The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Palantir: What Is the Main Business of the Company?
I read about Palantir and its successful funding campaign in “Palantir’s Latest Round Valuing It at $9B Swells to $107.8M in New Funding.”
If you run a query for “Palantir” on Beyond Search, you will get links to articles about the company’s previous funding and to a couple of stories about the companies interaction with IBM i2 related to an allegation about Palantir’s business methods.
Compared to the funding for ordinary search and content processing companies, Palantir is obviously able to attract investors better than most of the other companies that make sense out of data.
I find Palantir interesting for three reasons.
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Is Palantir In The Business of Raising Money?”
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| Dr. Paul M. Torrens, Dept. Geographical Sciences and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, Univ. Maryland | ||||||
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NATO Watch Comment:By Dr Ian Davis, NATO Watch Director
22 November 2013
www.natowatch.org Promoting a more transparent and accountable NATO
Disclosure of US intelligence surveillance activities in Germany and other allied countries has aroused angry political and public reaction in those countries. The whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed close technical cooperation and a loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies. The German Government in particular has expressed disbelief and fury at the revelations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) monitored Angela Merkel's mobile phone calls. Even the Secretary General of the UN is regarded as fair game by the NSA.
But questions concerning the integrity and professionalism of UK and US intelligence services are nothing new. In March 2003, GCHQ‘whistleblower’ Katharine Gun revealed in a leaked email that the NSA was eavesdropping on UN Security Council diplomats belonging to the group of ‘swing nations’ that were undecided on the question of war against Iraq. The NSA requested the help of its British counterparts at GCHQ to collect information on those diplomats.
Social Media and News: Amazing Graphic
“News Use across Social Media Platforms” confirms what I have suspected for a while. The mobile generation has some interesting behavior patterns with regard to news. Among the factoids that the Pew outfit has boiled down to numbers are:
ITEM: YouTube viewers are not using the service to get news. Maybe that explains why experiments with Thomson Reuters proved to be somewhat disappointing.
ITEM: Google Plus is less popular than Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook as a source of news. The push back about Google Plus as a prerequisite for YouTube comments may have more importance than some realize.
ITEM: Facebook is an important source of news. As the demographics of Facebook shift, the importance of news may suggest that Facebook has morphed into a more mature service.
The most interesting “fact” in the report is the apparent importance of Reddit, a service which points to public posts on a range of issues. The Reddit service offers a search function, but I find consistently disappointing. In fact, most of the unusual collections of links and comments are essentially unfindable.
Ignored Reality Is Going To Wipe Out The Human Race
To inform people is hard slugging. Everything is lined up against the public being informed, or the policymakers for that matter. News is contaminated by its service to special interests and hidden agendas. Many scientists or their employers are dependent on federal money. Even psychologists and anthropologists were roped into the government’s torture and occupation programs. Economists tell lies for corporations and Wall Street. Plant and soil scientists tell lies for agribusiness and Monsanto. Truth tellers are slandered and persecuted. However, persistence can eventually win out. In the long-run, truth sometimes emerges. But not always. And not always in time.
I have been trying to inform the American people, economists, and policymakers for more than a decade about the adverse impacts of jobs offshoring on the US economy. The word has eventually gotten out. Last week I was contacted by 8th grade students competing for their school in CSPAN’s StudentCam Documentary Contest. They want to interview me on the subject of jobs offshoring for their documentary film.
America is a strange place. Here are eighth graders far ahead of the economics profession, the President, the Congress, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and the financial press in their understanding of one of the fundamental problems of the US economy. Yet, people say the public schools are failing. Obviously, not the one whose students contacted me.
Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: Ignored Reality Is Going To Wipe Out The Human Race”
Predicting the Epicenter of Crime: Analytics Tool Cuts Crime Rates
A predictive policing tool in use in the U.S. and abroad helps law enforcement predict crime in the same way that geologists predict earthquakes.
EXTRACT
Brantingham said that there are features in the environment that, by their nature, are prone to crime, much like faults are to earthquakes. “A shopping mall is a great example. It’s a standing crop of cars to be stolen or to be broken into. It’s not going anywhere. It’s like a big fault that produces earthquakes at a regular clip.”
Crimes also tend to produce “aftershocks,” as criminals tend to be creatures of habit and return to the same locations where they found previous success. “So you get these after-crimes that occur near in space and near in time to previous crimes.”
PredPol takes that information – what crime is being committed, when and where it happens – and applies mathematical algorithms, and uses it as the basis to forecast where crime will happen in the future. The concept grew out of using hot spots to track where crime is occurring (where you map crime over long intervals to see where it is concentrated to aid in the allocation of resources). But PredPol cuts down the reaction time to changes in crime patterns that might not be readily apparent by simply looking at hot spots marked on a map, thus allowing for a more real-time reaction to changes in the crime landscape.
