RIght, that was fun, I learned loads but I need to take break for a few days. Before leaving let me show you a great tool for creating these visual maps. Datawrapper is a free online application for all kinds of Data Visualisation requirements. All you need is an excel sheet with data and you are good to go. They have map templates for Ireland by County, Garda Division etc.. just need to have the correct county/division names and it will pick them up. I highly encourage people to play around with this using some of the csvs and excels I have posted in the past. Teach a man to fish and all that! https://www.datawrapper.de/

“Where there is data smoke, there is a government fire.”

I was looking into crowdmapping platforms and came across this. Ushahidi.. Its African and very good. Can be used for community incident /crime reporting / citizen journalists/ election monitoring/ mapping. This is the type of software that NGOs fund and actively encourage in developing counties. The same NGOs would have a meltdown if Europeans adopted the same tech to report on current events.

You might curse the NGOs, but they have built alot of tools that can be used by anyone from anyside of the political spectrum.

What is Ushahidi?
Ushahidi is an open source web application for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. It helps you to collect info from: SMS, Twitter, RSS feeds, Email. It helps you to process that information, categorize it, geo-locate it and publish it on a map.

https://www.ushahidi.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi

The missing Q4 details for Ukrainian accommodation was released. Thanks to Gerry O'Neill from the wests awake for bringing it to my attention in his post. https://westawake.substack.com/p/85000000-in-new-contracts-target?sd=pf Attached is a CSV with all contracts awarded for the four quarters of 2022. 278 million in total.

Mark Little (Our AI disinformation overlord) has a new podcast. Worth a listen. Know thy enemy in the information/disinformation media battle ahead. https://linktr.ee/historyofthefuture

"The Network State pdf"
Balaji Srinivasan is one of my tech heros and definitely a "good guy" in these times. His latest book "The Network State" is a must read as we move into a world where trust in institutions break down and parallel network states start to emerge. He has done great work in the past outlining how the information supply chain in the west is broken.. and how to fix it. Facts that cant be tampered are written onto blockchains (eg cso / vaccination stats) using oracles.. only then should narratives can be written about these censorship resistant facts ..

I sometimes think that Hate Speech / Misinformation Monitoring & Legislation is a preventative measure to stop pools of "radioactive data" emerging, data that could be used to train AI with the wrong aka "correct" opinions.

Data / Digital hoarding will be deemed a mental disorder and frowned upon activity in the near future. A quick Google search on the topic confirms my suspicion.. but why would it be framed like this? Well, what happens when access to quality/online data for training your AI models becomes severly restricted? In 2023 people should be downloading and archiving as much media as they can, especially high quality pdfs / books / papers etc. These pools of knowledge could be used to create personal style chatGPT assitants that sit out side of big tech and government control. Buy yourself a nice big hardrive this year.

The Permaweb concept could be a white pill entering an age of disinformation management and information control.. uncensorable and undeletable internet storage thats permanent for all time. People get freaked out by the concepts of blockchains , always associating it with governmental control.. when it's the perfect tool for circumventing said controls. AI development seems to be in the hands of the woke, but blockchain development is still squarely in the hands of libertarian types. https://arweave.medium.com/welcome-to-the-permaweb-ce0e6c73ddfb

European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) report on "Disinformation in Ireland" - Jan 2023

The EU funds Fujo (DCU), theJournal, NewsWhip (with the help of technologists from the University of Sheffield) to monitor Irish "disinformation" & "misinformation".