The article titled Codd’s Relational Vision – Has NoSQL Come Full Circle on opensource connections relates the history of relational databases and applies their lessons to the NoSQL databases so popular today. The article walks through the simplest databases that followed the hierarchical model and then into generalized databases. The article then delves into the work of Edgar F. Codd himself:
The in-depth article part is a little more complex. The company is positioning this change as helpful to those 10 percent of users Google says are after more than just a quick answer. While they do promise to include “up to” three in-depth articles and a link to pre-load “up to” ten more, these results are now pushed to the bottom of the page.
Writer Jennifer Slegg tells us:
“In-depth articles previously appeared in the middle of the search results. This update should help appease those webmasters who are concerned about organic search results being pushed lower and lower on the page, while still giving the searchers the information they want….
This change is currently available in English on Google.com, however they plan to expand the feature to more countries and languages in the future. Not all search results will have in-depth articles, but the program is expanding with more topics, particularly things that are related to current events. Google promises that alongside reputable and established news sources like the Washington Post and The Guardian, readers will also find in-depth content from smaller blogs and publications.”
This being a Search Engine Watch article, it does pass on Google’s advice for webmasters hoping to reach these users who are after comprehensive content. If you belong that slice of inquisitive searchers, just remember to scroll down and click through for the good stuff. Of course, it would make things easier for the search giant if that pesky ten percent would just get with the program and take what Google offers. Maybe someday.
Syria: President Bashar Asad Monday called for a battle against Wahhabism, the political and religious theology embraced by the Saudi Arabian government that backs the Sunni uprising against his regime.
“President Assad said that extremists and Wahhabi thought distort the real Islam, which is tolerant,” state news agency SANA reported. He underlined the role of men of religion in fighting against Wahhabi thought, which is foreign to our societies, according to Asad.
Wahhabism is an ultra-conservative Muslim tradition, which is predominant in Saudi Arabia and whose intolerant precepts govern Saudi religious, civilian and political life. It is a sect of Sunni Islam, whose leaders profess has no sects.
Truth Finding on the Deep Web: Is the Problem Solved?
Xian Li, Xin Luna Dong, Kenneth Lyons, Weiyi Meng, and Divesh Srivastava.
In VLDB, 2013. [PDF][Report]
Big data integration & linkages. Xin Luna Dong and Divesh Srivastava. Tutorial in Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 6(11): 1188-1189, 2013. [ publisher site | talk slides(PPTX) ]
All is not well in the land of US spooks despite them having access to all the data on citizens that they can eat.
William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to snoop on Internet traffic around the world, has warned that the agency knows too much.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the NSA can't understand the data it has because it has too much to do anything useful with it.
Binny said that the NSA's addiction to data had made it dysfunctional and the agency is drowning in useless data.
He described an agency where analysts are swamped with so much information that they can't do their jobs effectively, and the enormous stockpile is an irresistible temptation for misuse.
His warning mirrors concerns shown in the Snowden documents. An internal briefing document in 2012 about foreign mobile phone location tracking by the agency said the efforts were “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data.
In March, some NSA analysts asked for permission to collect less data through a program called Muscular because the “relatively small intelligence value it contains does not justify the sheer volume of collection”.
Heather Linebaugh's personal account of her work on the US drone program gives one set of reasons for why that program should be stopped immediately. Another reason was given by the Prime Minister of Pakistan two days ago: the use of drones in Pakistan violates the national sovereignty of that country and is protested by almost everyone there who learn to hate Americans for doing this to their country. A third reason: unless drones are banned by an international treaty with the same seriousness that chemical warfare was banned, we may live to see the day when powers hostile to the U.S. launch drones that kill or main you, your neighbors, your children, your friends. It could happen here–and sophisticated drones could be much harder to head off than other forms of attack. And the source of drone attacks may be hard to identify as drones start to become an accepted weapon by many countries, including small dictatorships that will eventually be ovethrown (some by people who wish to strike back at the US for supporting their repressive governments, as for example Egyptian Muslims watching as the US refuses to call the recent coup a coup so that we can still fund the military dictatorship which is every day proclaiming some new assault on freedm and democracy of the Egyptian people).
Few of the politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue how it actually works (and doesn't)
Heather Linebaugh
Guardian, U.K. Dec. 29th
Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them some questions. I'd start with: “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?” And: “How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Or even more pointedly: “How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicle] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?”
