Create an Account
username: password:
 
  MemeStreams Logo

What questions are you asking yourself?

search

Jeremy
My Blog
My Profile
My Audience
My Sources
Send Me a Message

sponsored links

Jeremy's topics
Arts
  Literature
   Classical
   Fiction
   Horror
   Non-Fiction
   Sci-Fi/Fantasy Literature
  Movies
   Movie Genres
    Action/Adventure
    Cult Films
    Documentary
    Drama
    Horror
    Independent Films
    Film Noir
    Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films
    War
  Music
   Music Styles
    Classical
    Electronic Music
    Rap & Hip Hop
    IDM
    Jazz
    World Music
  TV
   TV Documentary
   TV Drama
   SciFi TV
Business
  Finance & Accounting
  Industries
   Tech Industry
   Telecom Industry
  Management
  Markets & Investing
Games
  Video Games
   PC Video Games
   Console Video Games
Health and Wellness
  Medicine
Home and Garden
  Cooking
  Entertaining
Miscellaneous
  Humor
  MemeStreams
   Using MemeStreams
Current Events
  War on Terrorism
  Elections
  Israeli/Palestinian
Recreation
  Cars and Trucks
  Travel
Local Information
  United States
   California
    SF Bay Area
   Events in Washington D.C.
   News for Washington D.C.
   Georgia
    Atlanta
     Atlanta Events
Science
  Biology
  History
  Math
  Medicine
  Nano Tech
  Physics
Society
  Economics
  Education
  Futurism
  International Relations
  History
  Politics and Law
   Civil Liberties
    Internet Civil Liberties
    Surveillance
   Intellectual Property
  Media
   Blogging
  Military
  Philosophy
Technology
  Biotechnology
  Computers
   Computer Security
    Cryptography
   PC Hardware
   Human Computer Interaction
   Computer Networking
   Macintosh
   Software Development
    Open Source Development
  Military Technology
  High Tech Developments

support us

Get MemeStreams Stuff!


 
compos mentis. Concision. Media. Clarity. Memes. Context. Melange. Confluence. Mishmash. Conflation. Mellifluous. Conviviality. Miscellany. Confelicity. Milieu. Cogent. Minty. Concoction.

RE: The Problem With the CIA
Topic: Politics and Law 6:52 am EDT, Aug  3, 2004

Decius wrote:
] Jeremy says: Gold Star.
]
] I say: This link is on Free Republic. They are a bad
] reputation for being the Republican version of the Slashdot
] hordes. All power in numbers and no clue. However, the article
] is Stratfor, and hence worthy of attention. It reads a bit
] Republican, which is likely why the freepers have posted it.
] I'm not sure that it is. Stratfor likes to talk about what is
] going on and why. They don't usually talk about what might
] have been done. Its rare that they talk about what ought to be
] done.

The Gold Star is for the two paragraphs quoted, which are neither Republican nor Democrat. And while it is the problem with the CIA, it is also a more universal problem throughout government and the corporate world.

I don't care about Free Republic or the link or the reputation of their hordes. Don't click through. It's just a convenient cache/mirror. Find another one if you want or ignore it.

There are some emerging fundamental disconnects regarding the purpose of the site, of the status of an individual entry/article, and so on. The notion that an entry is a request to "click through" a particular link is one of the disconnects.

In this case, and in many others, the link is simply a convenient method of attribution. The text of the entry itself is the message. Do not click through. Go directly to the next post. Do not collect $200.

On 16 April 2004 you quoted a back-looking Stratfor article.

On 12 September 2002 you did the same.

On 20 May 2004 you did the same, in which Stratfor "offers an opinion", in your words.

On 20 March 2004 you expressed similar reservations about Stratfor "going political" on you. I didn't understand your William Safire comment at the time, and I still don't. Presumably it's not you, it's me.

As for why George Friedman isn't running for office, I'll quote you at

http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid12789/blogid4068055

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

There are two reasons that people act: Carrots and Sticks. Lowering the barrier to entry might be a carrot, but the sticks are much more effective and come when the political situation makes it impossible for people to go about their lives without acting.

I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do. When people are involved and committed and political leaders are honest and have clear vision; that usually happens when things are really, really fucked up. Who are the U.S. Presidents we most admire? What was going on during their presidencies?

This can also explain why Stratfor "goes political" from time to time.

RE: The Problem With the CIA


The Problem With the CIA
Topic: Politics and Law 1:05 am EDT, Aug  3, 2004

There is a corporate culture in America that says as long as the process is adhered to, people have done their jobs. Orderly, predictable processes that can be clearly mapped and explained are not an end in themselves. The time and effort spent on them can be justified in only one way: success. Over and over, the lovers of ISO 9000, 9001 and endless other standards confuse the means with the end. They embrace order -- even when it leads to failure.

That is what happened at the CIA: A culture of process destroyed a culture of excellence. There are many outstanding people at the agency, in both the Directorate of Intelligence and in Operations. The agency's obsession with the intelligence process crushes these people daily. Those who flourish in this environment are those who can sit through long meetings without falling asleep. The people who can peer through the darkness and see the truth are either sucked into the surreal world of modern management or shunted aside.

Gold Star.

The Problem With the CIA


RE: Protect Consumers, or Big Business?
Topic: Society 1:03 am EDT, Aug  3, 2004

Vile wrote:
] What are you recommending?

I'm recommending that you read the text I quoted. Nothing more. Whether or not you click through is of secondary importance. The idea should stand on its own, more or less independent of the article in which it appeared.

It appears that you read it, or at least looked at it long enough to reply. Mission accomplished.

RE: Protect Consumers, or Big Business?


Protect Consumers, or Big Business?
Topic: Politics and Law 11:59 am EDT, Aug  1, 2004

Apparently, the FDA, along with the president, functions on a plane where errors are not made and judgments and decisions never need to be revisited.

For those of us who see questioning and constant re-evaluation as essential to progress of any kind, this is one more frightening reminder that our administration is taking us down the wrong road at ever increasing speed.

Protect Consumers, or Big Business?


Propagation of Trust and Distrust
Topic: Technology 6:08 pm EDT, Jul 31, 2004

A network of people connected by directed ratings or trust scores, and a model for propagating those trust scores, is a fundamental building block in many of today’s most successful e-commerce and recommendation systems.

In eBay, such a model of trust has significant influence on the price an item may command. In Epinions (epinions.com), conclusions drawn from the web of trust are linked to many behaviors of the system, including decisions on items to which each user is exposed.

We develop a framework of trust propagation schemes, each of which may be appropriate in certain circumstances, and evaluate the schemes on a large trust network consisting of 800K trust scores expressed among 130K people. We show that a small number of expressed trusts/distrust per individual allows us to predict reliably trust between any two people in the system with high accuracy: a quadratic increase in actionable information.

Our work appears to be the first to incorporate distrust in a computational trust propagation setting.

Propagation of Trust and Distrust


Manifesto for the Reputation Society
Topic: Technology 1:32 am EDT, Jul 19, 2004

Information overload, challenges of evaluating quality, and the opportunity to benefit from experiences of others have spurred the development of reputation systems. Most Internet sites which mediate between large numbers of people use some form of reputation mechanism: Slashdot, eBay, ePinions, Amazon, and Google all make use of collaborative filtering, recommender systems, or shared judgements of quality.

But we suggest the potential utility of reputation services is far greater, touching nearly every aspect of society. By leveraging our limited and local human judgement power with collective networked filtering, it is possible to promote an interconnected ecology of socially beneficial reputation systems -- to restrain the baser side of human nature, while unleashing positive social changes and enabling the realization of ever higher goals.

Manifesto for the Reputation Society


Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq
Topic: Politics and Law 10:33 am EDT, Jul 18, 2004

The 511-page report focuses on something called a "National Intelligence Estimate."

Three versions of the report on Iraq were prepared, all of them concluding that Saddam Hussein was a major threat. But the first, long, classified one was peppered with reservations. A declassified version that was given to Congress erased most of the doubts. The even shorter public version had no caveats at all.

Decoding the Senate Intelligence Committee Investigation on Iraq


We, Robots
Topic: Movies 10:20 am EDT, Jul 18, 2004

What makes Asimov's robots interesting isn't sentience or consciousness or a human appearance. It's the fact that the machines embody three hierarchical laws that require robots to protect humans from harm, to obey humans and, a distant third, to protect themselves.

Those three ironclad laws create a framework for decency that few people ever display. It's no wonder Hollywood prefers simply to fear robots, as it does in "The Terminator," "The Matrix" and now "I, Robot," to name only a few examples. It's vastly easier and more thrilling than introspection.

We, Robots


Mapping Knowledge Domains
Topic: Technology 9:34 am EDT, Jul 16, 2004

This is a special issue of PNAS from April 2004, now freely available.

Here are a few papers of note:

Coauthorship networks and patterns of scientific collaboration
From paragraph to graph: Latent semantic analysis for information visualization
A method for finding communities of related genes
Tracking evolving communities in large linked networks
Traffic-based feedback on the web

Mapping Knowledge Domains


A Pause for Hindsight
Topic: Politics and Law 8:35 am EDT, Jul 16, 2004

If we want Mr. Bush to be candid about his mistakes, we should be equally open about our own.

We were wrong about the weapons.

We did not listen carefully to the people who disagreed with us. We had a groupthink of our own.

Many politicians who voted to authorize the war still refuse to admit that they made a mistake. But they did. And even though this page came down against the invasion, we regret now that we didn't do more to challenge the president's assumptions.

It's hard to tell for sure if this is just a tactical political manuever or a measure of true intellectual honesty on display. (Perhaps it's both.)

To the extent it's the latter, I find it interesting that the public probably has Jayson Blair to thank for (indirectly) bringing about this new approach.

A Pause for Hindsight


(Last) Newer << 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 ++ 27 >> Older (First)
 
 
Powered By Industrial Memetics
RSS2.0