing its way into the lexicon is “infrastructures for peace” (“I4P” or “peace infrastructures”). It has been floating around for some time and looks like it may be on the verge of going mainstream. The origins of the term have been credited to conflict transformation guru Jean Paul Lederach. More recently the term has been championed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and an international NGO network has been established to promote the concept. The concept is now the focus of two recent publications: the Berghof Handbook Dialogue Series dedicates its latest issue to the topic as does the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development. On top of these, the inaugural issue of the new open access journal Peacebuilding contains an article and comments on the topic.

Read more.

Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Vaccines: Infertility, Sterilisation & Abortion

[back] Unethical vaccine agendas   Vaccination and pregnancy  Covert sterilisation

[A covert-sterilisation programme using vaccines such as tetanus, rubella and what looks to be Gardasil (1), also the use of mercury in third world country vaccines (even after they have removed most of it it from Western countries) is suspected of being a birth control ploy (1).  They have form with 60,000 Americans coercively sterilized , and between 1963 and 1965 more than 400,000 Colombian women were sterilized in a program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation which also helped found and fund the German eugenics program; and even funded the program that ultimately sent Josef Mengele into Auschwitz (1, 2, 3).]

Read full page with many links.

Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Meier

GDACSmobile: Disaster Responders Turn to Bounded Crowdsourcing

GDACS, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, sparked my interest in technology and disaster response when it was first launched back in 2004, which is why I’ve referred to GDACS in multiple blog posts since. This near real-time, multi-hazard monitoring platform is a joint initiative between the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the European Commission (EC). GDACS serves to consolidate and improve the dissemination of crisis-related information including rapid mathematical analyses of expected disaster impact. The resulting risk information is distributed via Web and auto-mated email, fax and SMS alerts.

I recently had the pleasure of connecting with two new colleagues, Daniel Link and Adam Widera, who are researchers at the University of Muenster’s European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). Daniel and Adam have been working on GDACSmobile, a smartphone app that was initially developed to extend the reach of the GDACS portal. This project originates from a student project supervised by Daniel, Adam along with the Chair of the Center Bernd Hellingrath in cooperation with both Tom de Groeve from the Joint Research Center (JRC) and Minu Kumar Limbu, who is now with UNICEF Kenya.

GDACSmobile is intended for use by disaster responders and the general public, allowing for a combined crowdsourcing and “bounded crowdsourcing“ approach to data collection and curation. This bounded approach was a deliberate design feature for GDACSmobile from the outset. I coined the term “bounded crowd-sourcing” four years ago (see this blog post from 2009). The “bounded crowd-sourcing” approach uses “snowball sampling” to grow a crowd of trusted reporters for the collection of crisis information. For example, one invites 5 (or more) trusted local reports to collect relevant information and subsequently ask each of these to invite 5 additional reporters who they fully trust; And so on, and so forth. I’m thrilled to see this term applied in practical applications such GDACSmobile. For more on this approach, please see these blog posts.

Read full post with additional links.

BP accused of rewriting Wikipedia records

A British Petroleum representative is being accused of rewriting almost half of the firm’s environmental records on popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

By Charlie Osborne

Read full article.

Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Aurelius

Pfc. Bradley E. Manning’s Statement for the Providence Inquiry

Alexa O’Brien

For more information on the lack of public and press access to United States v. Pfc. Manning, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed a petition requesting the Army Court of Criminal Appeals (ACCA) “to order the Judge to grant the public and press access to the government’s motion papers, the court’s own orders, and transcripts of proceedings, none of which have been made public to date.”

The statement below was read by Private First Class Bradley E. Manning at the providence inquiry for his formal plea of guilty to one specification under Article 92 with a substituted time frame for the offense, and nine specifications for lesser included offenses under Article 134. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications. This transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O’Brien at the Article 39(a) session of United States v. Pfc. Bradley Manning on February 28, 2013 at Fort Meade, MD, USA.

UPDATE

PFC Bradley Manning

Judge Lind: Pfc. Manning you may read your statement.

Pfc. Bradley Manning: Yes, your Honor. I wrote this statement in the confinement facility. Start now. The following facts are provided in support of the providence inquiry for my court martial, United States v. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning.

Personal Facts.

I am a twenty-five year old Private First Class in the United States Army currently assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, HHC, US Army Garrison (USAG), Joint Base Myer, Henderson Hall, Fort Meyer, Virginia.

My [exodus?] assignment I was assigned to HHC, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, NY. My primary military occupational specialty or MOS is 35 Foxtrot intelligence analyst. I entered active duty status on 2 October 2007. I enlisted with the hope of obtaining both real world experience and earning benefits under the GI Bill for college opportunities.

Facts regarding my position as an intelligence analyst.

Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Meier

Keynote: Next Generation Humanitarian Technology

I’m excited to be giving the Keynote address at the Social Media and Response Management Interface Event (SMARMIE 2013) in New York this morning. A big thank you to the principal driver behind this important event, Chuck Frank, for kindly inviting me to speak. This is my first major keynote since joining QCRI, so I’m thrilled to share what I’ve learned during this time and to my vision for the future of humanitarian technology. But I’m even more excited by the selection of speakers and caliber of participants. I eager to learn about their latest projects, gain new insights and hopefully create pro-active partnerships moving forward.

You can follow this event via live stream and @smarmieNYC & #smarmie). I  plan to live tweeting the event at @patrickmeier. My slides are available for download here (125MB). Each slide include speaking notes, which may be of interest to folks who are unable to follow via live stream. Feel free to use my slides but strictly for non-commercial purposes and only with direct attribution. I’ll be sure to post the video of my talk on iRevolution when it becomes available. In the meantime, these videos and publications may be of interest. Also, I’ve curated the table of contents below with 60+ links to every project and/or concept referred to in my keynote and slides (in chronological order) so participants and others can revisit these after the conference—and more importantly keep our conver-sations going via Twitter and the comments section of the blog posts. I plan to hire a Research Assistant in the near future to turn these (and other posts) into a series of up-to-date e-books in which I’ll cite and fully credit the most interesting and insightful comments posted on iRevolution.

Directory of and Links to Foundation Posts:

Read the rest of this entry »

Click on Image to Enlarge

Open Source Everything: Working with the jQuery Foundation

EXTRACT

Over the past few months, I’ve been able to spend a great deal of time working on the jQuery Foundation’s initiative to open source the content and design of all its sites. A major reason for this effort is to dramatically lower the barrier for community involvement and therefore open up entirely new avenues for people who’d like to begin helping out, but haven’t been sure how.

. . . . . . . . . .

To learn more about the technologies involved and find out how it all works, take a look at the jQuery Foundation’s web site contribution guide. The new jQuery Learning Center is especially ripe territory for anyone who likes helping other people out and has good ideas to share!

Read full post.

This report, grounded entirely in facts, is going to upset you. It is a saga of how a nation commits suicide, and if it doesn’t leave you concerned, it might be wise to make sure you have a pulse.

9 Economic Facts That Will Make Your Head Spin
LYNN STUART PARRAMORE – AlterNet (U.S.)

Half the population of the U.S. has slipped into poverty or is barely making enough to get by.

Sub-Titles Only:

1. Recovery for the rich, recession for the rest.
2. Half of us are poor or barely scraping by.
3. Unhappy meal (47 million on food stamps)
4. Old age and poverty.
5. Incarceration nation.
6. The cost of gender inequality.
7.  College degrees still pay off, big-time.
8. A retired couple needs a quarter million for retirement – just for healthcare.
9. The looting of America.

Read full article.