The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Multi-part problem.
Does the peer review process stifle scientific innovation?
A new study suggests the current model may succeed in keeping out the scientific riff-raff, but its maintenance of the status quo comes with a drawback, the study's authors argue — the regular rejection of cutting-edge work.
End of the Facebook Revolution
At Russian authorities' request, Facebook blocked an opposition rally announcement. Its willingness to do so shows that activists worldwide can no longer count on it as a platform. Read more.
Phi Beta Iota: Facebook still yields 2X to 3X the twitter referrals for any given post. The announcement of its demise is premature. It is, however, immature, and not listening to those who might help it — and/or twitter and/or Sharknet — become the World Brain.
See Also:
Robert Steele: Reflections on the Next Data Revolution
Bottlenose: Not a Dolphin, Another Intelligence Vendor
EXTRACT
The reality of many commercial services, which may or may not apply to Bottlenose, is that:
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Bottlenose — Hype without Limit?”
Artificial Intelligence: Duh? What?
I have been following the “AI will kill us”, the landscape of machine intelligence craziness, and “Artificial Intelligence Isn’t a Threat—Yet.”
The most recent big thinking on this subject appears in the Wall Street Journal, an organization in need of any type of intelligence: Machine, managerial, fiscal, online, and sci-fi.
Harsh? Hmm. The Wall Street Journal has been running full page ads for Factiva. If you are not familiar with this for fee service, think 1981. The system gathers “high value” content and makes it available to humans clever enough to guess the keywords that unlock, not answers, but a list of documents presumably germane to the keyword query. There are wrappers that make Factiva more fetching. But NGIA systems (what I call next generation information access systems) use the Factiva methods perfected 40 years ago as a utility.
Another Good Enough Challenge to Proprietary Enterprise Search
The protestations of the enterprise search vendors in hock for tens of millions to venture funders will get louder. The argument is that proprietary search solutions are just better.
Navigate to “Postgres Full-Text Search Is Good Enough!” This has been the mantra of some of the European Community academics for a number of years. I gave a talk at CeBIT a couple of years ago and noted that the proprietary vendors were struggling to deliver a coherent and compelling argument. Examples of too-much-chest-beating came from speakers representing and Exalead and a handful of consultants. See, for example, http://bit.ly/1zicaGw.
The point of the “Postgres Good Enough” article strikes me as:
The internet is less free than last year.
The internet is getting less free year by year with governments passing more laws to restrict online speech and increase monitoring of users.
That's according to New York-based Freedom House which on Friday published its fifth annual study of internet freedom around the globe.
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Which is the most free country? Iceland, apparently, with a satisfying 6 points, followed by Estonia (which this week announced it would offer e-citizenship) with 8 points. Canada comes next with 15, then Australia and Germany are tied with 17 points a piece. And as for the Home of Freedom™? The United States comes sixth with 19 points.
