Here is what they have as of today. An extraordinary effort that should soon become automated. You won't find these on LinkedIn! Click for individual Venn diagram similar to the Keystone Pipeline shown below.,
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine this being done at every level of government from the municipality on up, across every policy domain, with whole systems analytics, true cost economics, and all trade-offs clearly visible. This is where we are going. Humanitarian technology and Open Source Everything (OSE) are going to empower the public in a manner no government or corporation can conceive or achieve.
This search engine is a great option if you value your privacy above all else. The team behind DuckDuckGo believes in better search functions without tracking its users. Its features include “goodies” (special search queries such as calculations and programming), browser extensions and perhaps most of all, peace of mind.
Instead of searching the web for answers to your questions, Wolfram|Alpha conducts dynamic computations based on built-in data, algorithms and other methods. The search engine's goal is to build on existing knowledge and become a single, reliable source for definitive answers.
When Facebook doesn't cut it for finding people, Ark comes in handy. As an alternative to Graph Search, you can search through more than 1 billion people based on filters such as location, college and employment. If you just moved to a new city, Ark comes in handy to find others with similar interests.
Taiwan uses free widespread Wi-Fi to lure tourists
Taiwan is making it easy for foreign tourists to stay connected.
The government recently announced that international travelers to the country will be able to access free Wi-Fi at 4,400 hotspots at indoor public spaces throughout the country. By showing a passport, tourists can open an account on the 1Mbps iTaiwan Wi-Fi network that’s found at major tourist spots, transportation hubs, cultural establishments, and government offices, covering much of the island nation.
“The Taiwan Tourism Bureau and the Research, Development, and Evaluation Commission are working to provide the utmost convenience for foreign visitors and eliminate any communications problems they may encounter. This new service will considerably brighten Taiwan’s already shining image for quality travel services,” said the Taiwan Tourism Bureau in a statement.
The iTaiwan program isn’t new. The government started it in 2011, with free Wi-Fi in 3,000 indoor public areas throughout the country. But until now it was only available for citizens.
Last year, Taiwan grew the number of foreign tourists by 20 percent with a record 7.3 million who helped the tourism industry generate $11 billion.
That was the unexpected question that my World Bank colleague Johannes Kiess asked me the other day. I was immediately intrigued. So I did some preliminary research and offered to write up a blog post on the idea to solicit some early feedback. According to recent statistics, international tourist arrivals numbered over 1 billion in 2012 alone. Of this population, the demographic that Johannes is interested in comprises those intrepid and socially-conscious backpackers who travel beyond the capitals of developing countries. Perhaps the time is ripe for a new form of tourism: Tourism for Social Good.
There may be a real opportunity to engage a large crowd because travelers—and in particular the backpacker type—are smartphone savvy, have time on their hands, want to do something meaningful, are eager to get off the beaten track and explore new spaces where others do not typically trek. Johannes believes this approach could be used to map critical social infrastructure and/or to monitor development projects. Consider a simple smartphone app, perhaps integrated with existing travel guide apps or Tripadvisor. The app would ask travelers to record the quality of the roads they take (with the GPS of their smartphone) and provide feedback on the condition, e.g., bumpy, even, etc., every 50 miles or so.
They could be asked to find the nearest hospital and take a geotagged picture—a scavenger hunt for development (as Johannes calls it); Geocaching for Good? Note that governments often do not know exactly where schools, hospitals and roads are located. The app could automatically alert travelers of a nearby development project or road financed by the World Bank or other international donor. Travelers could be prompted to take (automatically geo-tagged) pictures that would then be forwarded to development organizations for subsequent visual analysis (which could easily be carried out using microtasking). Perhaps a very simple, 30-second, multiple-choice survey could even be presented to travelers who pass by certain donor-funded development projects. For quality control purposes, these pictures and surveys could easily be triangulated. Simple gamification features could also be added to the app; travelers could gain points for social good tourism—collect 100 points and get your next Lonely Planet guide for free? Perhaps if you’re the first person to record a road within the app, then it could be named after you (of course with a notation of the official name). Even Photosynth could be used to create panoramas of visual evidence.
Next week I am doing an invited talk in London. My subject is search and Big Data. I will be digging into this notion in this month’s Honk newsletter and adding some business intelligence related comments at an Information Today conference in New York later this month. (I have chopped the number of talks I am giving this year because at my age air travel and the number of 20 somethings at certain programs makes me jumpy.)
I want to highlight one point in my upcoming London talk; namely, the financial challenge which companies face when they embrace Big Data and then want to search the information in the system and search the Big Data system’s outputs.
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Notice that precision and recall has not improved significantly over the last 30 years. I anticipate that many search vendors will tell me that their systems deliver excellent precision and recall. I am not convinced. The data which I have reviewed show that over a period of 10 years most systems hit the 80 to 85 percent precision and recall level for content which is about a topic. Content collections composed of scientific, technical, and medical information where the terminology is reasonably constrained can do better. I have seen scores above 90 percent. However, for general collections, precision and recall has not been improving relative to the advances in other disciplines; for example, converting structured data outputs to fancy graphics.
I don’t want to squabble about precision and recall. The main point is that when an organization mashes Big Data with search, two curves must be considered. The first is the complexity curve. The idea is that search is a reasonably difficult system to implement in an effective manner. The addition of a Big Data system adds another complex task. When two complex tasks are undertaken at the same time, the costs go up.
The Times does mention that reputable organizations including the Huffington Post, The Atlantic and Business Insider all use branded content. (In fact The Atlantic apologized for one instance of sponsored content from the Church of Scientology in January). The Times suggests the reason for this shift in advertising technique below,
“Publishers are largely being driven to support the use of sponsored content because of fewer people clicking on banner ads, the abundance of advertising space and other factors make it more difficult to make money from traditional online advertising. As advertising technology becomes more sophisticated, ads can be bought and sold at cheaper rates across the Web. Often they are ignored by the very customers advertisers are trying to reach.”
When I was checking out the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program I noticed e-International Relations – the world’s leading website for students of international politics. They had an About page similar to that of Wikistrat, listing all of their volunteer editors and some additional information on them.
Last night I entered most of that information into e-IR-base, a Maltego graph. Those who want to follow along can download the graph file, get the free Maltego Community Edition, and do a portion of the things I do with it. The free version has very limited access to Paterva‘s transform servers, so I will provide the necessary intermediate files.
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This is a top level view of the e-IR graph. What I say next presumes some knowledge of hands on work with Maltego.
The lavender dots are Person entities – a place for a first and last name, and like every entity you can makes notes and attach files to it. The blue dots at the upper right are URL entities and they contain links to an editor’s profile on the official site. Not everyone has a profile – this seems to be for people who produce their own content as well as work as editors. The five green dots are Twitter accounts, the five blue dots with an orange dot in the middle are LinkedIn profiles and an entity for the domain itself.
Maltego provides different types of entities, but here at the start we are only using Person, Domain, URL, and Phrase. Maltego provides a way to group different types of entities using colored stars – blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. This is useful for searching and organizing tasks – if you run a transform that starts with the five Twitter accounts shown here, but gets back over a thousand responses, how do you spot your originals?
