Social Futures Thinking (c) RAND CORP.

The most common objection people have to our research: "Too many people would have been involved to pull off such a massive hoax." Well, with trillions of taxpayers' dollars at hand, this operation could certainly afford contracting many individuals (under a gag order and on a need-to-know basis). Meet the real - and unreal - persons, companies & entities assigned to carry out this gigantic, media & military-assisted psyop.
MartinL
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Social Futures Thinking (c) RAND CORP.

Unread post by MartinL »

While re-visiting Rand Corporation in my research I stumbled across something fascinating that I feel fits well into our area of research. Something called Imen-Delfi.

Short excerpt from Wiki about RAND:

The RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development) is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government, a private endowment, corporations including the healthcare industry, universities and private individuals. The organization has long since expanded to working with other governments, private foundations, international organizations, and commercial organizations on a host of non-defense issues.

RAND researchers developed many of the principles that were used to build the Internet. Numerous analytical techniques were invented at RAND, including aspects of dynamic programming, game theory, the Delphi method, linear programming, systems analysis, and exploratory modeling. RAND also contributed to the development and use of wargaming. Rand was also behind the first Software company in the world.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corpo ... te_note-16




The Imen-Delphi procedure in practice

Systems Research and Behavioral Science,

March-April, 2004 by David Passig, Aviva Sharbat

OBJECTIVE

After a decade of using the Imen-Delphi (ID) procedure, the objective of this research note is to evaluate its potential for social futures thinking. The paper A highlights the changes the ID procedure took that emerged in the course of the procedure's practice, and B discusses their benefits and justification for future development and usage of the ID.

The ID procedure was designed based on the foundations of the applied social systems theories (Bahg, 1990; Woudenberg, 1991), and relies upon the strengths of later versions of the Delphi technique (Ranch, 1979; Turoff, 1975; Press, 1983; Harkins and Kurth-Schai, 1983; Poolpatarachewin, 1980). The ID procedure was developed in the early 1990s in order to facilitate discussions among panelists sharing a common future interest, and in order to help them develop shared future images.

Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_7 ... n32027250/

If you read through this you will hopefully understand the significance of this info.
hoi.polloi
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Unread post by hoi.polloi »

Stupendous find, Martin! Infuriating and interesting read, too.

If the Air Force-CIA is the muscle, and MITRE is the growing, oozing brain-blob, does that make RAND the originating thought process?
MartinL
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Unread post by MartinL »

More from the same Israeli authors Aviva Sharbat and David Passig.

"To my knowledge no study has been published describing a curriculum exercise that would help participants invent the future-not just anticipate it. The purpose of this article is to report such an exercise. "
Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... _n8883054/

"This research concerning VR in education is an attempt to define the future mission of virtual reality (VR) in education. In this on-going research, we are using a version of the Delphi method called "Imen-Delphi" technique."
Source: http://vr.coe.ecu.edu/vrits/3-1shar1.htm
MartinL
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Unread post by MartinL »

More from same author:

In recent years, the American Jewish community has been vigorously evaluating social and religious trends shaping its evolving communal and ethnic look. Many of the studies published pointed to alarming changes in the structure and religious character of the American Jewish community (Feldstein 1984; Nussbaum Cohen 1991; and others). These studies used forecasting methodologies aimed mainly at observing trends. To my knowledge no study has been published describing a curriculum exercise that would help participants invent the future-not just anticipate it. The purpose of this article is to report such an exercise.

Source: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_q ... _n8883054/
hoi.polloi
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Unread post by hoi.polloi »

It's nice to see them trying to wrap their brains around compassion, equality and mutual benefit through such humanistic terms as "human terrain" and "social engineering". Charming.

They'll get there eventually ... if they just ... think ... hard ..... e-n-o-u-g-h ....

WHEW! :rolleyes:
timothymurphy
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Unread post by timothymurphy »

I've been having a trawl through the psychology experiments associated with 9/11.

Here is a survey, published Nov 2001, led by Mark Schuster of RAND CORP.

It is entitled:


A National Survey of Stress Reactions after the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks


Methods
Using random-digit dialing three to five days after September 11, we interviewed a nationally representative sample of 560 U.S. adults about their reactions to the terrorist attacks and their perceptions of their children's reactions.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NE ... 1153452024


Most academic research involves researchers from more than one institution.
This RAND stuff appears to be totally "in-house".
This fact seems remarkable to me, although perhaps it's normal for stuff coming from think-tanks rather than universities.

All 10 researchers named on the paper are staff-members at RAND.

Mark Schuster:
http://www.rand.org/about/people/s/schuster_mark_a.html
Bradley D Stein:
http://www.rand.org/about/people/s/stein_bradley.html
Lisa Jaycox:
http://www.rand.org/about/people/j/jaycox_lisa.html
Rebecca L Collins
http://www.rand.org/about/people/c/coll ... cca_l.html
Grant N Marshall
http://www.rand.org/about/people/m/mars ... ant_n.html
Marc N Elliot
http://www.rand.org/about/people/e/elliott_marc_n.html
David E Kanouse
http://www.rand.org/about/people/k/kanouse_david_e.html
Janina L Morrison
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/m/morrison_j_l.html
Sandra L Berry
http://www.rand.org/about/people/b/berry_sandra_h.html
Annie Jie Zhou
http://www.rand.org/about/people/z/zhou_annie_jie.html


The 9/11 survey they used, and results:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_brief ... ndex1.html

---------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not sure where you (Martin and Hoi) are at, in terms of demonstrating connections of Corporations like RAND to 9/11.

But if RAND were 9/11 project planners, then this survey would be part of their project evaluation, or terror-market research.
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Unread post by simonshack »

Sorry - just a copy & paste of a post of mine from the "9/11 institutions thread".
Hope I won't be banned for spamming! :D



******************************************************************
*


All roads lead to RAND

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND

I encourage all to get familiar with the RAND corporation and its personages.
They seem to be a jolly collection of weirdos and war-obsessed individuals:

(my personal selection of 'notable' RAND folks):



Notable RAND participants
Over the last 60 years, more than 30 Nobel Prize winners have been involved or associated with the RAND Corporation at some point in their careers.




Henry H. Arnold -- General, United States Air Force -- RAND founder
Harold L. Brode -- physicist, leading nuclear weapons effects expert
Bernard Brodie -- Military strategist and nuclear architect
Samuel Cohen -- inventor of the neutron bomb in 1958
James F. Digby -- American Military Strategist, author of first treatise on precision guided munitions 1949 - 2007
Stephen H Dole -- Author of the pivotal book Habitable Planets for Man"
Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. -- President, Douglas Aircraft Company -- RAND founder
Daniel Ellsberg -- leaker of the Pentagon Papers
Francis Fukuyama -- academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man
Brian Michael Jenkins -- terrorism expert, Senior Advisor to the President of the RAND Corporation, and author of Unconquerable Nation
Herman Kahn -- theorist on nuclear war and one of the founders of scenario planning
Henry Kissinger-- United States Secretary of State (1973?1977); National Security Advisor (1969?1975); Nobel Peace Prize Winner (1973)
Lewis "Scooter" Libby -- Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff
Andrew W. Marshall -- military strategist, director of the US DoD Office of Net Assessment
Douglas Merrill -- Former Google CIO & President of EMI's digital music division
Condoleezza Rice -- former intern, former trustee (1991?1997), and former Secretary of State for the United States
Donald Rumsfeld -- Chairman of Board from 1981?1986; 1995?1996 and Secretary of Defense for the United States from 1975 to 1977 and 2001 to 2006.
James Schlesinger -- former Secretary of Defense and former Secretary of Energy
James Steinberg -- Deputy National Security Advisor to Bill Clinton
Albert Wohlstetter -- Mathematician and Cold-War Strategist
Roberta Wohlstetter -- Policy analyst and military historian



Governance
Former members of the RAND board include: Walter Mondale, Condoleezza Rice, Brent Scowcroft, Carl Bildt, Donald Rumsfeld, ...etc
http://www.septemberclues.org
simonshack
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Unread post by simonshack »

...and over at the "Let's Roll Forums", moderator "do2read" has this interesting post:

The Rand Corporation and Their Report on the Victim's Compensation Fund
http://letsrollforums.com/rand-corporat ... 22061.html
http://www.septemberclues.org
Libero
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Re: Social Futures Thinking (c) RAND CORP.

Unread post by Libero »

Although debatable, the likeliest contender for the best picture of 2001 should have been the compilation of the networks' "live" media coverage shown on the morning of September 11th to the audience of hundreds of millions of dazed viewers across the globe :) , however and alas, the motion picture that took home the Academy Award for the year was a drama named "A Beautiful Mind", directed and co-produced by the Academy Award winning director of that same year, Ron Howard. Loosely based on the biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Sylvia Nasar, "A Beautiful Mind" opened to the United States cinemas on December 21, 2001 (winter solstice of that year and day with least amount of daylight, FWIW) and primarily focuses on Nash's mathematical genius along with his purported mental sickness. In fact, the subplot that folks who have seen the movie will likely recall most vividly includes events whereby Nash obsessively searches for hidden patterns in magazines and newspapers while on assignment to crack encrypted enemy telecommunication and which are revealed later to simply be 'delusional' episodes caused from his onset and development of paranoid schizophrenia (how convenient for us Cluesforum sleuths. ^_^ ) What viewers may less likely remember from the movie as it was only lightly touched upon was Nash's 'real-life' achievement as a Nobel Prize winner for the year 1994 in Economic Sciences, sharing it with fellow game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. John Forbes Nash, Jr. was (is?) also an esteemed member of the RAND Corp.


Oh yeah... Anyone can see the resemblance to Russell Crowe. :D
Image
Game theory is a major method used in mathematical economics and business for modeling competing behaviors of interacting agents. Applications include a wide array of economic phenomena and approaches, such as auctions, bargaining, mergers & acquisitions pricing, fair division, duopolies, oligopolies, social network formation, agent-based computational economics, general equilibrium, mechanism design, and voting systems, and across such broad areas as experimental economics, behavioral economics, information economics, industrial organization, and political economy.

...This research usually focuses on particular sets of strategies known as equilibria in games. These "solution concepts" are usually based on what is required by norms of rationality. In non-cooperative games, the most famous of these is the Nash equilibrium.

...The Nash equilibrium was named after John Forbes Nash.

...Nash equilibrium has been used to analyze hostile situations like war and arms races (see prisoner's dilemma), and also how conflict may be mitigated by repeated interaction (see tit-for-tat). It has also been used to study to what extent people with different preferences can cooperate (see battle of the sexes), and whether they will take risks to achieve a cooperative outcome (see stag hunt). It has been used to study the adoption of technical standards, and also the occurrence of bank runs and currency crises (see coordination game). Other applications include traffic flow (see Wardrop's principle), how to organize auctions (see auction theory), the outcome of efforts exerted by multiple parties in the education process, regulatory legislation such as environmental regulations (see tragedy of the Commons), and even penalty kicks in soccer (see matching pennies).
Hungarian born John von Neumann looks to have been a a key figure in the development of game theory and is featured in both the RAND Wiki and in the Game Theory wiki below. In his own wiki, we find that he was not only a frequent consultant for the the RAND Corporation, but also consulted for the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Army, Standard Oil, General Electric, and IBM among others.

Image

From the wiki of Columbia University Professor of Business Journalism, Sylvia Nasar, she appears to have completed work on another book.
Nasar's second book, Grand Pursuit, was published in 2011. It is a historical narrative which sets forth Nasar's view that economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material circumstances in its own hands rather than in Fate.
Yep... It seemingly all makes perfect sense. The ability to influence through either true talent or via artificial means is the highest rewarded as has always been in the game of life where money is king, so long as the subject matter shall not include the telling of the complete truth to the un-or-mis-informed due to lack of payoff as is easily observed in the Nash equilibrium, but I suppose most of us here knew that already. And as more become aware to the presence of the game along with its distorted rules and fabricated economic underbelly, I wonder what then is the strategy... and where go the final remnants of morality?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Beautifu ... %28film%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Nasar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Aw ... st_Picture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
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