Peak Oil is the point at which petroleum production reaches its greatest rate just before going into perpetual decline. In "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth productions, radio host Thom Hartmann explains that the world will reach peak oil within the next year if it hasn't already. As a nation, the United States reached peak oil in 1974, after which it became a net oil importer.
Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and the other scientists, researchers and writers interviewed throughout "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" describe the diminishing returns our world can expect as it deals with the consequences of peak oil even as it continues to pretend it doesn't exist. These experts predict substantially increased transportation costs, decreased industrial production, unemployment, hunger and social chaos as the supplies of the fuels on which we rely dwindle and eventually disappear.
Chomsky urges us to anticipate the official response to peak oil based on how corporations, news organizations and other institutions have responded to global warming: obfuscation, spin and denial. James Howard Kunstler says that we cannot survive peak oil unless we "come up with a consensus about reality that is consistent with the way things really are." This documentary series hopes to help build that consensus. Click here to watch the introductory video, and check back here for new videos each Wednesday.
several groups of free information advocates have emerged to help educate the latest generation of activists. To that end, one such group, Access, just released its guide to maintaining online and mobile phone security, with versions in Arabic and English.
A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.
Wyoming Corporate Services will help clients create a company, and more: set up a bank account for it; add a lawyer as a corporate director to invoke attorney-client privilege; even appoint stand-in directors and officers as high as CEO. Among its offerings is a variety of shell known as a "shelf" company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity.
"A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy," the company's website boasts. "A person you control... yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!"
Why? Simply Because scores an impromptu interview with known social activist David Suzuki on the first day of the Occupy Montreal movement. This protest was a satellite protest to Occupy Wall Street. Follow the movement at #occupywallstreet -
Thanks to Jobbook for the great help on the interview!
http://www.whysimplybecause.com
I do not doubt that companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google rely more on data every day. But the best human curators still maintain their supremacy.
Data may help, but what may matter more is a sense of what appeals to the hearts of obsessive people, and who can deliver that. And what that suggests is that competition will remain possible for companies that aren't Amazon or Netflix, without massive piles of data on hand.
What Congress should do to help big data
Allow access to confidential data such as the Census data centers
Allow sharing between statistical agencies
Have a chief data dfficer that promotes a federal data science community of data scientists and statisticians
Hadoop projects are costing 50 times more than expected
DHS failed fast with a big data in the cloud project, but quickly and at less cost
The federal government should foster real innovation with government data
This document presents highlights of the Metadata Management Survey results. It helps to understand the current state of affairs with regards to Metadata Management in the EU Member States.
I find business cases for data publishers much more compelling than examples of how open data can be used. For a start, I don’t think it’s possible to predict how open data will be used or what that will mean in terms of economic or societal impact: the wide world into which it’s released is just too complex to know.
One argument I’ve heard made about government open data is that releasing it can help organisations avoid the costs of Freedom of Information requests.
The reverse of cost avoidance is finding sponsors for open data publication.
The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns
There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires
“Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,”
The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars.
The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.
it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability
Restoring constitutional rights is thus a political imperative: whichever of the major parties more assertively defends the populist principles at stake stands to siphon the support of significant portions of the other's base.
Nearly a decade ago, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) stood alone as the Senate's constitutional conscience. Casting the only dissenting vote against passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, he was powerless to stop an opportunistic power grab by neoconservatives who had long sought, well before the tragedy of 9-11, to expand our government's reach into the lives of law-abiding Americans.
d I want to go much further in harnessing the power of technology to refashion the structures and workings of government
s can open the door to a reinvention of the core policy-making processes and towards a renewal of politics itself
to replace the first generation of e-government with a much more interactive second generation form of digital engagement which we are calling Mygov
s open, personalised platform will allow us to deliver universal services that are also tailored to the needs of each individual
to move from top-down, monolithic websites broadcasting public service information in the hope that the people who need help will find it – to government on demand.
survey freely available to the public, without restrictions on re-use. Further details on the package and government’s response to the consultation will be published by the end of March.
in the autumn the Government will publish online an inventory of all non-personal datasets held by departments and arms-length bodies – a “domesday book” for the 21st century.
Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused instead on some sophisticated task
True socially-infused movements cannot be forced
The bad news for marketers is that Shirky’s examples quietly illustrate that we can’t force meaningful social activities. They happen organically, if not accidentally
Data Without Borders seeks to match non-profits in need of data analysis with freelance and pro bono data scientists who can work to help them with data collection, analysis, visualization, or decision support.
It should come as no surprise to readers of Datablog that, as editor Simon Rogers puts it himself, "we are drowning in data." We suddenly find ourselves with unprecedented access to torrents of data that could be used to better society.
To help bridge the gap between socially minded organizations and do-good dataists, we started a project temporarily dubbed "Data Without Borders".