With a tip of the hat to MILNET, these two stories go so very well together, they had to be combined her.
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Telkom says it cannot be blamed for slow broadband services at a Durban-based company which claims a pigeon can carry its data bundles faster. . . . . . . . In total it took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds for Winston the pigeon to fly to Hillcrest and to upload the data from the card on to the call centre system. By that time, the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete.
Arno Reuser, one of a tiny handful of lifetime leaders of the new disciplines of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and its public service manifestation, Public Intelligence in the service of Collective Intelligence, contributed the below piece in 2008. It is a standard reference. Below is the summary followed by a link to the full-text article online. Summary: Searching for information in order to solve somebody's information problem requires a wide range of skills, methods, capabilities, and knowledge of sources. In other words, it requires strategy and tactics. Unfortunately, many customers think that a simple connection to the Internet and one general-purpose search engine is more than enough to do the trick. Luckily, the well-framed end user knows better, but librarians are often challenged by budget holders and higher management to explain why the Internet is not the ultimate solution for every conceivable information problem. To confront this challenge, the author presents six simple aspects of Internet bias: 1. The Internet is not international. 2. The Internet is not easy. 3. The Internet is not just Google. 4. The Internet is not large. 5. The Internet is not objective. 6. The Internet is not anonymous. Skilled librarians or information professionals can outperform the Internet in many occasions. In the information world, librarians rule. The problem is, they are too modest.
Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.
Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.
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A ‘Second Life’ for NATO Staffers
Katie Drummond
September 4, 2009
This isn’t the first time NATO has toyed with virtual training programs. In February, they requested a computerized replica of Afghanistan, complete with data on Afghan economics, politics and culture, to be used by war planners in decision-making considerations. And two years ago, the Navy asked for the same thing, but with Iraq as the targeted 3D nation.
Phi Beta Iota: EarthGame by Medard Gabel does all this and more, for no more than $2 million a year, with one caveat: it is unaffordable and unachievable if DoD and NATO insist on everything being Top Secret.
In 2008, U.S. military forces collected 400,000 hours of airborne surveillance video, up from several thousand hours 10 years ago. So the Pentagon is turning to computers to help save, sort and search it all.
“The proliferation of unmanned systems across the battlefield is not going to lessen in the future. We saw it happen in the first Gulf War. Once commanders have it, there is an insatiable appetite for FMV,” or full-motion video, said Maj. Gen. John Custer III, who commands the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, Fort Huachuca, Ariz.
“You not only need the tools to exploit that, you need storage because commanders don’t only want to see a building now but what it looked like yesterday, six weeks ago and six months ago,” Custer said. “When you have 18 systems up for 18 hours a day, you get into terabytes in a week. We are going to be in large data-storage warehousing for the rest of time.” Continue reading “Journal: MILNET Flags Sorting It Out: New Tools Wrestle Mountains of Data Into Usable Intelligence”
Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.
“DNA is a lot easier to plant at a crime scene than fingerprints,” she said. “We’re creating a criminal justice system that is increasingly relying on this technology.”
. . . . . . .
From a pooled sample of many people’s DNA, the scientists cloned tiny DNA snippets representing the common variants at each spot, creating a library of such snippets. To prepare a DNA sample matching any profile, they just mixed the proper snippets together. They said that a library of 425 different DNA snippets would be enough to cover every conceivable profile.
To begin on a positive note: Google has both computational mathematics that are out of this world, an order of magnitude better than anything IBM or the other usual suspects can muster, and it has cracked the cloud storage and heat and throughput issues in a way that is now an almost insurmountable barrier to entry for corporations (China and India are emergent and Brazil and Russia might have some anti-Google surprises in the making).
Google lacks human and intelligence-oriented leadership, and suffers from the usual problems associated with a bureaucracy that grew too fast on the fantasy cash from credulous investors. “Zooglers” is the term of art now used for Google people that have vested and leave to create new capabilities that “surf” on Google while doing things the Google bureaucracy could not countenance as an internal active.
Then there is evil Google. Click on the Google Evil-Bad Google logo for a page of links, or choose from among the links below. We know Larry Page personally, through the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference. He is a nice person, an engineer, with zero ethics in the sense that dorks do not know anything about etiquette. Eric Schmidt is the new monopolist in town, and Eric Schmidt has absolutely zero interest in the public interest.
