The article titled How Semantic Search is Killing the Keyword on iMedia heralds the end of keyword-driven search in place of semantic search, or the user’s intention. Based mainly on Google’s work on the Knowledge Graph, a web of information that attempts to connect related data and provide a user with answers to questions they might not have known to ask. The article goes so far as to call keyword-centered content a thing of the past.
A study of how older teenagers use social media has found that Facebook is “not just on the slide, it is basically dead and buried” and is being replaced by simpler social networks such as Twitter and Snapchat, an expert has claimed.
Young people now see the site as “uncool” and keep their profiles live purely to stay in touch with older relations, among whom it remains popular.
Prof Daniel Miller of University College London, an anthropologist who worked on the European Union-funded research, wrote in an article for the academic news website The Conversation: “Mostly they feel embarrassed even to be associated with it.
“This year marked the start of what looks likely to be a sustained decline of what had been the most pervasive of all social networking sites.
“Young people are turning away in their droves and adopting other social networks instead, while the worst people of all, their parents, continue to use the service.
“Where once parents worried about their children joining Facebook, the children now say it is their family that insists they stay there to post about their lives. Parents have worked out how to use the site and see it as a way for the family to remain connected.
“In response, the young are moving on to cooler things.
“What appears to be the most seminal moment in a young person's decision to leave Facebook was surely that dreaded day your mum sends you a friend request.”
… the quite predictable case of data overload and why the most serious 4th Amendment breach relates to the statistical problem of ‘data culling' algorithms* generating large numbers of “false positives” and thereby wiping out the principle of “probable cause.”
William Binney, a former NSA coder behind some of the surveillance program’s algorithms, is warning that the agency’s interest in mass surveillance is coming at a grave cost in efficiency.
While the agency sees value in taking in any data it can get, “just in case,” sorting through a stockpile of unrelated data is soaking up so many resources that what relevant data they might have is getting less focus.
Binney’s comments mirror warnings in some of the Snowden documents, which show the NSA is also concern about their data collection programs far outpacing their ability to process that data.
Indeed, in March some NSA analysts were asking for permission to collect less data with some of the programs, saying that they are collecting a lot of data with “relatively small intelligence value.”
Bryan Alexander takes off from Jane Hart's personal knowledge management routine to describe his own method of handling information overload, which he calls “information wrangling.” He works through channels and sources daily, reflects, and shares. Alexander details each of these processes in his blog.
Jane Hart describes her daily personal knowledge management (or PKM) routine. It’s an inspiring yet practical workflow for information curation. Or information wrangling, as I like to call it:
I like this framework for various purposes, starting with how it describes a way of handling information overload. It’s also a good model for helping people transition from an analog (print, in-person) set of habits to one including the digital world.
Inspired by this, I’d like to describe my own.
Every day I work through a series of channels and sources (Hart’s “Seek” category), reflect on what I find (“Sense”), then share those reflections (“Share”). I’ll break it down into three aspects, but keep in mind that there’s a lot of back-and-forth across them.
With the Internet it is easier than ever to plagiarize by either stealing or buying someone’s work. The Internet is a double edge sword, however, because there are tools available to people to check a work for veracity and originality. Unless you are a teacher or in some form of academia, you might not be aware of the Web sites that are plagiarism checkers. Through our own research, we have complied a list:
Plagiarisma—Available in different languages with other useful features and downloadable apps.
Copyscape—Has the unique feature, Copysentry to allow users to monitor plagiarism on the Web.
Plagium—Like many of the other checkers, but has a beta version to check social media.
There is an expression that says, “there are no original ideas anymore.” New ideas spring up all the time, but it takes a lot more work to create something new than it does to make something from scratch. Plagiarism does not benefit anyone, especially the stealer. Use the plagiarism tools to improve your work quality and come up with something new.
South Sudan is at the brink of civil war and societal collapse
History is just one of those hard things to ignore, especially in South Sudan.
In 2011, the U.S. midwifed the creation of a new nation, South Sudan. Though at the time Obama invoked the words of Dr. Martin Luther King speaking about Ghana (“I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment”) in officially recognizing the country, many were more focused on the underlying U.S. motives,
For Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, his team broke down data silos and moved all the data to a cloud repository. The team built Narwhal, a shared data store interface for all of the campaigns’ application. Narwhal was dubbed “Obama’s White Whale,” because it is almost a mythical technology that federal agencies have been trying to develop for years. While Obama may be hanging out with Queequag and Ishmael, there is a more viable solution for the cloud says GCN’s article, “Big Metadata: 7 Ways To Leverage Your Data In the Cloud.”
Data silo migration may appear to be a daunting task, but it is not impossible to do. The article states:
