The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The best they could do.
PDF (31 Pages): (U) 2014 US IC DNI Threat to SSCI 29 Jan 14
Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: 2014 Worldwide Threat Assessment — Moderately Retarded?”
Calculating How Much Amazon Costs
Amazon Web Services are a good way to store code and other data, but it can get a little pricey. Before you upload your stuff to the Amazon cloud, check out Heap’s article, “How We Estimated Our AWS Costs Before Shipping Any Code.” Heap is an iOS and Web analytics tool that captures every user interaction. The Heap team decided to build it, because there was not a product that offered ad-hoc analysis or analyzed an entire user’s activity. Before they started working on the project, the team needed to estimate their AWS costs to decide if the idea was a sustainable business model.
They needed to figure how much data was generated by a single user interaction, but then they had to find out where the data was stored and what to store it on. The calculations showed that for the business model to work a single visit would have to yield an average one-third of a cent to be worthwhile for clients.
CPU cores, compression, and reserve instances reduced costs, but there are some unexpected factors that inflated costs:
1. “AWS Bundling. By design, no single instance type on AWS strictly dominates another. For example, if you decide to optimize for cost of memory, you may initially choose cr1.8xlarge instances (with 244GB of RAM). But you’ll soon find yourself outstripping its paltry storage (240 GB of SSD), in which case you’ll need to switch to hs1.8xlarge instances, which offer more disk space but at a less favorable cost/memory ratio. This makes it difficult to squeeze savings out of our AWS setup.
2. Data Redundancy. This is a necessary feature of any fault-tolerant, highly available cluster. Each live data point needs to be duplicated, which increases costs across the board by 2x.”
Heap’s formula is an easy and intuitive way to calculate pricing for Amazon Cloud Services. Can it be applied to other cloud services?
Whitney Grace, January 30, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Here is a potentially revolutionary development in gene-based medicine. When I read this I wondered, does the lack of funding, in fact the suppression of gene research, by the Bush Administation — done to placate the Theocratic Right — help explain why the major breakthroughs in this area of medicine are happening outside of the U.S.?
Stem Cell ‘Major Discovery' Claimed
JAMES GALLAGHER, Health and Science Reporter – BBC News (U.K.)
Gareth Porter
5.0 out of 5 stars Does for Iran What Truth Dig Did for Iraq, January 29, 2014
I *strongly* recommend this book to every citizen concerned about a government that lies all the time. The NSA debacle of recent time, on top of the CIA debacles (rendition, torture, assassination by drone) on top of the various other White House led debacles are all deeply disturbing.
I have a copy of the book on the way and will provide my usual detailed review as soon as it arrives. In the meantime, here is a snippet from a really superb review by Peter Jenikins at Lobelog:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Porter concludes: “US and Israeli policies have been driven by political and bureaucratic interests, not by a rational, objective assessment of available indicators of the motives and intentions of Iranian leaders”.
Another central theme, one that complements the hidden motive theme, is that intelligence material and intelligence assessments have played a baleful part in this saga.
Continue reading “Review: Manufactured Crisis – The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”
Gareth Porter
Review By Peter Jenkins @ Lobelog
The subtitle of Gareth Porter’s new book, The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, is well-chosen. Large parts of A Manufactured Crisis are indeed untold till now. They amount to what the author terms an “alternative narrative”.
But don’t be misled by “alternative”. This is not the work of some crank who imagines conspiracies where none exist. One senses, rather, from the author’s meticulous sourcing and the extent of his research that what motivates him is a fierce hunger for truth and aversion to deceit.
Porter has been investigating the Iranian nuclear case for the best part of a decade. The result of his researches is both a fascinating addition to a growing corpus, unlike any previous work on the issue, and a disturbing indictment of US and Israeli policies.
One central theme is that hidden motives have coloured these policies. On the US side, Porter explains, the end of the Cold War led to a federal bureaucratic interest in exaggerating the WMD and missile threat posed by Iran (and other emerging countries) to justify funding bids. During the presidency of George W. Bush some senior administration members also sought to exploit nuclear fears to “delegitimize” the Iranian government and engineer a pretext for enforced regime change.
The US IC has spent 1.2 trillion dollars since 1992 — and failed to provide ethical evidence-based decision-support capable of influencing tens of trillions more. This waste has to be understood in the context of a leadership (both intelligence and political) focused moving money, not actually in the business of producing decision-support or making decisions in the public interest.no.
All of these documented advisories were published in the key journals of the time, and ignored.
What does it say when an intelligence community is incapable of doing intelligence on itself?
DOC (1 Page Table): Steele On Intelligence Cross-Walk Over Time
Extracts (quotes on NSA not in table) and Links Below the Line
Semantria: A New Face For Text Analytics
Semantria applies Text and Sentiment Analysis to tweets, facebook posts, surveys, reviews or enterprise content.
A cloud based company that specializes in text analytics and sentiment analysis named Semantria has just released a new website. The design of the website emphasizes the different products and features Semantria has to offer. The entire process of getting up and running with either a free or paid Semantria account can now be done with 3 clicks.
Another cool feature is the ability to purchase text analytics software without talking to a salesperson. After registering with Semantria, you are automatically credited with 10,000 transactions for free. One transaction equals one tweet, one survey response, one Facebook comment; basically any one passage of text. Now when you run out of credits, you can simply login to the Semantria website and buy more.
Due to the nature of this technology, things can be complicated. Getting help with support and tutorial is made more seamless, as well as additional documentation has been made available. The goal of the new website was to make it easy to navigate.
Get up and running in minutes, no credit card required!
See Also:
Search Wizards Speak: Oleg Rogynskyy, Semantria
Semantria Adds Value to Unstructured Data With Sentiment Analysis
