Fear that sources and methods may have been compromised
By Lisa Ruth – The Washington Times Communities, Saturday, August 3, 2013
In warning about possible al Qaeda attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials may have provided too much detail about intercepted chatter and the source of the information, and that may make it more difficult to get such tips next time, former and current intelligence officials say.
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“Now? We are going to have to start all over again. We are operating blind,” he says.
Following is stunning, coming as it does from the left-wing newspaper we called “Pravda on the Potomac” during the Cold War.)
Two op-eds from mainstream media follow; both discuss need for Legislative and Executive Branches of the USG to get their [sierra] together and serve the national interest.
Washington Post, August 4, 2013, Pg. 18
Defense In Decline
Sequestration cuts at the Pentagon put the nation's safety at risk.
Speaker A: My friend is creating a wide-area radio network for Afghanistan.
Speaker B: Afghanistan has no infrastructure — including radio stations. Although radio is popular, it is mostly shortwave, with a few local FM stations for the local Iman. And electricity for radio stations is spotty at best including in Kabul.
Speaker A: Well, I can build really cheap, “ultra” cheap, radio receivers.
Speaker B: As long as you are doing that, why not give them OpenBTS cell phones running on ambient energy, and include a radio app? Then get someone else — Google, Virgin Mobile, the Chinese or India — to focus on all-purpose cellular towers and tethered ballons?
Part 4 of 6: Avaaz – Be the Change the Global Elite Want
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 3rd, 2013
In 2006 another ‘democracy’ project made its debut throughout the world. The organization is called Aavaz. According to its website:
Avaaz—meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.
Avaaz empowers millions of people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. Our model of internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force.
Gearóid Ó Colmáin is a political analyst based in Paris. He is a frequent contributor to Russia Today, Radio Del Sur and Inn World Report. His blog can be reached at Metrogael. Read other articles by Gearóid.
I read “How Can I Pass the String ‘Null’ through WSDL (SOAP)…” My hunch is that only a handful of folks will dig into this issue. Most senior managers buy the baloney generated by search and content processing. Yesterday I reviewed for one of the outfits publishing my “real” (for fee) columns a slide deck stuff full of “all’s” and “every’s”. The message was that this particular modern system which boasted a hefty price tag could do just about anything one wanted with flows of content.
Happily overlooked was the problem of a person with a wonky name. Case in point: “Null”. The link from Hacker News to the Stackoverflow item gathered a couple of hundred comments. You can find these here. If you are involved in one of the next-generation, super-wonderful content processing systems, you may find a few minutes with the comments interesting and possibly helpful.
My scan of the comments plus the code in the “How Can I” post underscored the disconnect between what people believe a system can do and what a here-and-now system can actually do. Marketers say one thing, buyers believe another, and the installed software does something completely different.
As big data analytics begins picking up steam, we are seeing more and more interesting outlets to learn about different platforms to choose from. Not just catalogs and boastful corporation sites, but insightful criticism. One such recent stop was when we came about the “About” story of Bamboo DIRT.
According to the site:
Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT is an evolution of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.
One look at its tips for analyzing data and we were sold. Here we were turned on to such intriguing companies as 140kit and Dataverse. The user-supported recommendations were the best. About Dataverse, it said: “Researchers and data authors get credit, publishers and distributors get credit, affiliated institutions get credit.” Concise and giving all the needed vitals, this type of crowdsourcing recommendation site could really catch on as the world of big data analytics keeps growing beyond most users’ capacity to keep up.
Almost every day I read stories about Republican actions to subvert the wellbeing of the middle class. It is amazing to me. They just roll in day after day, each one more extreme and hurtful than the one before it. Here is an example. Frankly, and I know this will offend the 14 per cent of my readers who are conservatives, as presently configured ! I do not think is is possible to be an ethical person and to vote Republican. I am sorry, but on the facts, in my view, that is the case.
