Researching symptoms and health concerns on Wikipedia will lead you to false information most of the time, scientists in the U.S. say.
Scientists compared health information from the online encyclopedia with peer-reviewed medical research. They concluded that 90 percent of the site's health entries they studied contained false information on diseases including diabetes, lung cancer, heart disease and depression, the BBC reported.
Researchers said their findings, recently published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, should encourage people to seek professional medical help instead of relying on the Internet.
Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, and most of the few people who are actually doing it aren't doing it all that well.
Whatever the official theme of the 2014 RSA Conference was, any one attendee will tell you the unofficial theme — the message on every banner in the place, it seemed — was “Threat Intelligence.” But threat intelligence, as it was put to me by Eric Olson of Cyveillance, is a lot like teenage sex: Everyone is talking about it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, and most of the few people who are actually doing it aren't doing it all that well.
There are lots of fashionable things to say about intelligence, and everyone gets all… cool when they discuss it, as if they have some dark, national secret that you don't have. Balderdash!
Let's cut through the mystery in two important ways:
Since Google ditched Google Reader, RSS has receded from many people's awareness. Yet RSS and versatile RSS readers such as NetVibes continue to exist, and if you want to learn information skills to support attention skills, you can do no better than Dawn Foster, who can tell you simply and step-by-step how to arrange for the information you want to come to you, and to filter out the information you don't want.
Summary: The key to cutting information overload is to more efficiently find the data that you want among the data that you don’t care about. I wanted to share some of the techniques that I use to hack and filter my RSS feed to prioritize relevant information.
The current academic publishing model has been failing for some time, but it seems things are worse than previously thought. The model is broken: professors have to publish to be tenured, but they have to pay to be published. But the main market for academic publishing is academia, the very employers of these same professors. So the world of education is paying for academic publishing both coming and going. Furthermore, the pressure to publish and achieve tenure can be so overwhelming that everyone starts looking for some relief, or even a shortcut. The National Post has exposed a deeper problem in their article, “It’s the ‘Worst’ Science Paper Ever — Filled with Plagiarism and Garble — and Journals are Clamouring to Publish It.”
In the previous article, Cyber Intelligence Collection Operations, the types of collection and the types of data that could be obtained were discussed. At the end of the discussion I pointed out that analysts must be critical of the data they evaluate as at any time it could be compromised.
Specifically, adversary actors could employ counterintelligence or deception type techniques to push analysts to draw wrong conclusions or discount the data entirely. In this article we will cover this topic of Cyber Counterintelligence (CCI) and discuss its two main branches: Offensive CCI and Defensive CCI.
Hunter Newby is the CEO of Allied Fiber, a carrier neutral provider of dark fiber with a national footprint addressing the lack of accessible dark fiber in the market by making it available for long term lease. He is a twelve year veteran of the telecom networking industry and has built a depth of creative and management experience and expertise in multiple disciplines within the field ranging from sales, marketing and technical aspects to network engineering and raising capital.
ROBERT STEELE: I encountered Hunter Newby in NYC where he was the opening speaker at LIBTCH NYC (I was the closing speaker). In all the years I have been focusing on cyber as the flip side of intelligence, I cannot think of a more energizing and inspiring package of intelligence and integrity combined with a concept I did not properly understand: dark fiber. Understood in Hunter's terms, this also changes our understanding of net neutrality — communities can opt-in to direct access to this dark fibre, and by-pass all intermediaries with enormous cost savings and bandwidth amplification.
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We are going to start following this. Dark fiber is the carrier-neutralphysical layer that is in theory without limit, which Hunter has very brilliantly arranged to run within the railroad right of ways across America. This is “root” for a Smart Nation on the cyber side. This is also what does not exist as a public or universal service. Below is the briefing he presented, followed by a selection of particularly interesting columns he has published before. A complete list of his prior columns is here.
Are we really facing a STEM crisis? Or is this crisis as bogus as the missile gap that started the space race over 50 years ago? It's time to cut through the hyperbole and take a hard look.
EXTRACT
In our desire to heighten technical skills and achieve scientific hegemony, we lost sight of the incredible value of a well-rounded education. And this loss has had a debilitating effect on society today.
Hal Berghel is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he has previously served as Director of the School of Computer Science and Associate Dean of the College of Engineering. He is also the founding Director of the Identity Theft and Financial Fraud Research and Operations Center. His research interests are wide-ranging within the binary and digital ecosystem, ranging from logic programming and expert systems, relational database design, algorithms for non-resolution based inferencing, approximate string matching, digital watermarking and steganography, and digital security (including both computer and network forensics).
