Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 1413 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/12/022014/12/01

Stephen E. Arnold: Finding Books — the Failure of Amazon, Google, and Commercial Catalogs — Findability Zero…

Three or four years ago I described what I called “the book findability” problem. The audience was a group of confident executives trying to squeeze money from an old school commercial database model. Here’s how the commercial databases worked in 1979.

. . . . . .

What the write up triggered was the complete and utter failure of indexing services to make an attempt to locate, index, and provide a pointer to books regardless of form. The baloney about indexing “all” information is shown to be a toothless dragon. The failure of the Google method and the flaws of the Amazon, Library of Congress, and commercial database providers is evident.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Finding Books — the Failure of Amazon, Google, and Commercial Catalogs — Findability Zero…”

2014/12/01

Patrick Meier: Use of Social Media to Anticipate Human Mobility and Resilience During Disasters

Advanced Cyber/IO

Using Social Media to Anticipate Human Mobility and Resilience During Disasters

The analysis of cell phone data can already be used to predict mobility patterns after major natural disasters. Now, a new peer-reviewed scientific study suggests that travel patterns may also be predictable using tweets generated following large disasters. In “Quantifying Human Mobility Perturbation and Resilience in Hurricane Sandy,” co-authors Qi Wang and John Taylor analyze some 700,000 geo-tagged tweets posted by ~53,000 individuals as they moved around over the course of 12 days. Results of the analysis confirm that “Sandy did impact the mobility patterns of individuals in New York City,” but this “perturbation was surprisingly brief and the mobility patterns encouragingly resilient. This resilience occurred even in the large-scale absence of mobility infrastructure.”

Read full post.

2014/12/01

Berto Jongman: UN Report – USA Tops in Torture & Police Violence

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Government, Military, Officers Call

Being read in Europe.

UN Report Documents Torture, Police Violence in US

EXTRACT

While this remains a closed book to the American political establishment, the report underscores the seamless connection between military violence overseas and militarized police violence at home — though its criticisms are couched largely in racial terms.

2014/12/012014/12/01

Stephen E. Arnold: Search is Dead — and Search “Experts” are the Walking Dead

IO Impotency

Enterprise Search: Confusing Going to Weeds with Being Weeds

I seem to run into references to the write up by a “expert”. I know the person is an expert because the author says:

As an Enterprise Search expert, I get a lot of questions about Search and Information Architecture (IA).

The source of this remarkable personal characterization is “Prevent Enterprise Search from going to the Weeds.” Spoiler alert: I am on record as documenting that enterprise search is at a dead end, unpainted, unloved, and stuck on the margins of big time enterprise information applications. For details, read the free vendor profiles at www.xenky.com/vendor-profiles or, if you can find them, read one of my books such as The New Landscape of Search.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Search is Dead — and Search “Experts” are the Walking Dead”

2014/12/01

SchwartzReport: Time Cloak Encrypts Information

Advanced Cyber/IO

Here is the latest on Electronic Communications trend, and it is pretty magical.

Time cloak used to hide messages in laser light

A “time cloak” that conceals events rather than objects can hide secret messages through a trick of light, making information invisible to all but the intended recipient.

2014/11/28

Sepp Hasslberger: Graphene Revolutionizes Energy

05 Energy, 12 Water

Membranes of graphene – single atom layer carbon “sheets” – have unexpected and rather unusual properties that seem set to enable several new technologies

Scientists predict green energy revolution after incredible new graphene discoveries

The breakthrough raises the prospect of extracting hydrogen fuel from air and burning it as a carbon-free source of energy in a fuel cell to produce electricity and water with no damaging waste products.

2014/11/28

GMO (Monsanto) Destroying World’s Water (Acquifers)

01 Agriculture, 07 Health, 12 Water

Is GMO Farming Poisoning The World’s Drinking Water?

Monsanto’s Herbicide Linked To Groundwater Contamination

In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry last year, evidence surfaced that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the Monsanto’s patented herbicide Roundup, is flowing freely into the groundwater in areas where it is being applied.¹ The researchers found that 41% of the 140 groundwater samples taken from Catalonia Spain, had levels beyond the limit of quantification – indicating that, despite the manufacturer’s claims, glyphosate herbicide does not break down rapidly in the environment, and is accumulating there in concerning quantities.