IO Sense-Making – Page 5 – Public Intelligence Blog

We are familiar with Visual Mining and its range of dashboard and data visualization software. Currently, Visual Mining has been working on products that help users better understand and analyze actionable business data. Its enterprise software line NetCharts is compatible across all platforms, including mobile and tablets. The company recently released their Winter 2013 Chartline Newsletter.

Along with the usual end of the year greetings and gratitudes, the first note of business in the newsletter addresses is the Web site’s redesign.

Among the new features are:

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Visual Mining Tool Redesign”

2014/01/152014/01/23

2014 Intelligence Reform (All Others)

Ethics, Government, IO Impotency, IO Secrets, IO Sense-Making

SHORT URL:

http://tinyurl.com/2014-Intel-Reform

Under Construction – Send Nominations to robert.david.steele.vivas@gmail.com

Updated 23 Jan 2014 14:58 E

Phi Beta Iota: The current literature on intelligence reform is underdeveloped and under-specified. An example of this under- or mis-specification can be seen in the treatment of 9/11. The dominant position that 9/11 was an intelligence failure is correct in principle. It was, however, a failure of counterintelligence not of warning. Ample warnings had been provided, including from 9 different nations warning the White House and the CIA in advance. George Tenet had a clear role in positioning the intelligence community away from these warnings, including ABLE DANGER. Keith Alexander seems to have shared this misplaced analytical view, along with the Acting Director of the FBI who was not able to lever influence when the actual Director resigned. 9/11 was – in effect – enabled by Dick Cheney, who ordered a national counter-terrorism exercise for “the day,” months in advance, despite the numerous and clear warnings — not to stop 9/11, but to allow it, embrace it, enhance it, and leverage it. Today's US Intelligence Community is dedicated to moving money — nothing more — and of course this is all Congress wants, with its eye on the standard 5% kick-back to sponsoring Members. It is not in any way, shape, or form committed to producing ethical evidence-based decision support applicable to national strategy, national policy, national acquisition, or national operations. Intelligence with integrity is not to be found in the US Government (good people, bad system — this is a meta-challenge). Most intelligence scholars are currently serving to bolster this system rather than to stand as critical friends to challenge and help in the reform of it.

Below the line is an integrated list from the past several years. This is everybody else. For an alternative perspective on intelligence reform, see 2014 Robert Steele on Intelligence Reform.

Continue reading “2014 Intelligence Reform (All Others)”

2014/01/142014/01/14

Robin Good: Content Curation Guide

Advanced Cyber/IO, IO Sense-Making

An Introductory Guide to Content Curation

If you are interested in understanding what content curation is all about and where's its key value, you will find this reading material relevant to your learning goal.

In this reading collection (25 articles) you can learn how curation can be a fantastic instrument for learning, journalism and marketing, as it provides the means to create value, to find unique resources and to illustrate them, and in this process it showcases your competence and expertise on the matter (or the one of your company / organization).

If you are just starting out with content curation, this learning playlist will provide you with all the basic info you need to know to better understand this new activity and its relevance in our times.

Learning playlist.

2014/01/132014/01/13

Rob Dover: Putting the Steele into intelligence reform

#OSE Open Source Everything, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Sense-Making, Peace Intelligence

Putting the Steele into intelligence reform

Robert Steele is one of the more interesting writers on intelligence. Based in the US, and a former practitioner he has brought an enormous amount of energy to the questions around intelligence effectiveness and intelligence reform, and can rightly be thought of as a grandfather of the open source intelligence movement, and more recently the expanded “Open Source Everything” meme. I should insert the health warning that he has appeared in the Companion guide that Mike Goodman, Claudia Hillebrand and I edited, so I am not entirely impartial on this, but I would place myself as a ‘critical friend’ of his work.[i]

He has recently published a semi-manifesto piece about US intelligence and it can be found on this link. I have distilled the following key points from it, that I want to write around briefly here, but the original piece is where his take on these issues sit, obviously: 1) intelligence should be about decision support; 2) intelligence is currently being justified along the lines of the quantity of secrets it produces the Executive without regard to the total government need; 3) there is a dominant discourse that only secret intelligence agencies are equipped to ‘do’ intelligence; 4) Parliament and politicians in general desperately need intelligence qua decision-support, sense-making applied to all information secret and open that applies to their functional domains; and 5) the public desperately needs intelligence, again in the form of decision support. Recently the public has become the object – Americans would say the target – of intelligence agencies, which is quite the opposite of the public being a virtual intelligence network in being, contributing to national and public security more effectively by leveraging the creative commons approach to information, what some call collective or co-intelligence.[ii]

Continue reading “Rob Dover: Putting the Steele into intelligence reform”

2014/01/112014/01/11

Howard Rheingold: Seven Principles of Information Filtering

IO Sense-Making

Filtering Seven Principles

Filtering is essential to the info-handling side of infotention, and JP Rangaswami is one of the few people I look to for deep and broad thinking about infotention issues (Harold Jarche and Robin Good are others who immediately come to mind). Consider adding his blog to your RSS aggregator: confused of calcutta: a blog about information.

Filtering: Seven Principles

In earlier posts towards the tail end of last year and early this year, I committed to writing a number of posts on filtering. The background is simple:

Continue reading “Howard Rheingold: Seven Principles of Information Filtering”

2014/01/062014/01/06

Stephen E. Arnold: Human Creativity Key for Big Data Design & Exploitation

IO Impotency, IO Sense-Making

Creativity is Key for Data Scientists

Hmm, does this defy the easy-big-data narrative? VentureBeat warns us, “The Data Is Not Enough: Creative Data Scientists Make the Difference.” Not only is there a shortage of data scientists in general, we are now told firms would do well to find data scientists graced with creativity. How pesky. Writer Jordan Novet refers to a recent panel given at VentureBeat’s 2013 DataBeat/Data Science Summit headed by LinkedIn‘s former lead data scientist, Peter Skomoroch. The article relates:

“Skomoroch envisions a world not too far in the future where balance sheets will track companies’ data assets. But he and other panelists don’t just want more data to analyze. They discussed the importance of creativity as a key trait to look for in people who work with the data. That means relying on proven algorithms might not always cut it.”

Novet shares with us the perspectives of a few panel members. For example, former Kaggle president Jeremy Howard, apparently the creative type himself, described his process:

“Howard likes to just dive into data and start getting hunches about it, without knowing about the industry the data comes from and other context that others would find valuable. ‘That way, there’s no blinkers,’ he said. It might come across as a contrarian view, but Howard thinks his approach is one reason he did well in Kaggle competitions.”

Other panelists quoted in the article include Jawbone‘s VP of data, Monica Rogati and Pete Warden, CEO of Jetpac. See the story for their thoughts.

Cynthia Murrell, January 06, 2014

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Big Data @ Phi Beta Iota

2013/12/272013/12/27

Howard Rheingold: Information Wrangling — Seek, Sense, Share

Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making

Bryan Alexander takes off from Jane Hart's personal knowledge management routine to describe his own method of handling information overload, which he calls “information wrangling.” He works through channels and sources daily, reflects, and shares. Alexander details each of these processes in his blog.

Bryan Alexander

My daily info-wrangling routine

Jane Hart describes her daily personal knowledge management (or PKM) routine. It’s an inspiring yet practical workflow for information curation. Or information wrangling, as I like to call it:

I like this framework for various purposes, starting with how it describes a way of handling information overload. It’s also a good model for helping people transition from an analog (print, in-person) set of habits to one including the digital world.

Inspired by this, I’d like to describe my own.

Every day I work through a series of channels and sources (Hart’s “Seek” category), reflect on what I find (“Sense”), then share those reflections (“Share”). I’ll break it down into three aspects, but keep in mind that there’s a lot of back-and-forth across them.

Read full article with links.