The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
34.4 Other (Own Code, Wekis, Zementis, Oracle, SPSS, etc.)
26.4 StatSoft/Statistica
25.6 R
15.7 SAS Enterprise Miner
07.4 KNIME
06.0 MatLab
04.8 RapidMiner
00.4 Rapid-Insight
Tip of the Hat to Vincent Granville at LinkedIn.
2001 Porter (US) Tools of the Trade: A Long Way to Go
1988-2009 OSINT-M4IS2 TECHINT Chronology
Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents
David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.
David McCandless draws beautiful conclusions from complex datasets — thus revealing unexpected insights into our world. Full bio and more links
Phi Beta Iota: “Mining” the soil does not go far. Actually planting, tilling, watering, and growing is much more powerful. This is one of the most compelling TED briefs we have seen. “Language of the eye” combined with “language of the mind.” All about “relative” numbers and relationships. “Let the data set change your mindset.” Art of knowledge compression. Living data in a Google document. If you visit his books at Amazon, take the time to check out the related books on data visualization that Amazon clusters for around these.
Tip of the Hat to Magnus Hultberg at LinkedIn. Also see these resources.
David McCandless' two books:
BI implementations fail because they are sold to the IT departments and not to the business users. The use case and ROI needs to be built with the business users. If that is not done, it results in:
Phi Beta Iota: For decades we have been railing against the substitution of technology for thinking; the absence of processing power and analytic desk-top tool-kits, and so on. We have also pointed out that “BI” is nothing more than data mining, that competitive intelligence ignores context, and that only commercial intelligence with a 360 view as well as historical and future forecast aspects will do. Peter Drucker said in Forbes ASAP on 28 August 1998 that we have spent the past 50 years focused on the T in IT, and need to spend the next 50 focused on the I. That is what this web site and the Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 seeking donors, are focused upon. The World Brain and Global Game, connecting all minds to all information in all languages all the time, is achievable. Paul Strassmann was the first to point out in a very credible documented way that the ROI for most IT investments in the Fortune 500 is negative to neutral. IT is not pulling its weight because IT has no strategy and no intellectual frame of reference, e.g. connecting dots to dots, dots to people, and people to people so as to achieve specified outcomes.
See Also:
Competing in the Knowledge Economy is a blog by Tim Powell, a member of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and also active at LinkedIn.
While we have always said that information costs money and intelligence makes money (we call this Information Arbitrage), we like Tim's additional emphasis on DECISION, ACTION, and VALUE, and recommend both the specific Blog entry illustrated here, and the Blog in general.
Open Sourcing U.S. Intelligence Needs
Open Source Closed
Before you get excited about joining “the OpenSource.gov community to get access to the latest open source reporting and analysis,” you should know . . . you can't. The OSC is open only to U.S. government employees, contractors, foreign liaisons and employees of the BBC Monitoring Service.
Tip of the Hat to Mario Profaca at Facebook.
See Also:
Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is… an online gaming community.
Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game. (Also related, TED talk on how gaming can make a better world).
Phi Beta Iota: Most serious analysts now understand Citation Analytics 101. It's time to move to Citation Analytics 202, and there is no better way to introduce the art of the possible than by pointing to Kevin W. Boyack, Katy Borner, and Richard Klavans (2007), “Mapping the Structure and Evolution of Chemistry Research (11th International Conference of Scientometrics and Infometrics, pp. 112-123.
There are several take-aways from this article, which is more or less the “coming out” of the Klavens-inspired infometrics field now that he has won his law-suit and has unchallenged access to all Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) access [this was one of the sources we used to win the Burundi Exercise before the Aspin-Brown Commission in 1995].
