Computational Mathematics is the heart of both Google, and Wolfram Alpha. We understand that there are competing initiatives in China that have impressed Jim Fallows, now stationed there for Atlantic Monthly and in Russia. We imagine that both India and Iran have their own approaches underway as well, all emphasizing mathematics applied to bits and bytes.
This endeavor is funded by Stephen Wolfram, who made his fortune creating mathematical models and tools that are from a different planet. His book, A New Kind of Science, is a collector's item and could one day be considered the first step toward true cyber-biological integration.
Today WolframAlpha is highlighting updates and new capabilities in the following arenas:
The ICPVTR Terrorism Database – Global Pathfinder – is a one-stop repository for information on the current and emerging terrorist threat. The database focuses on terrorism and political violence in the Asia-Pacific region – comprising of Southeast Asia, North Asia, South Asia, Central Asia and Oceania.
In addition to providing the latest information on terrorist attacks and pronouncements, Global Pathfinder also includes over a hundred terrorist training manuals, counter terrorism legislations and conventions, analytical papers on terrorist ideologies, commentaries on terrorist trends and patterns, transcripts of landmark cases, interviews with terrorists as well as photographs from different conflict zones across the world. Further, Global Pathfinder also has a huge collection of jihadi websites, the contents of which are routinely translated and analysed by our analysts.
One of the main architects of the new al-Qaeda is a man named Abu Musab al-Suri. He put down his vision for the future of jihad in a book entitled Call for Worldwide Islamic Resistance, a one-thousand six-hundred page manifesto published on the Internet in 2004.
…he sought “…to transfer the training to each house of each district in the village of every Muslim….making appropriate training materials available to more than a billion Muslims….
Celebi's thesis focuses on the use of the Internet both in general and in the case of the Kurdish group PKK. The work is strongest in its discussion of what the author calls the training subsystem, and in his explication of that system as involving more than tradecraft and being increasingly based online. This training subsystem is seen as having four core functions:
1. The training subsystem creates, intensifies and sustains the competence, commitment and the skills that the terrorists will apply to reach their goals.
2. The training subsystem not only teaches the ways and means, but also justifies them by means of intensive indoctrination.
3. The training subsystem establishes ties to the group and creates a sense of belonging.
4. The training subsystem enables knowledge to be stored inside the boundaries of the system, and facilitates its passing through generations.
In an interview with the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph, Google vice president for search products Marissa Mayer challenged the readership to “Imagine what it would be like if there was a tool built into the search engine which translated my search query into every language and then searched the entire world’s websites.” We spoke with Abe Lederman, CEO of Deep Web Technologies, a technology supplier that already offers this multilingual search.
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The bottom line: Multilingual search is not just a figment of Google’s imagination. It’s already here — you just have to dig a bit deeper to find it.
SANTA FE, N.M., Sept. 3, 2009 — Deep Web Technologies is proud to announce development of a prototype of a multilingual translation capability for clients using its federated search applications. An early prototype of multilingual searching was demonstrated to the members of the WorldWideScience Alliance in June of 2009. This new feature, when fully developed and implemented, will translate a user’s search query into the native language of the collections being searched, will translate result titles and snippets back to the user’s original language and aggregate and rank these results according to relevance. The translation process will be seamless, making it simple to search collections in multiple languages from a single search box in the native language of the user.
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Deep Web Technologies (http://www.deepwebtech.com) creates custom, sophisticated federated search solutions for clients who demand precise, accurate results. The tool of choice when needing to access the deep web, federated search performs real-time, parallel searches of multiple information sources, merging the results into one page. Serving Fortune 500 companies, the Science.gov Alliance (http://www.science.gov), the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the Dept. of Defense, Scitopia.org (http://www.scitopia.org), Nutrition.gov, WorldWideScience Alliance (http://www.worldwidescience.org) and a variety of other customers and partners, Deep Web Technologies has built a reputation as the “researcher’s choice” for its advanced, agile information discovery tools
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Walter Dorn is one of a tiny handful of truly authoritative academic observers of UN intelligence, a pioneer in his own right, and perhaps the only person who has followed UN intelligence from the Congo in the 1960's to the creation of new capabilities in Haiti and elsewhere in the 21st Century. He is the dean of UN intelligence authors. See also Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Walter Dorn.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a brilliant piece of work, precisely what we should have been doing from 1988 onwards. It is probably too late only because the US Government is incapable of a 180 degree turn that puts two Berlin Airlifts in motion, one to Afghanistan and one to Iraq, with each redirected to Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen as the process moves forward.
Edit of 20 Dec 09: This article is one of two cited by a top US flag officer speaking to COINSOC in Iraq. The other one is Reference: PK Officer View on AF.
1. We are finally getting to where geospatial and functional data can be merged in near-real-time.
2. Intelligence Online remains our only “must read”
The question that is NOT being addressed is this one: What will it take to create an infinitely scalable and drillable digital map of the Earth, using open source software and open to all, to which all manner of data in all languages can be appended, validated, and integrated?
