Information Operations (IO) – Page 381 – Public Intelligence Blog

I have no idea whether this is real or not, but the idea is certainly neat… advancing the idea of the tricorder, the universal instrument the heroes of Star Trek always had with them…

Buyer beware – it could be one of those things that get funded never to be heard of again. If it's real, we will know fairly soon. A few months of wait.

Next Big Future Thing

$250 handheld laser spectrometer food scaner will connect to your smartphone and servers in the cloud to tell you what allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, ingredients are in your food

Continue reading “Sepp Hasslberger: Hand-Held Ingredient Scanner”

2013/12/242013/12/24

Howard Rheingold: Information Overload

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency

I've scooped before about Ann Blair's book of pre-modern info-overload — and what was done about. This is a nice short musing about today's information overload discourse.

Information Overload, Past and Present

Dan Cohen

The end of this year has seen much handwringing over the stress of information overload: the surging, unending streams, the inexorable decline of longer, more intermittent forms such as blogs, the feeling that our online presence is scattered and unmanageable. This worry spike had me scurrying back to Ann Blair’s terrific history of pre-modern information stress, Too Much to Know. Blair notes how every era has dealt with similar feelings, and how people throughout the ages have come up with different solutions:

. . . . . . . .

Blair identifies four “S’s of text management” from the past that we still use today: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing. She also notes the history of alternative solutions to information overload that are the equivalent of deleting one’s Twitter account: Descartes and other philosophers, for instance, simply deciding to forget the library so they could start anew. Other to-hell-with-it daydreams proliferated too:

Read full post.

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2013/12/242013/12/24

Berto Jongman: Bits, Bytes, & Stuff

Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency, Peace Intelligence

A Special Tribute to Gandhi:

In my view, four aspects of Gandhi's legacy remain relevant, not just to India, but to the world.

First, non-violent resistance to unjust laws and/or authoritarian governments.

Second, the promotion of inter-faith understanding and religious tolerance.

Third, an economic model that does not rape or pillage nature.

Fourth, courtesy in public debate and transparency in one's public dealings.

Ramachandra Guha on why Gandhi remains globally relevant

Other Links Today:

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2013/12/242013/12/24

NIGHTWATCH: Sub-Sahara Subversion

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, IO Deeds of War

Special comment: For reasons that are not clear, many of the governments in Sub-Saharan Africa have been destabilized a year or so after the catastrophe of the Arab Spring uprisings. Countries in stress include Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Congo Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, South Sudan and Somalia. These readily come to mind, but there are others, no doubt.

Sub-Saharan African has not experienced this extent of violent internal unrest since 1960.

2013/12/232014/07/01

Hamilton Bean: The Paradox of Open Source: An Interview with Douglas J. Naquin with Letter from Robert Steele

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Peace Intelligence

The Paradox of Open Source: An Interview with Douglas J. Naquin

Click above to buy the article (encouraged).

International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence

Volume 27, Issue 1, 2014

PDF (16 Pages): Bean Interview of Naquin Clean

Letter from Robert Steele

PDF (3 Pages): IJIC Steele on Bean-Naquin As Published

Full Text of Letter Below the Fold

Continue reading “Hamilton Bean: The Paradox of Open Source: An Interview with Douglas J. Naquin with Letter from Robert Steele”

2013/12/232013/12/29

Steve Aftergood: Orgs ask DNI to Preserve Access to World News Connection — Comment on OSC in AF by Robert Steele

Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

ORGS ASK DNI TO PRESERVE ACCESS TO WORLD NEWS CONNECTION

More than a dozen professional societies and public interest groups wrote to the Director of National Intelligence last week to ask him to preserve public access to foreign news reports gathered, translated and published by the Open Source Center and marketed to subscribers through the NTIS World News Connection.

The CIA, which manages the Open Source Center for the intelligence community, intends to terminate public access to the World News Connection at the end of this month. (CIA Halts Public Access to Open Source Service, Secrecy News, October 8.)

Among other things, the groups said that this move is inconsistent with the President's Open Government National Action Plan.

Continue reading “Steve Aftergood: Orgs ask DNI to Preserve Access to World News Connection — Comment on OSC in AF by Robert Steele”

2013/12/232013/12/23

Stephen E. Arnold: Big Data Falls Down…Way Down…

Commerce, Idiocy, IO Impotency

Big Data Fans: The Nitty Gritty

Love talking about Big Data? I recommend doing a bit of reading. I found “What I Learned from 2 Years of Data Sciencing” refreshing. Quotes I noted were:

With reference to Big Data projects where the author worked: “None of these projects gained traction within the company and became abandoned.”
With reference to the work required: “Much of the efforts spent for those projects were in getting the right data into the right shape.”
“Little did I know that we’ll be cleaning and shaping data for most of my second year at uSwitch.”
“In practice, I was just cleaning and shaping data.”
“Figuring out the right work to do is one of the most difficult tasks for a data science team. It doesn’t help with the fact that the data science role is so vague.”
“Figuring out where to devote our time and effort is not as easy as it sounds.”
“Unless someone or something can act on the data, results can only satisfy intellectual curiosity. A business can’t survive on funding people to carry out academic studies forever.”
“If cleaning vast amount of data, being clueless as to what to do, and debating with colleagues sound like a challenge that you want to take on, I know a company in London that’s looking for a data scientist!”

Is there a message about the nuts and bolts of data? Is analytics repeating the sins of the first enterprise search vendors? It is so much easier to sell sizzle than focus on the basics like figuring out what’s important and getting valid data. Let’s just take the easy path seems to be one risk for analytics cheerleaders.

Stephen E Arnold, December 22, 2013

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