The article on PRNewswire titled Attivio and Quant5 Partner to Bring Fast and Reliable Predictive Customer Analytics to the Cloud explains the partnership between the two analytics innovators. Aimed at producing information from data without the hassle of a team of data scientists, the partnership promises to effectively create insights that companies will be able to act on. The partnership responds to the growing frustration some companies face with gleaning useful information from huge amounts of data. The article explains,
Public pressure has helped push back against a bill in Congress that would have torn up the negotiated agreement with Iran by imposing yet more sanctions on the people of that country. The people of this country are not eager for another war, and have not accepted that sanctions lead away from war rather than into it.
But supporters and opponents of that bill tend to agree that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and that this program must be stopped by one means or another. This underlying assumption is not supported by any evidence and never has been. We've heard it propounded for over thirty years, and the repetition has had its intended effect, but any evidence at all has always been lacking. A belief without evidence is a myth.
Iran has a nuclear energy program because the U.S. and European governments wanted Iran to have a nuclear energy program. The U.S. nuclear industry took out full-page ads in U.S. publications bragging about Iran's support for such an enlightened and progressive energy source. The U.S. was pushing for major expansion of Iran's nuclear program just before the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Since the Iranian revolution, the U.S. government has opposed Iran's nuclear energy program and misled the public about the existence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran. This story is well-told in Gareth Porter's new book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, and by Porter is his upcoming interview this week on Talk Nation Radio.
The U.S. assisted Saddam Hussein's Iraq in a war against Iran in the 1980s, in which Iraq attacked Iran with chemical weapons. Iran's religious leaders had declared that chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons must not be used, even in retaliation. And they were not. Iran could have responded to Iraqi chemical attacks with chemical attacks of its own and chose not to.
Iran is committed to not using or possessing weapons of mass destruction. The results of inspections bear that out. Iran's willingness to put restrictions on its legal nuclear energy program — a willingness present both before and after sanctions — bears that out. Inspections should continue. All steps should be taken to move the world toward safe and sustainable energy sources. But can we drop the idea that Iran wants to nuke us?
TinyTinyRSS – an open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator designed to allow you to read news from any location while feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible
UNetbootin – creates bootable Live USB drives to Ubunto, Fedora, and other Linux distributions without burning a CD
Wagn – free open means of creating team-driven websites
Zotero – free tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research sources
“It is now six weeks since I arrived in Ecuador as part of an international team of researchers and activists that are working with the government to radically transform the nation’s economic model.
John Restakis
In what may be one of the most innovative change programs in Latin America, the administration of Rafael Correa is proposing to transition from a neo-liberal, free market economic model to what they are calling a social knowledge economy based on a combination of commons-based economics and the promotion of open knowledge systems. It’s heady stuff and the project is placing Ecuador at the forefront of global efforts to advance human knowledge as a commons and to apply this knowledge to the creation of a new economic model based on the commons, co-operative models of production, open-source systems of sharing, and free access to information.
Internet Society New York Chapter President David Solomonoff interviews Isaac Wilder and Marcus Eagan of the Free Network Foundation at the FreedomBox Hackfest at Columbia Law School NYC on Feb 18 2012
The numbers we use in development, and most of what we think of as facts, are actually estimates. It's time for a data revolution
Claire Melarned
The Guardian, 31 January 2014
You know a lot less than you think you do. Around 1.22 billion people live on less than a $1.25 (75p) day? Maybe, maybe not. Malaria deaths fell by 49% in Africa between 2000 and 2013? Perhaps. Maternal mortality in Africa fell from 740 deaths per 100,000 births in 2000 to 500 per 100,000 in 2010? Um … we're not sure.
These numbers, along with most of what we think of as facts in development, are actually estimates. We have actual numbers on maternal mortality for just 16% of all births, and on malaria for about 15% of all deaths. For six countries in Africa, there is basically no information at all.
In the absence of robust official systems for registering births and deaths, collecting health or demographic data, or the many other things that are known by governments about people in richer countries, the household survey is the foundation on which most development data is built. Numbers from the surveys are used to estimate almost all the things we think we know – from maternal mortality to school attendance to income levels. Household surveys are run by governments or by external agencies such as the World Bank, USAid or Unicef.
But it's a shaky foundation. First, to make the survey representative of the population, you need to know a lot about the population to make a good sampling frame. This knowledge comes from a population census. But only around 12 of the 49 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have held a census in the past 10 years. So there might be large population groups missing – especially in countries undergoing rapid change. There are likely to be big urban informal settlements, for example, which are not included in the most recent census, and therefore don't exist for sampling purposes. They also don't happen very often – 21 African countries haven't had a survey in the past seven years.
And they're not all done in the same way, which makes comparing countries or combining data from different countries very difficult – and illustrates how hard it is to know the “real” number. There are, for example, seven perfectly acceptable ways of asking questions in surveys about how much people eat. A recent experiment by World Bank researchers in Tanzania, comparing results from the different methods, found that estimates of how many people in the country are hungry varied from just under 20% to nearly 70%, depending on the method chosen.
