The NY Times on using social software to connect the dots
Clive Thompson’s article on today’s New York Times Magazine is an interesting reflection on what social software can and cannot do to help intelligence agencies gathering and analyzing information.
Among other things, Thompson discusses two proposals submitted for the Galileo Award, a competition created by the C.I.A. to collect ideas on how to improve information sharing among American intelligence agencies. The first proposal, written by C.I.A. Calvin Andrus, proposes to use wikis and blogs to collect and share information among agencies. By allowing linking of information and ideas, previously disconnected pieces of data are shaped and structured by the dynamics of a social network.
If analysts and agents were encouraged to post personal blogs and wikis on Intelink — linking to their favorite analyst reports or the news bulletins they considered important — then mob intelligence would take over. In the traditional cold-war spy bureaucracy, an analyst’s report lived or died by the whims of the hierarchy. If he was in the right place on the totem pole, his report on Soviet missiles could be pushed up higher; if a supervisor chose to ignore it, the report essentially vanished. Blogs and wikis, in contrast, work democratically. Pieces of intel would receive attention merely because other analysts found them interesting. This grass-roots process, Andrus argued, suited the modern intelligence challenge of sifting through thousands of disparate clues: if a fact or observation struck a chord with enough analysts, it would snowball into popularity, no matter what their supervisors thought.
Tears in Paradise
Paradise, Pennsylvania, saw the nation’s third deadly school shooting in a week and the second that targeted female students. A 32-year-old man who was “acting out to achieve revenge for something that happened 20 years ago,” let the boys leave, tied the girls, all between 6 and 13 years old, and then shot them in the head at close range. He killed three girls, critically wounded 3, and injured 5 more before killing himself.
An adult, father of three, executing children tied to the blackboard in a small rural school? I really need to blame somebody, because I cannot make sense of this. If I only knew who.
Technorati Tags: amish, school, shooting
Five years
I’ve tried to write a post on 9/11 for the past two days and I couldn’t. Today, I kept CNN’s replay of the September 11, 2001 broadcast on the entire day. I thought that the emotional grip of these images would be lighter after five years. I was wrong.
On September 11, 2001 it was impossible to understand the impact of what was going on. Fragments of information were hitting us from all over and formed a fuzzy picture. I was at work, and after the CNN website got jammed, I got small pieces of news throughout the day. At night, the continue replay of the planes hitting the twin towers felt as a scene from an apocalyptic movie, not as a very real event that had just happened 106 miles from where I lived.
The day after, even in the awareness of the horrible tragedy, the entire world seemed to close around us and hug us tight.
Today, the facts are even too clear. We know how many people died, we can name some of them, we know some of their stories, we have seen their pictures. We know what happened after that day. No worldwide hugs are left. There is no mystery, no suspense. September 11 now appears as it is: just a terrible tragedy that is still unfolding in front of us and whose human sense escapes us.
Technorati Tags: September 11
The TED Conference is online
Every year, the brightest and most influential gather in Monterey for TED. The theme of this year’s TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, was The Future We Will Create….
Google Video has a set of video recordings of some amazing 2006 TED conference talks. Al Gore was there and you can feel his presence in many of the videos. If you only have time for one, watch Majora Carter, MacArthur “genius” grant winner and founder of Sustainable South Bronx, talking about environmental justice and explaining why green is the new black.
For more videos, visit the TED site and YouTube; you can also find photos from the TED conference on Flickr and visit/subscribe to the TEDblog for more information and video updates on the conference.
No, you cannot attend TED 2007. The conference is by invitation only (although anybody can apply for an invitation) and it seems to be already sold out.
Technorati Tags: TED, conference, TEDconference, 2006
Katrina, one year later. Mission not accomplished
After one year, New Orleans is still wounded. This pictures of the 9th Ward was not taken last year; it’s just a few days old and was taken by photographer 1115 (via Albert; view the entire set on Flickr).
Technorati Tags: remembering, anniversary, Katrina, New Orleans
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