Terrorist Alert: Special Comment. It is always hazardous to comment on events without having had access to the underlying source material about them. This is especially true of threatening developments. Thus it is not possible to comment on the quality or accuracy of the information on which the current terrorist alert rests.
What makes this threat warning even trickier is that terrorist groups have long known that the US and others eavesdrop on their conversations and chatter. Terrorist knowledge of US eavesdropping practices creates the condition for a perfect set up for deception. It also makes warnings based primarily on that intelligence evidence unpersuasive.
“Adding to its already rich set of capabilities for business analyst-driven predictive analytics, BIRT Analytics 4.2 sports three new advanced features: Association Rules for detecting purchase patterns over time (for instance in grocery receipts by and across customer segments); Decision Tree, which allows prediction of outcomes based on decision paths; and Campaign Workflow to enable you to effectively execute campaigns based on the analysis, and set up a process to improve them based on analyzing the results.”
While we have extremely high hopes for this new edition of BIRT, we are aware that it’s a long, hard climb to the top of the analytics mountain. Personally, we think organizations like Oracle and Sinequa do a better job. We are patiently waiting to watch BIRT burst to the top of the charts, but know that it might never happen. Such is the world of analytics, be warned.
The next two years will be marked more by power vacuums and gaps than by a reassuring graceful degradation of the world order or by the rise of new power constellations. For this reason it is necessary to change the traditional geographic subdivision still built around the borders of nation states into a new vision more adapted to present and future realities. In fact one should conceive global relationships as wide area geopolitical and geoeconomic networks (i.e. geonetworks) crisscrossed by shaping flows.1
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The Pacific Geonetwork is dominated by the shift of the strategic centre of gravity towards the Chinese Sea that is the focus of acute maritime controversies. The backdrop is provided by the ambiguous and controversial bond between China and the United States, who are interdependent through the dynamics of the economic global crisis. The banking sector is a particularly critical area because on one hand the US banks are still very vulnerable to higher interest rates (no stress tests have been carried out regarding this emergence) and because the US shadow financial system is practically still unregulated, with serious consequences on national debt as security risk. On the other the Chinese shadow lending system risks to cause another financial crisis with €1,4 billion outstanding wealth manage ment products. There is a serious recovery effort by the USA in the Pacific Ocean, but for the time being military action will be ruled out (Korean crises apart, which remain a serious concern) because the whole American continent is witnessing major political reorganization in all leading countries (USA, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil).
The Indian Geonetwork is characterised by a strategic China-India rivalry that is moving away from the traditional confrontation along the mountainous arc of Himalaya; the fight for influence is now centred on increased air-sea presence in the Indian Ocean, despite the fact that Washington is the dominant naval power. At the same time a fluid relationship between China, India and the USA is emerging around a tangle of rather converging interests that could isolate Pakistan in the medium term, once the military part of the intervention in Afghanistan will end. The country itself will concentrate more on its internal transition after the 2013 parliamentary polls in May.
Earlier this week I had a go at Visualizing The Global Terror Database using Gephi. Three weeks ago I laid hands on a license for Sentinel Visualizer a law enforcement/intelligence grade link analysis and data visualization tool. Today I had some broken time and in between a stream of phone calls I managed to get a little of the Global Terrorism Database into SV, and I like the results.
I started with Egypt.
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Clicking the plus sign adds related links. I find it a bit puzzling that a database like this lumps Gaza and the West Bank into one category. They don’t share a geographic boundary. They don’t share a government. There is some overlap between the sources of trouble in each location, but Hamas and Fatah do not spoon very often. Looking at things from a geospatial perspective this is an incorrect aggregation.
At last week's annual summit of the Organization of American States, Latin American leaders distanced themselves from the United States' drug policies and agreed to consider the widespread legalization of marijuana.
The OAS summit “was really a tipping point for this movement” to end the war on drugs, said Pedro Abramovay, a campaign director for Avaaz, a global nonprofit group that has petitioned the OAS to liberalize its drug policies.
The move comes as Uruguay debates a bill to legalize the production and sale of pot (it is already legal there for personal use) and as Chile considers decriminalizing it. Latin American leaders also have kept a close eye on how Colorado and Washington, having legalized marijuana, will go about regulating its consumption.
At the summit, which wrapped up on Friday in Antigua, Guatemala, delegates reviewed a recent OAS study that explores a range of options for a new regional drug policy that might include legalizing or decriminalizing cannabis, and even abandoning the fight against the coca production in some areas. “Never before has a multilateral organization engaged in such an inclusive and intellectually legitimate analysis of drug policy options,” Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said in a statement. The delegates agreed to create a high-level commission to debate the study and make policy suggestions.
Identifying user sentiment has become one of the most powerful analytic tools provided by text processing companies, and Bitext’s integrative software approach is making sentiment analysis available to companies seeking to capitalize on its benefits while avoiding burdensome implementation costs. A few years ago, Lexalytics merged with Infonics. Since that time, Lexalytics has been marketing aggressively to position the company as one of the leaders in sentiment analysis. Exalead also offered sentiment analysis functionality several years ago. I recall a demonstration which generated a report about a restaurant which provided information about how those writing reviews of a restaurant expressed their satisfaction.
Today vendors of enterprise search systems have added “sentiment analysis” as one of the features of their systems. The phrase “sentiment analysis” usually appears cheek-by-jowl with “customer relationship management,” “predictive analytics,” and “business intelligence.” My view is that the early text analysis vendors such as Trec participants in the early 2000’s recognized that key word indexing was not useful for certain types of information retrieval tasks. Go back and look at the suggestions for the benefit of sentiment functions within natural language processing, and you will see that the idea is a good one but it has taken a decade or more to become a buzzword. (See for example, Y. Wilks and M. Stevenson, “The Grammar of Sense: Using Part-of-Speech Tags as a First Step in Semantic Disambiguation, Journal of Natural Language Engineering,1998, Number 4, pages 135–144.)
A six week course using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, concept maps, Personal Brain, and synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter
Cost for individuals is 300 dollars US or 500 dollars if employer reimburses — via Paypal. 250 for graduates of Rheingold U courses ($200 if you've taken two courses, etc.) Class cohort limited to 30 learners. If you are interested in signing up, contact howard@rheingold.com to reserve a spot.
