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"Meet the Elite Business and Think-Tank Community That's Doing Its Best to Control the World The large foundations of America's industrial giants have played a truly profound - and largely overlooked - role in the shaping of modern society By Andrew Gavin Marshall Alternet, June 19, 2013 Straight to the Source For related articles and more information, please visit OCA's Politics and Democracy page. "The corporate-policy network is highly centralized, at both the level of individuals and that of organizations. Its inner circle is a tightly interwoven ensemble of politically active business leaders..." -- Academics William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski In an article titled "The Global Corporate Elite" in the journal International Sociology, William K. Carroll and Jean Philippe Sapinski examined the relationship between the corporate elite and the emergence of a "transnational policy-planning network," beginning with its formation in the decades following World War II and speeding up in the 1970s with the creation of "global policy groups" and think tanks such as the World Economic Forum, in 1971, and the Trilateral Commission, in 1973, among many others."

"By Brendan DeMille via DeSmogBlog A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene. Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption. The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke."

Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) is a Java-based application for qualitative category-based content analysis. It serves two purposes: coding statements of actors into categories, and converting these structured data into networks that are readable by UCINET, visone and other network-analytic software packages. The software can extract either bipartite (affiliation) networks or adjacency networks. It is complementary to semantic network analysis applications because it neither relies on algorithms for automatic text processing, nor does it focus on the internal meaning or mental representation of a single text or document. Instead, tags are applied to the text data by manual inspection, thus rendering it more flexible, yet at the same time more work-intensive. DNA can be used to code a large body of text documents and then convert them into graphs. The application is currently being developed, tested and heavily used in my dissertation research project on German pension politics. Updates will be posted here as soon as something has been published. If you use DNA, I would love to hear from you about your project (if possible, via the DNA-help mailing list). For more information about the software, please consult the documentation or obtain a free copy from the download page.

He knew what that meant: this ad wasn't being shown to every person who read that page. It was being targeted to him in particular. Tax-exempt groups like Crossroads GPS have become among the biggest players in this year's election.  They're often called "dark money" groups, because they can raise accept unlimited amounts of money and never have to disclose their donors.

A 50-foot tall statue of Shaquille O'Neal marks the southeast entrance to Beijing's Chaoyang Park. The NBA star clutches a basketball close to his chest and gazes towards the horizon. Nearby are three outdoor basketball courts, where I've scheduled an interview with the head of Greenpeace East Asia's Sustainable Finance Program. Calvin Quek is playing a game of four-on-four when I arrive one morning this past August. Smog blocks the sunshine and makes the air feel thick. If the other players notice, they don't show it. Some smoke cigarettes during the water breaks. "It's hard to say black and white whether [the government] is for or against us," Quek says of Greenpeace, over the sound of bouncing basketballs. Earlier this week, his colleagues had published "Thirsty Coal," a grim critique of China's coal strategy. The government plans to build 16 new coal-fired power bases by 2015 in some of the country's most arid regions. "Left unchecked," reads the English report summary, "these mining projects will only cause more ecological disaster and social unrest in the foreseeable future."

"In a post-fact era, you can be an elected official and have a remarkably flexible relationship with the truth. Take climate science: more than 97% of scientists agree that climate change is a man-made phenomenon, but conservative politicians--and more than 65% of Republicans in Congress--outdo one another to demonstrate just how little they believe in science."

"How do you move from a culture of "need to know" to a culture of "need to share?" Richard Boly thinks about the answer to that question every day. Boly, a speaker at next week's Gov 2.0 Expo, is the director of the Office of eDiplomacy at the State Depar

"Examples of Diplopedia content include a comprehensive collection of information for desk officers, the foreign service officers who act as the in-house experts and go-to officials on a particular country. ... Forty briefing portals help DOS employees fi

If one draws links radiating outward from NATO to all of these different countries and organizations, the result is a security network that has multiple hubs and clusters - much like a map of the Internet or of planets and galaxies. This world is no longer unipolar, bipolar, or even multipolar, because the actors that matter are not single states but groups of states that are more or less densely connected. It is a multi-hub security network, in which the hubs are regional organizations of different sizes and strengths.

Rioting and related intra-crowd dynamics are significant human processes, but we know less about the basic behavioral science and subsequent processes that drive and shape rioting than we would like to. This is due, in large part, to the difficulty in studying riots on the ground and to the sheer complexity of riot phenomena. We know even less about the geographical dynamics of rioting, even though there is a dedicated (but only general) appreciation that geography is important. Existing work has, for the most part, adopted the most straightforward path to discovery, by examining coarse (city-scale) geographies of rioting, or in the few instances where intra-crowd riot dynamics are considered they have focused on stylized abstractions of behavior. Because of the difficulties of using standard social science inquiry to study riots (surveys, ethnographic analysis, interviews), many researchers have turned to computer modeling to create synthetic riots that can be configured, sampled, and experimented with. But, building models of something as bewilderingly complex as rioting is really quite difficult and so many short-cuts are taken. In particular, models are usually cellular-based in form (where rasters represent people and their local environment) and founded on physical interactions between relatively "dumb" particle-people (where continuum mechanics, random walks, or particle-particle forces serve as a substitute for socio-spatial interaction and behavior).