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Question, if you know. What's the Jordanian construction sector like? While building a pipeline may only weakly protect the jobs of the Amman farmers, are local companies/contractors involved in the pipeline's construction?
Does the pipeline go to any other areas which may be exploitable in the future? Do you know what the relations were like with the Southern Desert families? This could be an attempt to push out a faction and install another.
Interesting idea, the only thing I can think of adding is maybe add tagging to the system. In the case of your media: eg, if you feel like watching Sci-Fi you can run a search to retrieve some of the highest recommendations from your backlog. Of those you may have results that come back with anime, Western, and foreign live-action results. If there's a specific type of show you want you could then add that tag to your results (anime+sci-fi) to get a more precise list of recommendations.
Tagging could be both top-level (as above, picking Sci-Fi doesn't infer that it must be anime) or hierarchical. I could think of something like programming. You have a set of different programming projects that you would like to work on, however they may require different libraries or languages to work (golang, jscript, R; or Tensorflow, Node.js). You could tag them as resources necessary to complete high-level projects. Using an ELO-scoring system you could compare projects to get a rough estimate of what should be done, followed by running similar scoring on the child tags to determine either the order to read, practice skills or tasks to complete. If your work tasks are separate from your read tasks, then this might offer an extra benefit by showing you articles/reference material that is applicable to (estimated) upcoming or current projects.
Top-level tags might add a constant increase to ELO scores of subtags, however if some subtags start to outperform other subtags in differing parent tags, the system might reorganize your projects to highlight ones you would prefer to focus on. If it keeps track of tasks done it may also force you to handle tasks that while low ELO by themselves are necessary to complete a nearly finished project.
One problem might be chaining tasks, where (an estimated) preferred task exists behind a less desirable task. That might cause a hit to ELO even if it would be better in the long-run to finish the detestable task. Maybe using the higher ELO task could provide a carrot (You could be working on this in only x hours!) to try to push past the block. This kind of structure might be able to solve some Hal's lightbulb problems as well.
I'm assuming that the system would give you a choice of activities (say 5), rather than just telling you what you should do. The choices you make could then reinforce the ratings of one activity over others. If you wanted to go all-out, you could probably graph this information to see what your preferences actually are and may show what sort of jobs you naturally avoid in your projects. Use weekly check-ins to help determine where new projects or resources should map into your planning, possibly with an artificially higher ELO for a short period (to simulate excitement/motivation).
Some disjointed ideas that came to mind, first blush. They might not work as I'm imagining, or they may add too much complexity to the system to be useful. This does remind me a bit of a SCRUM-like system as well.
I spent a couple weeks a few years ago looking into different PIMs (Personal Information Management) solutions. For writing, if you don't mind spending a bit of cash, Scrivener looked like a very nice solution. The only issue is no browser extension compared with some systems like Evernote. Evernote was listed before and is probably the easiest solution to use out-of-the-box.
If you're doing more scientific work, you may want to consider something like BeakerX or Jupyter. Much more setup, but allows for running code from within the notebook and supports LaTeX notation, backup to GitHub etc. For bibliography, there's JabRef. If you plan on keeping all reference documents on your local system, using something like TagSpaces might be worth it. TagSpaces is essentially a file organizer that allows you to add searchable tags to different files. This allows it to act as an outliner, and it also allows for flat-file markdown documents similar to Wiki pages. Copy/paste are basically pictures, though, and I'm not certain if you can reference other files. I believe there are browser extensions.
Currently, my information is stored in Evernote with project notes and code in Notepad++ using Workspace links. I have other generalized notes and project ideas/tasks held in a Kanban solution. I've been thinking of moving to a Wiki-based solution for reference/notes with some features like automated scraping via emailing links. If I start coding more I'd probably look at setting up a Git repo and use BeakerX. But I've got other things to do and haven't done this yet.