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A brief point.

AFJ has a feature article by General Martin Dempsey on the need for the Army in it’s professional military education system to build future leaders who are critical thinkers:

Building Critical Thinkers

….The Army Leader Development Strategy identifies three critical leadership attributes for all Army leaders: character, presence and intellect. In addition to those three foundational attributes, we assert that strategic leaders must be inquisitive and open-minded. They must be able to think critically and be capable of developing creative solutions to complex problems. They must be historically minded; that is, they must be able to see and articulate issues in historical context. Possessed of a strong personal and professional ethic, strategic leaders must be able to navigate successfully in ethical “gray zones,” where absolutes may be elusive. Similarly, they must be comfortable with ambiguity and able to provide advice and make decisions with less, not more, information. While all leaders need these qualities, the complexity of problems will increase over the course of an officer’s career and require strategic leaders to develop greater sophistication of thought….

Read the rest here.

The nation is currently undergoing a debate about public education, of sorts. I say “of sorts” because the debate has largely been very dishonest on the part of proponents of certain kinds of “reforms” in which they hope to have a future financial interest, if radical changes can be legislatively imposed that will a) drastically lower labor costs and b) permit a “scalable” curriculum, to use the grammar of certain equity investor CEOs and lobbyists. The former does not concern this topic as much as the second, though the two will work in unison to create a profitable business model for a for-profit management company desiring to contract with local and state governments to run school systems.

“Scalability” builds upon Bush era NCLB legislation that emphasized standardized testing in basic math and reading skills, with punitive accountability measures for schools and districts failing to make “adequate yearly progress”. Due to the penalties and escalating standards, public schools have frequently narrowed their curriculums considerably, reducing instructional time for history, science, complex literature and the arts to put greater emphasis on basic skill drill instruction in just two subjects.

The net effect is that American public school students, roughly 88 % of all school children, spend a greater proportion of their day at concrete level cognitive activities than they did five or ten years ago and far less time on higher-level “critical thinking” like analysis or synthesis, making evaluative judgments, inquiry based learning or problem solving.

 “Scalability” means expanding on this dreary and unstimulating paradigm with digitally delivered, worksheet-like exercises to comprise the largest percentage of the instructional time for the largest number of children possible. It will be a low-cost, high-profit system of remedial education for would-be contractors, provided students are not able to “opt out”, except by leaving the public system entirely.

But only if their parents can afford it.

The US military relies upon the public schools to deliver the initial k-12 education of the overwhelming majority of their officer corps, to say nothing of the enlisted ranks. The soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who went to Andover or similar private institutions before enlisting are very, very few. Today some public schools are excellent, some are failing and the rest are in-between. Most make an effort to challenge students of all ability levels, from those needing extra help to those in AP courses and gifted programs. There is systemic resiliency in a diversity of experiences.

What will be the effect on  the military leadership in the future if critical thought is methodically removed from public education by a nationally imposed, remedially oriented, uniform, “scalable” curriculum that is effectively free of science, history, literature and the arts? What kind of cognitive culture will we be creating primarily to financially benefit a small cadre of highly politically connected, billionaire-backed, would-be contractors?

Can inculcating critical thinking really be left entirely to universities and, in the case of the military, mid-career education?

What kind of thinkers will that system produce?

Better?

Or worse?

“What we think, we become” – Buddha

Saw this on Shlok’s site:

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

This kind of app is a required step for making augmented reality devices part of the social media ecology. Therefore, this tech will become a standard for all mobile devices – merchants and advertisers want us as an army of data collectors on each other.

OTOH, automatic face-recognition and social media aggregation raises serious concerns about the potential dangers of living under a panopticon state if an app is aggregating and bundling all your online data in real time, while giving out your GPS and home address. A godsend to stalkers, oppo researchers, con men, disgruntled spouses or employees, autocratic governments and other creepy malefactors. Expect businesses, which are already attempting to illegally pry and spy into all areas of employee’s lives, to make surreptitious use of apps of this nature

Puts the protests to revolution in Egypt and Tunisia in perspective, doesn’t it?

If the FCC wanted to do something useful and promoting of liberty, they might consider regs to let individuals exercise greater control the use third parties would have to their collective online IDs – then you could be “out there” or not or to the degree you liked. Some people, do want to be “out there” professional or social reasons. While you cannot control pictures of yourself in a public space, I’m not sure the Supreme Court thought that your presence in public meant that random strangers and government officials should be able to run your credit history as you sit at a table in a restaurant or bar or take in a movie or ball game by taking your photo. A similar logic underlies state laws prohibiting wiretapping or making auditory recording individuals without their knowledge and consent (Illinois being one such state where Chicago aldermen and state legislators have acquired a healthy fear of recording devices).

Speaking of government, I have been told by an authoritative source that the USG rsearch is far advanced in this area. Probably a lot further along than is Viewdle, but perhaps not.

Blogfriend Thomas P.M. Barnett’s partnership with Wikistrat, where he is Chief Analyst, to provide clients and subscribers with strategic advice and assessment of geopolitical affairs has had their official launch.

Exciting launch of our Wiki, coupled with a new CoreGap bulletin

Greetings from the Wikistrat Team,

Today we have launched the internet’s very first Global Strategic Model on a private and interactive wiki.

Join our subscribers and take advantage of the launch offer: a 50% discount off the regular price.  Sign up now before our regular prices return over the weekend. 

For a taste of what you’ll be getting, here is a video of Tom discussing content from the bulletin as well as a download link to the abridged PDF version.

See you on the wiki!

CEO Joel Zamel

CTO Daniel Green and

Chief Analyst Thomas P.M. Barnett of WIKISTRAT

There is a link for a PDF download on Tom’s post of the latest CoreGap Bulletin that I could not embed here, so I encourage you to go there and check it out.

I have had some email convos with Wikistrat CEO Joel Zamel and can attest that Wikistrat has an energetic team and is determined to make a splash in terms of being an influencer of opinion makers and corporate movers and shakers.

I was going to post on this subject but Dave beat me to it:

Theodore Vail’s America

….Among the greatest barriers to innovation are the industrial giants like GE which have shed jobs at an alarming rate over the last 30 years while wielding intellectual property laws and political clout to crush upstart competitors which are hiring. One way of spurring innovation would be to get dinosaurs like GE, grown huge through rent-seeking, the hell out of the way. I doubt we’ll see suggestions in that vein from Jeffrey Immelt.

The only jobs Immelt will create in America are for K Street lobbyists to secure yet more government contracts for GE. Expect a blizzard of proposed agency regs and executive orders this year as the Oligarchy tries to lock in as much of a permanent rentier economy as they can before the next election cycle.

Interesting. I suggested something like this years ago.

….What the USG desperately needs is a national security equivalent to DARPA that can both engage in deep thinking and have the freedom to run pilot programs to enhance America’s strategic influence that can later be expanded by our traditional power bureaucracies. This would be far more than a just a federally funded think tank – RAND, Brookings, Hoover , Heritage, AEI, CATO, CFR, Carnegie, CSIS and others all do a fine job of policy analysis. They also give statesmen a productive place to hang their hat as an alternative to whoring themselves out as corporate or ideological lobbyists. Another one of those is not what the times require.

What I’m proposing is a lot closer to a cross between a soft-power version of the Institute for Advanced Studies and a clandestine service – one with the objective of developing innovative programs to maximize the influence of American values and promote “Connectivity ” in nations mired in the endemic, isolated, misery of the “Gap”. This is not what the USG normally does. The bias of State and Defense, State in particular, when dealing with foreign policy questions tend to be orientated toward day to day, tactical, crisis management….

Google appears to be trodding down that very path:

Google Grabs State Dept. Star Jared Cohen for Foreign Policy “Think/Do Tank”

Jared Cohen joined Google last week as the director of its newly created Google Ideas “think/do tank”-an entity whose objective is to dream up and try out ideas that address the challenges of counterterrorism, counterradicalism, and nonproliferation, as well as innovations for development and citizen empowerment. He has also landed a side gig as an adjunct fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, focusing on innovation, technology, and statecraft.

Google has now hired Cohen to set up Google Ideas, which will look for innovative approaches to some of the stickiest international issues of the day. Out of his New York office, Cohen will, he told Foreign Policy, seek to “[build] teams of stakeholders with different resources and perspectives to troubleshoot challenges.” As for why he decided to give this a shot in the private sector, rather than in the public sphere, to which these issues have traditionally belonged, Cohen says there are “things the private sector can do that the U.S. government can’t do.”

The big thing is the resources and the capabilities. There are not a couple hundred [computer] engineers in the State Department that can build things; that’s just not what government does. You don’t necessarily have some of the financial resources to put behind these things. It’s really hard to bring talented young people in; there are not a lot mechanisms to do it. [And] on some topics, it’s very sensitive for government to be the one doing this.

During the Cold War, DARPA was a great success, as government bureaucracies go, partly because secrecy freed it from the normal political and bean counting constraints. The other reason was that DARPA’s focus was primarily upon engineering types of problems. Technically difficult, innovative and exploratory problems to be certain, but generally not the sort of socially constructed or influenced “wicked problems“. Or “intractable ones” ( DARPA delved into technical problems that were, due to the technological level of that earlier era, also intractable, but that is still a different kettle of fish from socioeconomic, perceptually intractable, problems). It would seem that Google Ideas will be tackling the harder set of problems to solve.

Google Ideas is an entity to watch but all the observation will be detrimental to the accomplishment of it’s mission, as the nature of social wicked problems carry with them vested interests determined to defend the dysfunctional status quo from which they derive benefits. In some scenarios, with extreme violence. In others, with political pressure. There’s a reason these problems in the human realm go unsolved – sweet reason and pilot program rational incentives might not appeal to leaders of La Familia or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Google might also need a formidible Google PMC.

Hat tip to Larry Dunbar.