IO Impotency – Page 152 – Public Intelligence Blog

The Cloud: Flecked with Scattered Twinkie-Like Information

I read “Cloud Revenue Jumps, Led by Old Computing Titans.” If you have a hard copy of the “real” journalism Mt. Parnassus, you can find this story in the August 4, 2014 version delivered to Kentucky. Online, the story carries an August 3, 2014 date and, if you are quick, you may be able to locate it at http://nyti.ms/1xUXLw9.

I found the write up fascinating because the guts of the story pivot on three firms engaged in selling consulting services: Synergy, Gartner, and IDC. The facts of the article appear to come from the financial reports and other public statements of Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft. As real news goes, relying on “experts” and somewhat broad groupings of financial information continues to make the wheels of commerce go round. I like it. The confection is an excellent Twinkie-like approach to a diaphanous, hard to define topic—the cloud.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: The Cloud — Twittering Twinkies”

2014/08/012014/07/30

Stephen E. Arnold: 1% of Science Gets Published — What Cost to Economics?

Academia, Earth Intelligence, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

No Search Or Publishing For Science

The scientific method is used to approach a problem logically and come to reasonable conclusion based off the presented evidence. Allow me to present the following question: if only a small percentage of scientists publish their work, does that not distort scientific information? Let us approach this problem in the same manner that Erik Stokstad did in his Science Magazine article “The 1% Of Scientific Publishing.”

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2014/07/252014/07/24

Robert Steele: WIRED on London’s Amoral Tech Elite

Commerce, Ethics, IO Impotency

I completely endorse this view, never mind that the author cites me as one of three who maintain the public will no longer stand for global inequality. I have long said that we in the USA have erred in substituting technology for thinking, and I have long felt that the intelligence profession has lost touch with ethics, humanity, and purpose. Open Source Everything (OSE) is about transparency, truth, and trust — not to be found among most technologists, none of whom have a clue what “true cost economics” actually means. Kudos to WIRED for nailing the naked tech Emperor to the wall by his foreskin.

London's ‘amoral' tech elite is driving inequality

London's tech elite resides uncomfortably among some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the UK. Technology is inherently political, whether we are looking at privacy issues, convoluted tax arrangements or immigration exemptions, but many entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic seem to operate in an amoral space, where optimisation, investment and exit strategies trump humility, equality and — according to campaigner and journalist Kirsty Styles — even right and wrong.

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2014/07/202014/07/19

Stephen E. Arnold: Search Implodes, Yahoo & Google Both is Jeopardy

IO Impotency

What Most Search Vendors Cannot Pull Off

I recently submitted an Information Today column that reported about Antidot’s tactical play to enter the US market. One of the fact checkers for the write up alerted me that most of the companies I identified were unknown to US readers. Test yourself. How many of these firms do you recognize? How many of them provide information retrieval services?

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2014/07/152014/07/14

Bojan Radej: What if everything we know about poor countries’ economies is totally wrong?

Commerce, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

What if everything we know about poor countries' economies is totally wrong?

Dylan Matthews

VOX, 14 July 2014

As China and India continue their fairly rapid paces of economic growth, a greater and greater share of extreme poverty is going to be concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. But if we're going to make progress there, we need to have good numbers about how various economies are faring, how income is distributed within them, and so forth.

The trouble, Simon Fraser University economist Morten Jerven argues, is that those numbers are often incomplete at best and downright false at worst. It's a problem that came into sharp relief recently when Nigeria “rebased” its GDP numbers, doubling its GDP in the process.

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2014/07/132014/07/11

Stephen E. Arnold: Big Data Stress at Both Ends of the Lens

IO Impotency

Big Data Stress at Both Ends of the Lens

An interesting article at the New Inquiry looks at the psychological effects of both surveying and being surveyed in the modern, data-driven world. It’s an interesting read, and I urge the curious to check out the whole piece. Writer Kate Crawford begins with ways intelligence agencies use big data and some of the stumbling blocks that come with it: No matter how much information they collect, the picture is incomplete. On the other hand, the more information they stockpile, the easier it is to miss important clues and fail to prevent a crisis. Agencies continue to search for frameworks that will help them put the pieces together faster.

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2014/07/122014/07/12

Stephen E. Arnold: Improving Government Data Access – Avoid PDF, Provide CSV, Simplify Search

IO Impotency

Steps Offered to Improve Government Data Sites

The article on FlowingData titled How to Make Government Data Sites Better uses the Center for Disease Control website to illustrate measures the government should take to make their data more accessible and manageable. The first suggestion is to provide files in a useable format. By avoiding PDFs and providing CSV files (or even raw data), the user will be in a much better position to work with the data. Another suggestion is simply losing or simplifying the multipart form that makes search nearly impossible. The author also proposes clearer and more consistent annotation, using the following scenario to illustrate the point,

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