Ted Perlmutter's List: Course

• There is still some cellphone service, so a new social-media link that marries Google, Twitter and SayNow, a voice-based social media platform, gives Egyptians three phone numbers to call and leave a message, which is then posted on the Internet as a recorded Twitter message. The messages are at twitter.com/speak2tweet and can also be heard by telephone.
• Then the service will instantly send the recorded call as a Twitter message using the hashtag #egypt.

• We leave people alone in America, to a fault.
• The Tucson shootings have prompted a national debate about the decline of civility in America. That's good, but we should expand the definition of "civil." A civil society isn't just about less screaming on cable TV. It also has an ethic of community, so that people try, as best they can, to look out for one another

• The Aid Transparency Movement

• Sovereignty as Responsibility for the Prevention of Genocide
• Creating the Outcry: Citizen-Driven Political Will for Genocide Prevention in the US Contex

• An umbrella communications and commerce portal that will let people from all around the world see and hear each other as individuals—including 3-5 billion people in the developing world whose names, and compelling stories, seldom appear in newspapers, magazines, television or the internet.

• i think most of people here do not fight because of something... they are fighting because of the fight... such a shame

• Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project

• The advent and power of connection technologies -- tools that connect people to vast amounts of information and to one another -- will make the twenty-first century all about surprises. Governments will be caught off-guard when large numbers of their citizens, armed with virtually nothing but cell phones, take part in mini-rebellions that challenge their authority
• But many historians believe that one of the keys to the revolution was the ability of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to spread his message using a simple device: the cassette tape. Using an extensive network, Khomeini distributed tapes of his speeches to more than 9,000 mosques.

  • Iranian tech: tape-recorder
• Meanwhile, the involvement of diaspora communities in bringing change to their homelands has vastly increased, creating new sources of financial support and international pressure.
• Oscar Morales used Facebook and the free Internet-based telephone service Skype to orchestrate a massive demonstration against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
• The world's most repressive regimes and violent transnational groups -- from al Qaeda and the Mexican drug cartels to the Mafia and the Taliban -- are effectively using technology to bring on new recruits, terrify local populations, and threaten democratic institutions. The Mexican drug cartels, in order to illustrate the consequences of opposition, spread graphic videos showing decapitations of those who cooperate with law enforcement, and al Qaeda and its affiliates have created viral videos showing the killings of foreigners held hostage in Iraq.

  • Showing violence is not entirely new.
• These kinds of cat-and-mouse games will no doubt continue, but in the short run there is doubt that Beijing's attempts to control access to information will largely succeed.
• Although connection technologies can serve as creative outlets for citizen innovation in such countries, they also offer the opportunity to export terrorist and criminal behavior.

  • Failed states as natural exporters.
• For both companies and the nonprofit sector, the interconnected estate provides a place where they can join together in new alliances to multiply their impact. One example is the Global Network Initiative, an organization that brings together information technology companies, human rights groups, socially responsible investors, and academics in an effort to promote free expression online and protect privacy.

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• What is abrupt and new is the rapid growth and abundance of recently created virtual groups, and how amazingly durable they seem to be. It is no exaggeration to claim that the Internet has transformed the commons from tragic and depleted to vibrant and inexhaustible. "On line" strangers cross domestic class and international boundaries to freely choose their priorities, interests, and new friends.
• A wonderful analogy to the power of weak but persistent connections comes to us from the world of the global positioning system, now a widely proliferated navigation utility

• The BBC Governors' independent panel report on the impartiality of BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recommended that the BBC should make public an abbreviated version of its journalists' guide to facts and terminology.
• BARRIER

        BBC journalists should try to avoid using terminology favoured by one side or another in any dispute.  

   The BBC uses the terms "barrier", "separation barrier" or "West Bank barrier" as acceptable generic descriptions to avoid the political connotations of "security fence" (preferred by the Israeli government) or "apartheid wall" (preferred by the Palestinians). 

   The United Nations also uses the term "barrier"
• Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed it in 1981
• under international law, East Jerusalem is considered to be occupied territory.
• Under international law, Israel is still the occupying power in Gaza,
• The Green Line is a dividing line or a boundary.
• The Israeli government's preferred phrase to describe the West Bank and Gaza Strip is "disputed territories"
• Generally it's a good rule to question the use of any adjective.

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• Launched in July 2010 by PeaceNet Kenya, the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), and National Steering Committee (NSC) on Peace Building and Conflict Management with support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Uwiano Platform for Peace was an SMS based information gathering and action programme designed to ensure that the Kenyan referendum held on August 4 2010 on a new constitution was violence free. Uwiano – meaning "connection" or "correlation" in Swahili also deployed a pool of volunteer monitors to hotspots across the country and established peace committees to improve relations between rival communities

  • a replacement for Ushahidi?
  Add Sticky Note

• And I made the interesting discovery that, during the recovery phase, Haitians saw Ushahidi not just as a life line, but a communication line – in fact, the only open communication line that seemed to exist between them and the humanitarian community.
• Haitians can call into a call center for free that is staffed by trained operators, and communicate critical pieces of information on their situation or request information.  The information is then sorted, categorized, geolocated, and put onto the online platform Noula.ht, where responders can access the information directly or through subscribing to receive alerts.