Given our “need to monitor everything like Big Brother,” this could be true. And the huge amount of time wasted trying to eliminate it – just the cost of “fighting terrorism.”

Predator Drone 'Virus' Could Be Military's Own Monitoring

"The virus that hit Predator and Reaper UAVs could be an internal monitoring system employed by the military. According to security researcher Miles Fidelman, there are vendors that sell security monitoring packages to the Defense Department which are 'essentially rootkits that do, among other things, key logging.' The virus is a keylogger that was found at pilot stations, and could be keeping tabs on keystrokes used by pilots to control the UAVs, found Wired's Danger Room blog. Fidelman adds, 'I kind of wonder if the virus that folks are fighting is something that some other part of DoD deployed intentionally.'"

If I understand this, they are trying to automate attendance because they can't train their teachers to consistently report attendance. So they opt for a system that will consistently catch some of the students (bus riders) and will consistently ignore others (non-bus riders and children whose parents opt out) Can they rely on inconsistent humans to properly supplement the machines? It would help if the uncounted students could be forced to have “Luddite” tattooed on their forehead.

Florida School District Begins Fingerprinting Students

"The Washington County school district in Florida has placed fingerprint scanners at the entrance to Chipley High School. They've also made a decision to run an alternate trial by placing the scanners on buses since most kids in the district ride buses every day. Since the beginning the fingerprinting, attendance is up, [Or perhaps they are now counting students who were always there but never counted? Bob] but not everyone is in agreement that the costs and risks are worth the attendance boost."

Aren't there simpler and less-creepy ways to count kids, like looking at empty desks?

[From the article:

"We got to talking about attendance in our district and how it was inconsistent," said Cook.

… "When it's all said and done, we're going to find that this is going to be one of the most monumental things that Washington County has ever done," said Cook.

The finger scan device costs the school district about $30 per student each year. Parents can still opt for their children to sign in the traditional way.

What did we ever do before Copyrights? Actually, this makes a lot of sense in some circumstances (like textbooks?) Would a “Patronage marketplace” be the basis of a successful business model?

Should Book Authors Pursue a Patronage Model?

"With ebook prices falling and some readers even unwilling to pay more than 99 cents for an ebook, some authors are starting to consider a move back to the patronage model that was successful in providing them with a living before the widespread use of copyright. Might such a model work or are the days where a midlist author can make a living off their work a relic of the 20th century?"

(Related) What would “Patronage” look like today?

B&N Yanks DC Titles After Exclusive Amazon Deal

"In response to DC Entertainment's agreement to exclusively offer digital versions of certain titles in Amazon Kindle format, Nook maker Barnes & Noble has begun pulling DC Entertainment's graphic novels off its shelves. Confirming the decision, B&N said in a statement, 'To sell and promote the physical book in our store showrooms, and not have the eBook available for sale would undermine our promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime.' Nice to see the pair is still able to keep their feud fresh on the 11th anniversary of the 1-Click patent infringement lawsuit."

(Related) Why would this surprise anyone?

UN Bigwig: The Web Should Have Been Patented and Licensed

"Cory Doctorow over at BoingBoing has unearthed an amazing video where the head of WIPO, the UN agency responsible for 'promoting' intellectual property, suggests that Tim Berners-Lee should have patented HTML and licensed it to all users. Amazingly this is done on camera and in front of the head of CERN and the Internet Society, who look on in disbelief."

For my Data Mining and Data Analysis students.

http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/028485.html

October 08, 2011

Mining Data From Social Media for Marketing, Trend Spotting and More?

The Economist: "The beauty of Twitter, the popular microblogging service, is that users have to keep it short: messages can only be 140 characters long. But companies that mine the stream of tweets for marketing and other purposes (see article in this week's issue of The Economist) get much more information. [Here is a map] of a tweet including all its metadata. The map was published by Raffi Krikorian, a developer at Twitter. It is 18 months old, but it is safe to say that the amount of metadata attached to a tweet has not decreased since."

[From the article:

MOST tweets are inane, but a million may contain valuable information. Fed through clever algorithms, a torrent of microblogs can reveal changes in a nation’s mood. Hence the excitement about a new market: the sale and analysis of real-time social-media data. DataSift, a start-up, will soon launch a marketplace for such information.

… Gnip, based in Boulder, Colorado, is more of a wholesale distributor. It charges $33,000 a month for a feed of half of all tweets. Customers can also subscribe to feeds of tweets containing web links or certain keywords. Buyers are mostly social-media monitoring companies, which analyse the data for a fee. Sysomos, a Canadian firm, for example, allows firms to track in real time what people think about certain products.