The article titled How Semantic Search is Killing the Keyword on iMedia heralds the end of keyword-driven search in place of semantic search, or the user’s intention. Based mainly on Google’s work on the Knowledge Graph, a web of information that attempts to connect related data and provide a user with answers to questions they might not have known to ask. The article goes so far as to call keyword-centered content a thing of the past.
A study of how older teenagers use social media has found that Facebook is “not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried” and is being replaced by simpler social networks such as Twitter and Snapchat, an expert has claimed.
Young people now see the site as “uncool” and keep their profiles live purely to stay in touch with older relations, among whom it remains popular.
Prof Daniel Miller of University College London, an anthropologist who worked on the European Union-funded research, wrote in an article for the academic news website The Conversation: “Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it.
“This year marked the start of what looks likely to be a sustained decline of what had been the most pervasive of all social networking sites.
“Young people are turning away in their droves and adopting other social networks instead, while the worst people of all, their parents, continue to use the service.
“Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected.
“In response, the young are moving on to cooler things.
“What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person's decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request.”
… the quite predictable case of data overload and why the most serious 4th Amendment breach relates to the statistical problem of ‘data culling' algorithms* generating large numbers of “false positives” and thereby wiping out the principle of “probable cause.”
William Binney, a former NSA coder behind some of the surveillance program’s algorithms, is warning that the agency’s interest in mass surveillance is coming at a grave cost in efficiency.
While the agency sees value in taking in any data it can get, “just in case,” sorting through a stockpile of unrelated data is soaking up so many resources that what relevant data they might have is getting less focus.
Binney’s comments mirror warnings in some of the Snowden documents, which show the NSA is also concern about their data collection programs far outpacing their ability to process that data.
Indeed, in March some NSA analysts were asking for permission to collect less data with some of the programs, saying that they are collecting a lot of data with “relatively small intelligence value.”
For Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, his team broke down data silos and moved all the data to a cloud repository. The team built Narwhal, a shared data store interface for all of the campaigns’ application. Narwhal was dubbed “Obama’s White Whale,” because it is almost a mythical technology that federal agencies have been trying to develop for years. While Obama may be hanging out with Queequag and Ishmael, there is a more viable solution for the cloud says GCN’s article, “Big Metadata: 7 Ways To Leverage Your Data In the Cloud.”
Data silo migration may appear to be a daunting task, but it is not impossible to do. The article states:
I've scooped before about Ann Blair's book of pre-modern info-overload — and what was done about. This is a nice short musing about today's information overload discourse.
Blair identifies four “S’s of text management” from the past that we still use today: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing. She also notes the history of alternative solutions to information overload that are the equivalent of deleting one’s Twitter account: Descartes and other philosophers, for instance, simply deciding to forget the library so they could start anew. Other to-hell-with-it daydreams proliferated too:
