– Albert Schweitzer [1]
The trilogy Cannibals in White Shoes: The MorganStanleyGate Exposé has been 14 years in the making and I would like to acknowledge those who: (1) instigated me to write it; (2) facilitated its creation; (3) provided invaluable guidance in its publishing; and (4) provoked an adaptation for large scale mobilized problem-solving.
The Instigators
Gratitude is endearingly directed to Edna May Young for the love and support only a mother can provide, and to fellow author and friend Theresa Vivanco, whose keen interest in this story and encouragement helped stoke the fire to finally memorialize it.
The Facilitators
It’s easy to take innovations for granted – from turning on the lights (thank you Thomas Edison[2]), to calling a friend (thank you Alexander Graham Bell[3]), to turning on one’s personal computer[4] (thank you Henry Edward Roberts[5] and/or Steve Wozniak[6]) and surfing the web[7] (thank you Vinton G. Cerf [8] and Robert E. Kahn,[9] who both worked for DARPA[10]).
However, there are two especially noteworthy innovators whose contributions to society are extraordinarily vast, including those essential to the producing of these books – so I would like to personally acknowledge my gratitude to Bill Gates[11] and Steve Jobs[12].
Now I could also attempt to recognize those responsible for creating the 75 software applications I ended up learning to establish the 15 websites that originally chronicled the events of MorganStanleyGate as they unfolded. Rest assured, I’m not going to burden you with enumerating these others, but suffice it to say, I am indeed thankful to them and for today’s remarkable technology.
However, I will point out that these websites, with servers located throughout the world, also served as important repositories to store the thousands of documents, pictures, videos and other files, which were later relied upon to cogently craft this exposé, representing much of the corroborating evidence to what is contained in all three volumes of Cannibals in White Shoes; The MorganStanleyGate Exposé.
And storing these documents off-site was a critically essential precaution, as woefully corrupt public officials, collaborating between multiple states, and working pursuant to the illicit directives of Morgan Stanley operatives, attempted to destroy all evidence of wrongdoing sponsored by this “too big to fail” bank.
How?
There was an illegal ransacking of my home, whereby ALL my computers and storages devices were wrongfully seized, while I was unlawfully incarcerated in maximum security jail and kept in solitary confinement on false charges that were literally made up out of thin air (and eventually dismissed as such). And since my computer equipment was never returned (despite incessant requests), this was also an instance of state-sponsored grand larceny – that alone should send chills up and down your spine, but there is SO much more, and we’ll cover the details of this corruption-laden criminal wrongdoing later on.
But let’s get back to the explaining why I have singled out Messrs. Gates (the principal founder of Microsoft) and Jobs (the principal founder of Apple) as key “Facilitators” in this Trilogy, and thus recognized as such in these Acknowledgements. To begin with, Microsoft Word 2016 is a mesmerizingly magical software package replete with features that made possible the drafting of an exposé of great complexity and magnitude. In addition, Microsoft’s OneDrive allowed me to readily store and access the various drafts and the voluminous supporting documents to Cannibals in White Shoes: The MorganStanleyGate Exposé.
Then we have the innovations of Apple, which obviously, Steve Jobs was the principal driving force behind – specifically, the mobility benefits of its iPad Air along with its surfeit of apps, including its powerfully accurate speech recognition capabilities, which allowed me to dictate much of the contents of each chapter. Moreover, I think it’s fair to say it was essential to have iTunes continuously playing background music to feed my soul during this prodigious literary undertaking.
And during the many times I found myself having to be away from my computers, I was still able to continue working on this Trilogy uninterrupted through the convenient assimilation of innovations from the companies of these two great innovators. For instance, when I was nearing completion of Volume 1: Big Apple Battleground, I was confronted with a health scare that required my hospitalization for over a month.
So what did I do?
I brought along my Apple iPad Air, which ran the Microsoft Word 2016 and OneDrive apps, so that while listening to soothing and spiritually uplifting music, I could readily dictate, edit, and access all files associated with this authorship endeavor using a most convenient high-speed hospital Wi-Fi network. And I must offer a special shout out to Mease Countryside Hospital in Safety Harbor, Florida, and part of the BayCare Health System, which in my opinion are some of the best healthcare facilities and medical care organizations in America – and this is coming from someone who spent much of his life in the New York Metro area, long known for having the state of the art medical facilities.
I would also be remiss if I did not recognize two other key facilitators to the creation of this literary work, to wit – Jimmy Wales[13] and Larry Sanger[14], the founders of Wikipedia[15], which is the citied source in an overwhelming majority of topics in the Appendices.
Publishing Guidance
Those who also provided invaluable assistance in cultivating this final product were Jack Canfield, Steve Harrison, Eric Kampmann and Margot Atwell. Each in this foursome is a virtuoso in the book publishing industry, and were effectively by my side every step of the way throughout the arduous, challenging, complex, but nevertheless fascinating process of authoring not merely one’s first literary work, but an innovative and hopefully ground-breaking exposé trilogy.
Some of the areas of guidance included: strategy; budgeting; scheduling; editing; packaging; design; marketing; logistics; negotiations; sales; distribution; networking; and publicity. Accordingly, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise for their support and guidance.
Mobilized Problem Solving
Lastly, in late 2009 a post-doctoral research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (“M.I.T.”) developed a social networking model designed to mobilize a populace to swiftly identify and engage the resources necessary to solve complex large-scale problems. Their hypothesis was quickly developed and put to the test in a unique contest[16] sponsored by DARPA (the “Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency”), which is the research arm of the United States Department of Defense, and the group credited with creating the Internet of today.
Pitted against hundreds of teams around the world, the team from M.I.T. won the contest[17] by locating and successfully identifying the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons randomly placed throughout the continental United States[18], which occupies a combined area of roughly 3.12 million square miles (or 8.08 million square kilometers).
Remarkably they accomplished this task in less than nine hours![19]
How did they do it?
The team, headed up by Dr. Alex (Sandy) Pentland and Dr. Riley Crane, developed what was described as the MIT Social Networking Problem Solving Model via Mobilization of the Masses, or more simplistically the ”MIT Mobilization Model”. This social intelligence paradigm promoted problem-solving through the swift viral collaboration of complete strangers.
They accomplished this by eliciting the help of others to quickly “get the word out” to those who could help find where these weather-balloons were located with the prospect of rewarding those who contributed toward solving this problem. To be effective, this effort had to involve: (1) zero cost; (2) a financial reward; and (3) little effort on the part of others. They did so by employing a “recursive incentive structure” that provided graduated financial incentives for people to cooperate with one another.
The cooperation typically involved a “chain” of individuals, who through a series of referrals, located the balloons. The person who actually located a balloon was paid the most and person at the beginning of the referral chain was paid the least, and those in the middle, received compensation scaled somewhere between.
Since the prize was $40,000 and there were 10 balloons, that meant the reward for finding each balloon was $4,000, allocated as follows: $2,000 for the person who found the balloon (the “finder”); $1,000 to the person who referred the “finder”; $500 to the preceding referral and so on. Thus, the further one was in the referral chain, the less that person would get. If, as in this example, three people were involved in finding a balloon, $3,500 was paid out and the remaining $500 from the $4,000 reward was donated to the Red Cross.
After the impressive victory in the DARPA challenge, Dr. Riley Crane went on the interview circuit, marketing the potentially wide application their newly developed problem-solving model could have. One of the more noteworthy interviews was conducted on The Colbert Report.[20]
In addition to Drs. Pentland and Crane, other members of this MIT post-doctoral team included Dr. Manuel Cebrian, and graduate students (at the time) Galen Pickard, Wei Pan and Anmol Madan, all of whom are shown holding the contest winning check in the below picture.
Importantly, the MIT Mobilization Model has been adapted to identify and engage the resources necessary to resolve many of the “problems” posed by MorganStanleyGate throughout this Trilogy, whereby their successful resolution will have potentially far-reaching positive implications for others. This would include the establishment of a charitable foundation whose mandate will be to help others similarly victimized, but lack the resources to defend themselves or otherwise meaningfully do anything about it.
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Footnotes:
Cannibals In White Shoes 