Monday, August 13, 2012

I'm sure it's not because “We don't want to start that debate before the election.” It must be because of a technical glitch, even if we have to create the glitch ourselves... Perhaps it just expired and we need to start another?
"The Electronic Privacy Information Center posted a brief and detailed notice about the removal of a petition regarding security screenings by the TSA at US airports and other locations. 'At approximately 11:30 am EDT, the White House removed a petition about the TSA airport screening procedures from the White House 'We the People' website. [now “We the second class People” Bob] About 22,500 of the 25,000 signatures necessary for a response from the Administration were obtained when the White House unexpectedly cut short the time period for the petition. The site also went down for 'maintenance' following an article in Wired that sought support for the campaign."

(Related) It has nothing what-so-ever to do with Security Theater that costs more that a Broadway show.
JFK's $100M security system breached
A man on a personal watercraft who became stranded in a New York bay easily breached Kennedy Airport's security system by walking undetected through two runways and into a terminal.
The New York Post reports that the 31-year-old man swam to a Jamaica Bay shore and then walked past motion sensors and closed-circuit cameras of the airport's state-of-the-art Perimeter Intrusion Detection System. The $100 million system is meant to safeguard against terrorists.
The man climbed an 8-foot-tall perimeter fence and made his way to Terminal 3.
He approached a Delta Airlines worker, who alerted authorities.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is investigating. The agency says it plans to meet with the security system's maker this week.


So IP lawyers, is this how it should be done?
"New research (PDF) shows that Intellectual Ventures is tied to at least 1,300 shell companies whose sole purpose is to coerce real companies into buying patent license that they don't want or need. Those who resist the "patent trolls" are dragged into nightmarish lawsuits."


Why secret? By now even the terrorists must know we're there. Are we doing something that citizens would not like? (Unlikely, Romney would jump on that) So it must be that the CIA is running the drones, and they won't talk about anything. (Why doesn't that make me all warm an fuzzy?)
Hidden History: America’s Secret Drone War in Africa
More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a U.S. Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew the type’s first mission over lawless Somalia, the shadowy American-led drone campaign in the Horn of Africa is targeting Islamic militants more ruthlessly than ever.
Thanks to media accounts, indirect official statements, fragmentary crash reports and one complaint by a U.N. monitoring group, we can finally begin to define — however vaguely — the scope and scale of the secret African drone war.
The details that follow are in part conjecture, albeit informed conjecture. They outline of just one of America’s ongoing shadow wars — and one possible model for the future U.S. way of war. Along with the counterterrorism campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen and the Philippines, the Somalia drone war demonstrates how high-tech U.S. forces can inflict major damage on America’s enemies at relatively low cost … and without most U.S. citizens having any idea it’s even happening.


Why we need Data Mining (to find relevant data) and Data Analytics (to make sense of what we find)
August 12, 2012
The Problem of Data - Council on Library and Information Resources
The Problem of Data, Lori Jahnke and Andrew Asher, Spencer D. C. Keralis with an introduction by Charles Henry. August 2012. CLIR Pubublication No. 154. “Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data—so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.” IBM, Bringing Big Data to the Enterprise
  • This extraordinary and often cited statistic is an apt quantitative introduction to our technological era, increasingly referred to as the era of Big Data. The massive scale of data creation and accumulation, together with the increasing dependence on data in research and scholarship, are profoundly changing the nature of knowledge discovery, organization, and reuse. As our intellectual heritage moves more deeply into online research and teaching environments, new modes of inquiry emerge; digital data afford investigations across disciplinary boundaries in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, further muddling traditional boundaries of inquiry. Jahnke and Asher explore workflows and methodologies at a variety of academic data curation sites, and Keralis delves into the academic milieu of library and information schools that offer instruction in data curation. Their conclusions point to the urgent need for a reliable and increasingly sophisticated professional cohort to support data-intensive research in our colleges, universities, and research centers."

(Related) Never ever analyze data in isolation (or by pre-defining a target group based on your perceptions and assumptions)
August 12, 2012
Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development
Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development: "The amount of data in the world is exploding - large portion of this comes from the interactions over mobile devices being used by people in the developing world - people whose needs and habits have been poorly understood until now. Researchers and policymakers are beginning to realize the potential for channeling these torrents of data into actionable information that can be used to identify needs & provide services for the benefit of low-income populations. This discussion note is a Call-to-action for stakeholders for concerted action to ensure that this data helps the individuals and communities who create it."

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