If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.
Cyprus: For the record. Cypriot lawmakers 19 March overwhelmingly rejected an EU bailout proposal that would have required a tax on deposits in the country's banks. Thousands of demonstrators burst into cheers and applause as their MPs on Tuesday voted down the EU bailout plan aimed at rescuing Cyprus from bankruptcy.
The Finance Minister flew to Moscow to seek Russian assistance to prevent insolvency by Cypriot banks. EU officials reportedly are stunned that the EU bailout scheme was rejected because it would have been paid mainly by Russian depositors in Cypriot banks.
Comment: The action of parliament averted widespread street disorders, at least for now. The Russians or Russian firms have several options for recapitalizing Cyprus as a banking center. If they decline, however, Cypriot banks would not be able to cover deposits, according to analysis in the Financial Times. Cyprus might eventually become the first EU member to be ejected, but for now Nicosia is not burning.
Meanwhile leaders in other European states with weak economies reassured bank depositors that they deposits were “sacred.”
If the details about this deal are true, it could be a game-changer for the enterprise cloud market.
That's because Amazon Web Services will help the CIA build a “private cloud” filled with technologies like big data, reports Konkel, citing unnamed sources.
The CIA is pretty closed-lipped about its business, as spies are apt to be. This is no exception. It won't confirm the deal or comment on it, so details are sketchy. But the contract is expected to be for a “private” cloud, which is not what AWS is known for.
AWS is the largest “public” cloud provider. In general, the term “private cloud” means using cloud computing technologies in a company's own data center. Public clouds are in hosted facilities, where the hardware is shared with many users. Sharing the hardware saves money.
From LIGNET (Langley Intelligence Group Network), a local commercial intel firm that trades on the perception, valid or otherwise, that it has ties to CIA.
After just over one year in power, North Korea’s novice leader, 30-year old Kim Jong Un, has dashed hopes that he will change course from the brinkmanship-style policies pursued by his late father, Kim Jong Il. For the first time in decades, U.S. intelligence and defense analysts believe the threat of an outbreak of significant hostilities on the Korean peninsula is a distinct possibility. How would a potential conflict play out? While there is little doubt that North Korea would lose, the consequences for the region would be dire, with casualties potentially in the hundreds of thousands, if not more.
Tensions and the risk of conflict have escalated precipitously on the Korean peninsula over the last year. In addition to conducting a successful long-range ballistic missile and a third nuclear test, North Korea has ramped up, even by its own standards, its bellicose rhetoric.
Inequality has been rising in most countries around the world, but it has played out in different ways across countries and regions. The United States, it is increasingly recognized, has the sad distinction of being the most unequal advanced country, though the income gap has also widened to a lesser extent, in Britain, Japan, Canada and Germany. Of course, the situation is even worse in Russia, and some developing countries in Latin America and Africa. But this is a club of which we should not be proud to be a member.
Some big countries — Brazil, Indonesia and Argentina — have become more equal in recent years, and other countries, like Spain, were on that trajectory until the economic crisis of 2007-8.
By Joe McKendrick | March 19, 2013, 4:00 AM PDT
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Businesses may be seeking to compete on analytics, but it’s often difficult for business decision-makers to get their heads around data.
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Tom Davenport, visiting professor at Harvard University and co-author of the seminal work Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, about the difficulties of converting to an analytics-driven culture. Davenport, who is also co-founder and research director of the International Institute for Analytics, and a senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics, is working on a new book, dicussing on how analytics need to be better communicated to business decision-makers. He shared some of the thinking behind his forthcoming work:
Q: BI and analytics vendors have been coming out with all sorts of graphic tools — dashboards, balanced scorecards and so on — for years. Do we need more than a nice splashy presentation on the tool to communicate analytics?
TD: We’ve all grown up on pie charts and bar charts or whatever, but there are probably at least tens, if not hundreds of alternative approaches to visual analytics. Narratives are a pretty good way to convey information in the past, so maybe we should be converting our data and analysis into stories. People are starting to do that more. Most analysts were unfortunately not trained in how you communicate effectively about analytics, so we’ve got a long way to go in terms of doing a better job of that.
Q: More and more data is flowing through enterprises. Is it a challenge to get C-level executives interested in turning this data into analytics?
TD: Not for all applications. Because increasingly people are feeding data into computers and the results go into another computer, and the decisions are getting more automated. Any time you have a human involved, it’s important to try to help them extricate the meaning of the data and analysis. And there a variety of ways to do that. Historically, we haven’t been too terribly good at it, the quantitative people among us.
Prison Profiteers Are Neo-Slaveholders and Solitary Is Their Weapon of Choice 
