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September 25 2011
Global Dashboard -- What is resilience? [Three-dimensional (3D) wellbeing]
'...wellbeing is a dynamic process with #material (what people have), #relational (what people are able to do) and #subjective (how people feel) dimensions. These dimensions are interlinked, co-evolving and fluid. The review is largely an individual/household level analysis but potentially could be applied to community/country-level resilience too. #Material dimension: ...households suffer asset loss; people’s health deteriorates; families go hungry. And attempts to minimise vulnerability in the present can have material consequences in the longer term... #Relational dimension: Social networks are important in enabling migration towards areas of relative safety and opportunity, even when restrictive policies are in place to limit movement. #Subjective dimension: The way in which an individual feels vulnerable is ultimately shaped by the culture and environment in which they grew up, by their position in society, by gender, and by a whole other range of contextually specific factors.'September 20 2011
The Big Squeeze: Part 3: The Quiet Rebellion: Civil Disobedience, Local Markets, and Debt Erasure
'We are coming to the big face-off between top-down control by those who would be gods over us and impose value on us, and bottom up creativity which recognizes that any “god” (energy, good, intelligence) comes up through us and is connected between us. It is this “within” and “between” well-negotiated and exchanged that produces real value. We need to transfer that growth and “frontier” mentality to non-scarce, non-material assets like learning, intellect, culture, music, community, family, creativity, human connection and interest. This is now happening. This movement will be driven by the younger, Generation X and millennial generations. Baby boomers may follow, but probably only after initially resisting, and trying to make the system work long enough so they can cash in their corporate 401(k)s and extract their welfare state entitlements. ...but eventually they will have to capitulate, find a renewed purpose, dust off their 60’s idealism, and reapply themselves.'August 09 2011
Global Guerrillas -- BOOK: Disaster Utopias and Elite Panics
'Rebecca shows in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, that people don't typically panic when they find themselves at the ground zero of a disaster. Through the use of detailed research on a number of extreme disasters, she shows that in most cases people are very practical when confronting disaster. Better yet, they are often more courteous and much more likely to help each other when things fall apart than they are normally. They come together to survive. In contrast to the people on the ground, she shows that the only people that actually do panic during disasters are the elites -- from those with wealth to those in the government. They panic over the loss of control a disaster brings. This often results in extreme actions that only serve to make things worse: from martial law authorized to use deadly force against looters (often just people trying to survive the situation) to arbitrarily herding people into locations that aren't able to support large groups of people.'August 02 2011
The Onion -- FDA: Everyone Needs To Induce Vomiting Right Now
'WASHINGTON—In a hastily called press conference broadcast live on all major television networks this morning, Food and Drug Administration commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg implored every citizen of the United States to induce vomiting immediately. "Please, everybody, there's no time to explain. Just gag yourselves, drink ipecac, do whatever is necessary to puke everything out right now—all of it," Hamburg said moments before jamming her index and middle fingers deep into her throat and violently disgorging the contents of her stomach all over the lectern. "Do it now! Now, now, now!" As of press time, the FDA released a statement saying that everyone should have vomited by now and informing those who hadn't that it was "too late."'May 16 2011
NYTimes.com -- How The Drudge Report Got Popular and Stayed on Top
'With no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of mid-’90s manual on HTML, The Drudge Report provides 7 percent of the inbound referrals to the top news sites in the country. Gabriel Snyder: “[He's] the best wire editor on the planet. He can look into a huge stream of news, find the hot story and put an irresistible headline on it.” “Matt Drudge is an American original,” Mr. Breitbart said. “He does not rig search optimization, he does not care about the next big Web innovation, he just has the best nose for news there is. He gives people everything, every single thing, they want to know in a single stop.” ...there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It’s the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.'April 14 2011
Gamasutra -- The Designer's Notebook: Introducing The Blitz Online
'The collective object of the game is to keep morale high so that Hitler abandons his strategy of civilian bombing. The more lives and buildings that the players save, the sooner Hitler will give it up. Even if morale drops, The Blitz Online will last for a maximum number of days... The game will include commissions ("quests") as well as ad hoc challenges... Players will perform certain routine duties more than once, but I expect these will feel different as the continuing bomb damage throws up new obstacles to completing them. There will always be too much to do, and failure to get something done will have consequences -- determined mostly through the mechanics rather than a prefabricated plot. I want the game to feel like one giant common enterprise, in which the players have individual responsibilities but all contribute to its success. I want The Blitz Online to feel as if no place is truly safe.'April 05 2011
Stowe Boyd -- Bang: A Microsyntax for Emergency Messaging
'I have proposed a microsyntax for sending and receiving structured Twitter messages during and relating to disasters. We should dedicate ‘!’ to indicate that a message is associated with a specific named disaster or emergency. This use of ‘bang’ or ‘exclamation mark’ should take precedence over other possible uses of the character. I propose we call this system ‘Bang’. A collection of two and three character codes based on bang should be developed to indicate various sorts of information useful in emergencies. For example, ‘!@’ could stand for the name of a person, based on the use of ‘@’ in Twitter and other applications. ‘!@@’ could be used for organizations, businesses, and so on. ‘!?’ could represent a question being asked, and ‘!!’ could be used for things desired, needed or the like.'January 29 2011
Global Guerrillas -- JOURNAL: Cell Phone Coordination of Open Source Protests
'Here's a cool little phone app called Sukey to help people navigate during a protest/riot. Very useful in avoiding kettling (a slang term for police crowd containment). NOTE: A slight variant of this could be used to direct open source protests by select routes and targets/takedowns (using a reddit style upvote process for each)'July 19 2010
Nieman Journalism Lab -- Ushahidi in 3G: How media outlets could extend the mapping platform beyond crisis communications
'“Unbounded crowdsourcing” is what we are familiar with: the idea of opening up a platform to the world, and letting the world contribute. “Bounded crowdsourcing” is when you have a specific network of individuals who are doing the reporting. So it’s a known, trusted network of individuals. So what they did is they had their own journalists on the ground, who were texting and tweeting live to the map, but they also opened it up to other residents — people in Gaza — to also submit information. ...you don’t necessarily know whether the crowd is trustworthy, or individuals in the crowd are trustworthy ...if some of these individuals start also reporting the same event that the journalists are reporting, then you know they might actually be more trustworthy. And so it creates this kind of digital trace, or like a shadow of history that allows you to start identifying which individuals in the crowd may actually be trustworthy. And you can sort of assign them a higher credibility score.'
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