
Fake Content: SEO or Tenure Desperation
Bottom Line Up Front: Indexing systems have a spotty record of identifying weaponized, shaped, or distorted information.
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Search Engines Cannot Identify Fake Information”

Fake Content: SEO or Tenure Desperation
Bottom Line Up Front: Indexing systems have a spotty record of identifying weaponized, shaped, or distorted information.
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Search Engines Cannot Identify Fake Information”

The more research I do on GMOs, the less the immediate problem seems to be the seeds, and the more it seems to center on the toxins used to protect the seeds, and the costs associated with this industrial chemical model of agriculture. Here is the latest.
Study Shows Dramatic Correlation Between GMOs And 22 Diseases
As crops that use the herbicide glyphosate rise, so do a wide range of diseases.
EXTRACT
The deep corruption of government is putting the health of the American people at serious risk.
The research highlighted below, “Genetically engineered crops, glyphosate and the deterioration of health in the United States of America,” was published in The Journal of Organic Systems this September and links GMOs to 22 diseases with very high correlation.

The “Rape School”: University of Virginia
Bottom Line Up Front: The frat boys rape at college – regarding it as a “perk” of their social status – and are confident in knowing they will be protected at the highest levels of the Elite school from any accountability. They later go on to rape – both figuratively and literally – the organizations and public they are supposed to serve. Violently raping women at college “trains” elitist males especially – it’s part of their real education – in later learning to adjust to bombing and incinerating and destroying countries and entire peoples, or causing immense harm to their workers and communities in many ways. Allow them to do something very bad, such as rape, then it’s much less of a jump for them to do worse in large public arenas.

I was glad to respond to an invitation to write “Beyond Data Monitoring,” a Background Paper for the UN International Expert Advisory Group (IEAG) on the Data Revolution, co-chaired by Robin Li of Baidu, which is good, with Open Source represented by Tim “algorithms rule” O'Reilly, which is bad. Although the paper gained no traction with the intended recipients, it was sent by other means to the special assistant to the Secretary-General, and has taken on a life of its own elsewhere. Building on the earlier Earth Intelligence Network concepts, and together with my forthcoming article on Applied Collective Intelligence (Spanda Journal, December 2014), this paper is the summary of my old thinking.
Today I begin new thinking, with a tip of the hat to Daniel Mezick among others — I feel blessed to have connected with so many brilliant information technologists over the years, including hackers around the world and with Stephen E. Arnold, CEO of Arnold IT, always in the forefront as my most trusted observer of the hollowness of industrial-era IT. Below is my emergent vision challenge for the future of public free open information sharing and sense-making. I am seeking contributing thoughts that will be acknowledged here as this develops.
Continue reading “Robert Steele: Reflections on the Next Data Revolution”

Chasing Non Swimmers from the Data Lake
If you are one of the Big Data believers, you will find “Clearing Up Muddied Waters in the ‘Data Lakes’” a reminder about the plasticity of concepts and their connotations. The write up addresses a clever phrase used to describe a storage pool into which
You store raw data at its most granular level so that you can perform any ad-hoc aggregation at any time. The classic data warehouse and data mart approaches do not support this.
The write up points out that the original notion of a data lake has been prodded, stretched, and pulled. Not surprisingly, after the verbal chiropractic, data lake is just not its old self.
Who are the perpetrators of this conceptual improvement? A “real” journalist and—no big surprise—several Big Data experts laboring away at a mid tier consulting firm.
So what? The coiner of the phrase points me and other readers to the original write up about data lakes here. Worth revisiting? Will the “real” journalist or the mid tier consultants likely to read the source document? I would guess not.
Stephen E Arnold, November 22, 2014
Phi Beta Iota: CTOs did not get to be CTOs by actually understanding the guts of Information Technology — they are decades from actually having programmed code and they have little understanding of the totality of the digital and analog worlds, of holistic analytics, true cost economics (for which databases generally do not exist), and a limited understanding of open source everything engineering and why that matters in terms of affordability, interoperability at the code and datum levels, and of course scale — crossing all boundaries and borders. The myths and malpractice that most CTOs accept about Big Data are quite astonishing. Below is the key quote from Jamie Dixon's 2010 blog post that created the Data Lake concept (which is as far removed from Oracle or any other structured “big data” repository as one can get):
If you think of a datamart as a store of bottled water – cleansed and packaged and structured for easy consumption – the data lake is a large body of water in a more natural state. The contents of the data lake stream in from a source to fill the lake, and various users of the lake can come to examine, dive in, or take samples.
See Also:

American voters, I believe, voted based on fear, peer group pressure, racism, and fantasy. Here is a comparison of the voters' agenda, and the agenda of the Republican leadership for whom they just voted.
NBC/WSJ Poll Reveals American's Priorities; Guess How they Match With GOP Lawmakers' Priorities
The new NBC/WSJ poll conducted November 14-17 provides a post election snap shot of American voter expectations, including their priorities for actions Congress should take. Can you guess how they match up with GOP Lawmaker’s priorities? It’s a real shocker folks.
The People’s agenda for Congress:
Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Public vs. Corporate Priorities”

Physical space and ‘Occupy’ tactics: a new trend in civil resistance?
Given the importance of broad, diverse, and sustained participation, it remains to be seen whether movements have been doing themselves a favor or a disservice by allowing themselves to be defined by the site of occupation or by the tactic itself, and not by political and social claims on behalf of those whom they represent.
Phi Beta Iota: Occupation is a means of demanding a specific change (this is where Occupy failed — it has no specific change to demand). The only specific change needed to restore the integrity of any government is Electoral Reform — all eleven points, not the half-baked “get money out of politics false panacea.
See Also:
CounterPunch: Where is Jesse Ventura When You Need Him?