Category: IO Impotency

Identifying Rebel Groups in Syria: An Analytical Methodology

Nov 2, 2012 – Joseph Holliday

In a narrated demonstration, Joseph Holliday presents his methodology to identify and track rebel groups in Syria. Using international media, YouTube videos, and Facebook pages, he verifies and describes rebel activity and assigns responsibility to named rebel groups. Often publishing records of their attacks, rebel groups provide a wealth of information about their capabilities, key personalities, principal values, and locations through film and other digital media. Analyzing these films and verifying observations through additional sources, Joseph Holliday has been able to describe changes in rebel capability, objectives, and limitations over time with a high degree of accuracy.

Phi Beta Iota: Pedestrian poop, neither analytical nor helpful, and certainly not worth the time/price inputs.  Worth watching for a sense of how little this offers.  Technology is not a substitute for thinking, and incoherent visuals are not a substitute for applied human intelligence that can answer a specific foward-looking question.

The Real Lesson of the Petraeus Scandal

We delude ourselves about the way we use technology.

By Christine Rosen

Slate, Monday, Nov. 19, 2012

EXTRACT:

Were any of our email accounts subject to scrutiny by the FBI, we might not be revealed as cheating cads, but most of us would, in ways large and small, be exposed as frequent and shameless purveyors of idle gossip, unnecessary fibs, outrageous flattery, pathetic excuses, and bandwidth-hogging cat videos. It’s all there in the emails and text messages that map the quotidian details of our lives. If, as Marshall McLuhan taught us, technologies are “extensions of man,” then the Petraeus story serves as a useful reminder of how our technologies (incredible as they are) nevertheless can encourage the extension of man’s less noble traits. History might end up judging Petraeus a meritocratic and military success but a moral manqué. As for the rest of us, let him without a sinful email sent (or drafts) folder cast the first stone.

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Twtrland: A Social Analytics Tool And Simple Way To Discover New People In The Twitterverse

Twitter does a lot of things well, but it hasn’t really nailed context yet — or search. After you first join the service, it takes a significant amount of following and unfollowing before you settle on a stream (or Twitter hose, as some call it) that works for you. Search, too, is noisy and generally unhelpful. In May, Twitter started to test some personalization features to start making better suggestions in terms of who to follow, etc., and it continues to improve search and “Discover.”

In the meantime, a newly-launched platform called Twtrland wants to give you a simple way to figure out whether or not you should follow, along with a new way to search the Twitter graph.

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