The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Using AIDR to Collect and Analyze Tweets from Chile Earthquake
Wish you had a better way to make sense of Twitter during disasters than this?
Communities: the institutions of the 21st century? An interview with Rachel Botsman
Since her influential book about how collaborative consumption is changing the way we live, Rachel Botsman has been a leading actor in the collaborative economy and stimulated important debates about its future. OuiShare Fest Co-chair Francesca spoke to her about her vision of the collaborative economy movement, her current work and what she will bring to OuiShare Fest this May.
A lot has happened since your book “What’s Mine is Yours”. Did you imagine the collaborative economy would look the way it does today? Where do you see the movement going now?
OpenCalais Has Big Profile Users
OpenCalais is an open source project that creates rich semantic data by using natural language processing and other analytical methods through a Web service interface. It is a simple explanation for a piece of powerful software. OpenCalais was originally part of ClearForest, but Thomson Reuters acquired the project in 2007. Instead of marketing OpenCalais as proprietary software, Reuters allowed it to remain open. OpenCalais has since become valued metadata open source software that is used on blogs to specialized museum collections.
There are many notables who use OpenCalais and a sample can be found on “The List Of OpenCalais Implementations Grows.”
OpenCalais is excited about the new additions to the list:
Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: OpenCalais Has Big Profile Users”
The Urban Shift in the U.S. Start-Up Economy, in One Chart
San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood; Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Kendall Square; Lower Manhattan: These are the dense, walkable neighborhoods that have become the new hubs of America’s tech scene, as the center of gravity for venture investment and start-up activity shifts from suburbs to urban centers.
This urban shift in America’s venture capital-fueled innovation economy is detailed in my latest report from the Martin Prosperity Institute, released today at The Atlantic’s Start-Up City: Miami event. (The report builds upon and deepens the analysis developed initially in my Start-Up City series here on the site last year).
The chart below, from the new report, shows just how extensive the urban shift in venture capital investment and start-up activity has become. It is based on detailed zip code data provided to us by Dow Jones for the year 2011. The data cover 11 metros and two combined areas, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington-Baltimore. Together, start-ups based in these metros accounted for almost three-quarters of venture capital investment in 2011.
Open Source and the Global Brain
1. Information reflecting facts, perceptions, and knowledge (which I will call data) exists in many forms and places throughout the world. Much of it is NOT protected by government classification or even by other deliberate efforts to prevent its availability to others who actively seek it out. I will call this open source data—OSD.
2. Collectively, and if properly integrated and reduced to its essentials, these data answer a great number of what intelligence services (from any government, business, or activity (such as NGOs, for example)) might characterize as desired knowledge. I will call this open source intelligence—OSINT.
3. Collecting these data does not require human secret agents, intercepting protected signals, or the use of other classified intelligence programs. It’s simply there for the taking—if one organizes to take it.
4. Reducing the data to desired knowledge does not demand classified intelligence programs. It, perhaps not so simply, requires effective techniques for use of the data. Though there are many techniques involved, one of the most critical is to harness, to the extent practicable, the collective wisdom of mostly non-governmental sources and methods—and that includes the hard work and innovativeness of people involved in the process all around the world—non-governmental practitioners.
5. In a sense, one could look at the global collective of data (OSD), desired knowledge coming from open sources (OSINT), and collective of practitioners as a sort of “global brain.” No one has all the data. No one has all the desired knowledge. No one has all the technique. But collectively—to the extent the collective can be harnessed on a wide scale—the Global Brain has a large number of the answers that governments, businesses, and various activities seek—all of it from open sources.
Continue reading “Boyd Sutton: Open Source and the Global Brain”
We Need to Rethink Access to Scientific Research
Aaron Moritz
One of humanity’s greatest technological triumphs is today’s potential for widespread and unrestricted access to all of our collected knowledge. As we march towards this noble goal, there is something crucial we need to talk about. That is, some of the most vital information we have is our scientific research, and much of it is still widely unavailable to the public. At least, without paying prohibitively high costs.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Aaron Moritz on Rethinking Access to Research”
There are legal ways to download books on the Internet without having to resort to Pirate Bay or other P2P networks. If you visit Open Culture, you will discover that there are over “550 Free eBooks: Download Books For Free.” Before you get on your soapbox and explain that most books available for free on are usually in the public domain, thus old and less than exciting to read. While that is true for these books, there are also more contemporary authors listed, such as Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, Neil Gaiman, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
If you are also interested in studying up on the Harvard Classics, because of this idea:
“During his days as Harvard’s influential president, Charles W. Eliot made a frequent assertion: If you were to spend just 15 minutes a day reading the right books, a quantity that could fit on a five foot shelf, you could give yourself a proper liberal education. The publisher P. F. Collier and Son loved the idea and asked Eliot to assemble the right collection of works.”
You will find that all of these classics are available for easy reading and download on the Internet. That Internet has made it easier to educate yourself with the amount of free classes, books, movies, and other content that can be obtained legally.
Whitney Grace, March 31, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
