Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2154 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Changes in the Social Media Monitoring Field

A recent move by social media monitoring firm DataSift has Business2Community contemplating “The Stratification of Social Media Listening.” DataSift is now working with Tumblr to distribute that site’s content to subscribers, and writer Mike Moran takes the occasion to discuss ways social media monitoring has changed since he began working in the field five years ago. At that time, he says, it was all about crisis management, and SalesForce’s Radian6 was a central player. Moran writes:

“Salesforce’s purchase of Radian6 is still the biggest deal ever in this business. But the Radian6 purchase was the last gasp of the fully integrated software stacks in social listening. Top to bottom, you bought it all from one vendor. Radian6 crawled the blogs, screen-scraped the message boards, contracted with Twitter for the firehose. Radian6 analyzed the data. Radian6 presented the dashboard of streaming messages and the dashboard that aggregated the metrics.”

Lately though, Moran tells us, media monitoring has been moving away from the centralized to the stratified. Companies now have the option of straying from their Radian6 (or similar) structure to embrace other tools, like Tableau for their analytics dashboard, or Clarabridge or Lexalytics for text analytics. He expounds:

“Which brings us to today’s DataSift-Tumblr announcement. Why should you care? Because this stratification of social media listening is truly allowing the best solutions to be brought together out of component parts. Cloud computing allows us to quickly and cheaply cobble together these pieces into what our clients really need.”

Moran goes on to note that this departure from the integrated stack opens a myriad of possible advantages. Off-the-shelf solutions are no longer enough to stay competitive, he insists; to excel in social media monitoring now calls for a customized approach. That sounds like a lot of work to me. Organizations should not overlook the cost of added hours when considering their options.

Cynthia Murrell, October 11, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

2013/10/112013/10/11

SchwartzReport: Jimmy Carter Says US Middle Class Today Resembles Poor of His Era

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

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I've waited two days with this story waiting to see if it was picked up. It was not. Think about what President Carter is saying, and ask yourself: Why didn't this story get coverage.

Jimmy Carter: Middle Class Today Resembles Past's Poor
The Associated Press

Read full story.

Phi Beta Iota: The actual unemployment rate in the USA is 22.4%. Only 47% of adults have a full time job, all others are either juggling two or more part time jobs without benefits, or unemployed. If the government cannot tell the truth about anything, we can hardly expect it to actually work in the public interest.

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Poverty

2013/10/112013/10/11

NIGHTWATCH: Pakistan Arrests Musharraf, Peace Talks Maybe?

08 Wild Cards

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Peace Talks and Security. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif Thursday said his government is sincere about holding peace talks with the Taliban. He made the statement in response to the interview by rebel chief Hakimullah Mehsud who complained no serious steps had been taken to open a dialogue. Speaking after a security meeting in Peshawar, Sharif said progress was being made on the issue of opening negotiations.” Sharif provided no details, however.

Pakistan: Musharraf update. Pervez Musharraf was arrested one day after having been granted bail.

“We have put General Musharraf under house arrest in a case involving a military operation on an Islamabad mosque,” Muhammad Rizwan, a senior official of the Islamabad police told reporters. “We will present him before a court on Friday.”

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Pakistan Arrests Musharraf, Peace Talks Maybe?”

2013/10/112013/10/11

Chuck Spinney: American Exceptionalism as Cover Theme for Elite Looting…

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

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American Exceptionalism is exceptionally lucrative for some morally unexceptional people and organizations.

If you doubt this, read the attached report, which can be thought of as a contemporary commentary on America's political-economic culture.

To bad for them Putin intervened to place a (temporary?) roadblock across their march to war.

(The report and a summary can be found at this link.)

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: American Exceptionalism as Cover Theme for Elite Looting…”

2013/10/112019/09/06

Review: Lessons of History (First Edition)

7 Star Top 1%, Education (General), History, Intelligence (Public), Philosophy

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Will and Ariel Durant

7 Stars, Life Transformational, So Fundamental as to be Priceless, October 10, 2013

When I donated my 2500 volume library to George Mason University (down from 5000 in earlier years), this is one of a tiny handful of books I held back, along with Buckminster Fuller's Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure.

This edition is the FIRST edition. The reprinted currently in stock version The Lessons of History is more readily available, but if you can get the first edition, it is priceless at multiple levels.

This is the first book that I discuss in my national security lecture on the literature relevant to strategy & force structure. It is a once-in-a-lifetime gem of a book that sums up their much larger ten volume collection which itself is brilliant but time consuming. This is the “executive briefing.”

Geography matters. Inequality is natural. Famine, pestilence, and war are Nature's way of balancing the population.

Birth control (or not) has *strategic* implications (e.g. see Catholic strategy versus US and Russian neglect of its replenishment among the higher social and economic classes).

History is color-blind. Morality is strength. Worth saying again: morality is strength.

They end with “the only lasting revolution is in the mind of man.” In other words, technology is not a substitute for thinking by humans.

See my various lists. Other books I recommend:

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Age of Missing Information
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition

And of course the nine books I have published, all but the last free online as well as within Amazon.

Robert Steele
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

2013/10/11

John Robb: In the National Interest? Probably Not.

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Peace Intelligence

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Is making a policy decision in the “National Interest” smart anymore? Probably not.

Here's something I've been thinking about.

I've been grappling with a simple question. Is the use of national interest, as the basis of security and foreign policy, a dumb idea in the present context?

National interest is a construct from the realism school of policy. Realism is simply a case by case analysis of the costs and benefits of actions relative to the interests of the state, without reference to ideology or ideals (capitalism, communism, religion, etc.).

Realism assumes that the world is an anarchic, in a Hobbsian dog eat dog way, and that nation-states need to be selfish in order to survive.

Of course, things have changed since that formulation was developed. In particular, we're now living in a world that is:

Continue reading “John Robb: In the National Interest? Probably Not.”

2013/10/11

Open Mind: Teen Invention to Skim Plastic Only From Oceans — Are We Ready to Harvest Profit from Second Generation of Fossil Fuel Garbage? + Plastic Trash RECAP

03 Environmental Degradation, Innovation

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Teen Says His Invention Will Save the World's Oceans

Nineteen-year-old Boyan Slat wants to change the world by making the oceans a lot less trashy.

The Dutch teenager says he has invented a device that can remove 20 billion tons of plastic trash from the world's oceans, according to a Daily Mail report. The story also spells out plans for this system – a series of floating booms and platforms that will skim the surface of the water, sucking up trash.

Slat, an engineering student, chose to use booms instead of nets because they won't disturb wildlife while cleaning the waterways of trash, the Daily Mail says.

The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has become a massive wasteland of plastic and other types of garbage. The patch has grown more than 100 times larger over the last 40 years, but Slat's plans are to remove all waste from the Pacific Ocean in five years, according to a story by the Las Vegas Guardian Express.