The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
14 Advanced Military Projects That Could Change The World Forever
LIST ONLY
Arctic Awareness (Distributed Sensors)
Biofuels
Cyber Range
Energy (Renewable At Sea)
Internet Content-Based Mobile Edge Networking
Internet Fiber (Photonics)
Internet Fixed Wireless at a Distance
Internet Mobile Hotspots
Laser Defense
Laser Weapons
Spectrum Mapping
Surveillance (Building Interiors)
Surveillance (Persistent, Stratospheric)
Thermal Ship Decking
Small Analytics Firms Reaping the Benefit of Investment Cycle
Small time analytics isn’t really as startup-y as people may think anymore. These companies are in high demand and are pulling in some serious cash. We discovered just how much and how serious from a recent Cambridge Science Park article, “Cambridge Text Analytics Linguamatics Hits $10m in Sales.”
According to the story:
Linguamatics’ sales showed strong growth and exceeded ten million dollars in 2013, it was announced today – outperforming the company’s targeted growth and expected sales figures. The increased sales came from a boost in new customers and increased software licenses to existing customers in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors. This included 130 per cent growth in healthcare sales plus increased sales in professional services.
This earning potential has clearly grabbed the attention of investors. This, is feeding a cycle of growth, which is why the Linguamaticses of the world can rake in impressive numbers. Just the other day, for example, Tech Circle reported on a microscopic Mumbai big data company that landed $3m in investments. They say it takes money to make money and right now, the world of big data analytics has that cycle down pat. It won’t last forever, but it’s fun to watch as it does.
Patrick Roland, April 22, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Concern about the Future of Technology
I suggest you read two articles.
The first is from folks who make their living cheerleading technology. The article “What Does the Recent Tech Stock Downturn Meant? The Truth Is Nobody Knows.” is an admission that the future of technology is—well—not too clear. With increasing class tension in the City by the Bay, I suppose some reflection is warranted. I sort of knew this when I was a wee lad. Apparently for those surfing technology, the notion that the fancy analytics systems with their clever predictive methods are clueless is interesting. I assume not even insider information is illuminating the dark corners of what seems to be a somewhat trivial issue compared with some of the national and international news.
The second is “We got Bookies to Predict the Future of Tech.” Crowdsourcing the future is not too interesting. I checked out the investment and threat markets and concluded that the Ivory Tower folks had time on their hands. This article contains a quote I noted. The comment is about Google Glass. Few items of headgear trigger assaults, so I was intrigued:
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Technology Flopping – Thinking Still Out of Style”
This report on the latest developments concerning consciousness research in physics is a wonderful illustration of a trend: the cutting edge of physicalist research is confronting consciousness. It is now one step away. Note two things: 1) the acknowledgement that the model is incomplete, missing a link, and a paradox: “why does the information content of our conscious experience appear to be vastly larger than 37 bi! ts of integrated information that can be stored in the human brain.”
Answering the paradox I predict will take physics into the nonlocal domain, and the matrix of information that is the all there is.
The German school of physics, referenced in is this report was made up of Planck, Pauli, Heisenberg, Einstein and others; the Olympiad of 20th century physics. All of them along with Jung, and Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, were strongly influenced by Adolf Bastian, a 19th century German polymath who posited the theory of Elementargedanke – literally ‘elementary thoughts of humankind.” It was an early attempt to recognize and try to study the nonlocal informational matrix, from which Jung developed the concept of the Collective Unconscious.
SOURCE: Consciousness as a State of Matter
Why Physicists Are Saying Consciousness Is A State Of Matter, Like a Solid, A Liquid Or A Gas
The Physics arXiv Blog
EXTRACT
Today, Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sets out the fundamental problems that this new way of thinking raises. He shows how these problems can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. And he explains how thinking about consciousness in this way leads to precise questions about the nature of reality that the scientific process of experiment might help to tease apart.
Tegmark’s approach is to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. ‘I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,” he says.
JP Rangaswami's thoughtful series of blog posts on the why and how of filtering online info-flows is a fundamental infotention text. Instead of Scooping all seven, I've Scooped this blog post by Jon Reed that summarizes and links to all seven parts.
Filtering JP Rangaswami – from information deluge to context
Jon Reed
diginomica, 7 February 2014
I liked JP Rangaswami‘s series on filtering so much, I decided to filter it.
The Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com, Rangaswami has a personal blog site, confused of calcutta: a blog about information, where he blogs on far-ranging enterprise topics on behalf of himself, not his employer.
The filtering series has been a very good read, but quickly became a monster series. The initial post laid out seven filtering principles; there are now five follow up posts to chew on.
Mafia Wars: How Italy's Military Police Use Metadata To Track Organized Crime
The Carabinieri, Italy's military police, used a new software platform to analyze the phone records of organized crime groups. Here's what happened.
There's a reason why the NSA likes metadata so much. Metadata–the auxiliary data generated by every digital move you make–can track a person's digital life in detail. Now a team of Italian academics are showing how metadata can reveal the structure of organized crime groups with a software tool called LogAnalysis, which combines information from mobile phone records with police databases. And among LogAnalysis's first users is the Carabinieri, the Italian military police.
Emilio Ferrara, a postdoc at Indiana University, created LogAnalysis with three researchers from the University of Messina in Sicily. Ferrara explains that their platform “infers, with pretty high confidence, the roles of individuals involved in criminal activity from communication data, simply looking at patterns and network features.”
Here's how it works: Police feed phone logs they obtain into LogAnalysis; those then get mashed up with mug shots, criminal records, and other proprietary information from police databases. This information then shapes the Carabinieri's investigations by giving vital clues about intra-group relationships of an organized crime group believed to be behind robberies, extortions, and narcotics trafficking. It's important to note that their paper anonymized all records, and did not identify which organized crime group Italian law enforcement were investigating.
It turns out that metadata can tell quite a lot about the way an organization is set up. Matt Unger, the chief digital officer of New York firm K2 Intelligence, explained over the phone to Fast Company that “with a good analytics platform, cell phone metadata reveals who the influencers are. They are the ones who send and receive the most communications, and you can also see the ripples they make in turn.”
PART I Imagine the Internet without Search Engines
Centrifuge Systems proposes an interesting idea in “Big Data Discovery Without Link Analysis Is Like The Web Without Google.” Centrifuge Systems asks readers of the short article to imagine using the Internet without a search engine. How would we locate information? It would be similar to the librarian’s favorite description of the Internet all the contents of a library spilled on the floor. The article continues to explain that big data without link analysis works the same as the Internet without a search engine.
PART II Google and IBM Struggle
At my age, I don’t own stocks. I don’t own anything because life in rural Kentucky is simple. The news about Google’s and IBM’s most recent financial results struck me as an MBA discussion group problem.
IBM issued “IBM Reports 2014 First Quarter Results.” What surprises did the $100 billion giant sprint on me? In a nutshell, declining revenues and profits. The bright spots were IBM’s consulting revenues and the company’s cloud computing. Other parts of the business were less robust. Overall IBM faces major challenges in hardware where no easy fix seems evident. Search as manifested in the Watson initiative will have to deliver.
In “Google Inc. Announces First Quarter 2014 Results” made clear that the Google was able to pump up its revenue. I noted the word “great” as Google’s way of describing the last 12 weeks’ financial performance. I noted that profit was down. Explanations included accountants being accountants and acquisitions. For me, the shift to mobile and the now-familiar dependence on one major revenue stream were important. Google may have to do more to keep up the appearance that it is the same super star that burst upon the scene more than a decade ago. Aging pro athletes and Hollywood starlets know the drill well. More effort goes into staying young at an increasingly higher cost. Is search as Google defines it up to the task of paying for personal trainers and plastic surgeons?
