Posted By John Hudson Sunday, July 14, 2013 – 7:06 PM Share
For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened?
“Google, Facebook, Amazon and other web giants have harnessed big data to solve some of their biggest tech challenges. Now many of these engineers are setting out on their own with startups. Some are focused on analytics. Some are working on in-memory databases, which do all their work on data stored in memory instead of hard drives. Others are casting their lot with NoSQL, a new kind of database that spreads processing and storage across multiple servers and storage systems.”
For example, Data Gravity, founded in 2012 with headquarters in Nashua, NH and star Paula Long, makes big data more affordable by embedding the tech into storage systems. The implications posed by these startups for IBM SPSS, SAS, Palantir and Digital Reasoning are as yet unclear. VC’s certainly seem optimistic, with almost all of the startups mentioned raking in millions of dollars from various backers.
From simple charts to complex maps and infographics, Brian Suda's round-up of the best – and mostly free – tools has everything you need to bring your data to life
One of the most common questions I get asked is how to get started with data visualisations. Beyond following blogs, you need to practise – and to practise, you need to understand the tools available. In this article, I want to introduce you to 20 different tools for creating visualisations: from simple charts to complex graphs, maps and infographics. Almost everything here is available for free, and some you have probably installed already.
I share with Lawrence Lessig the conviction that corruption is the principal threat to humanity. I would add to that my own view that corruption is responsible for 50% of all investments being wasted, be they in agriculture, energy, health, or the military, as representative domains. I also believe that corruption will persist until individuals can report corruption with absolute anonymity; an intermediary can combine reports from multiple sources to achieve a degree of trust in the accusations; and individuals, by name, time, place, and amount, and be publicly outed. We must also use this information to identify systemic unfairness in wages that often underlay corruption.
The key problem, as identified below in an overview of the latest report from Transparency International, is that no one trusts the government — where most of the corruption takes place or high crimes such as banking fraud are legalized.
Crisis Mappers, the rapid maturation of humanitarian technologies (relying on open source software and hardware), have impressed me deeply. I was one of the pioneers striving to get the US secret world to be intelligent about advanced information processing and analysis from 1986-1992, and they still don't get it. In my view, the time has come for Crisis Mappers to join with Transparency International (based in Berlin) and the Chaos Computer Club in Germany, to create Corruption Mappers.
NOTE: 2 years ago. At TED@MotorCity, Lisa Gansky, author of “The Mesh,” talks about a future of business that's about sharing all kinds of stuff, either via smart and tech-enabled rental or, more boldly, peer-to-peer. Examples across industries — from music to cars — show how close we are to this meshy future.
Comment by zasounotsukushi: Information company, not car company – I agree that's what I see for the future. But Zipcar has left some communities feeling abandoned, and didn't do what they needed to make the consumer feel listened to. On top of that, I think there's way more to collaborative consumption than how they were going about it. I like the final point – we need transparency and need to share failures. People need to stop picturing a shiny and happy picture of a connected society, cynicism needs to be built in.
Comment by D.S. Wellhauser: Another faux-intellectual re-packaging/re-marketing old ideas with some pseudo-new ideas…TED is Dead.
I get a lot of strange stuff in my inbox that’s just not appropriate here, but today was an exception. Someone asked a question and part of the answer was “Kenya Tweet Force”, an irregular cybermilitia supporting the Kenyan government against al Shabaab in Somalia. Their Twitter account, @KTF_press, was only following five others, so this was a good starting clue.
