Going down to Stasiland

In the era of the Stasi there was an overarching NSA style apparatus. Projections  were mainly of 'grays and dour greens.' Citizen informants were networked nodes. These were the browser cookies of the time. But they were embedded not in a browser but in a physical world. This was when humans were computers, or computers were humans, have it as you will. It may have been an apex of sorts, though "the jury is still out." The platform as you might say was East Germany, or GDR  (1946-1990). Then and there was created an internet of spies, detecting on their neighbors – on each other – with fault tolerance, high availability and cyclical redundancy checking. Psychological Zesetung, or Brainwave Decomposition, was a common application type. There were 8 Stasi agents for every 5 citizens. Today the file of the concern is available on the world wide zeb. The Stasi Records Agency (BStU) is responsible for making the records of the State Security Service of the former GDR accessible to the public. Every individual has the right to request to view his own personal file. There are files on Michael Jackson.  In 1954, Angela Merkel was born in the West but soon her family moved into Stasiland. Her pater was a Lutheran minister, which made young Angela and outsider in an outside land. Her family's ability to visit the West made her father's connections suspect. Her grade in compulsory Marxist-Lentilist education was 'sufficient – or passing'  (making her a student much like me-oh!) One day Merkel became presient of reunified Germany. When she discovered the U.S. N.S.A. was tapping her cell phone, a slew of 'grays and dour greens' danced in her momentarily fevered and dizzy field of vision.

Today's Data Drippings

Data as an enthusiasm or even hobby is in the air. As noted in an Economist article (Briefing: Clever Cities: The Multiplexed Metropolis –Sept 7 2013, p.21. ) But does close inspection of the results to date tell us the enthusiasm is warranted? Is this truly like the introduction of electricity to the city? Who benefited from the introduction of electricity, and if data is as powerful a game changer, who will benefit most on this go-round? "The importance of political culture will remain," according to the anonymous Economist writer (Ludwig Siegele).

Nist data symposium

Nist is looking into Big data and measurement thereof. Upcoming is a symposium in March. Symposium Topics:
Understanding the Data Science Technical Landscape:
Primary challenges in and technical approaches to complex workflow components of Big Data systems, including ETL, lifecycle management, analytics, visualization & human-system interaction.
Major forms of analytics employed in data science.
Improving Analytic System Performance via Measurement Science
Generation of ground truth for large datasets and performance measurement with limited or no ground truth.
Methods to measure the performance of data analytic workflows where there are multiple subcomponents, decision points, and human interactions.
Methods to measure the flow of uncertainty across complex data analytic systems.
Approaches to formally characterizing end-to-end analytic workflows.
Datasets to Enable Rigorous Data Science Research
Useful properties for data science reference datasets.
Leveraging simulated data in data science research.
Efficient approaches to sharing research data.

http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/data-science-symposium-2014.cfm

IBM shows its plan to move Watson forward

The IBM Watson supercomputer has garnered a lot of attention in recent years, but it's entering a particularly critical passage now. What happens next could influence the future paths of data analytics generally, and IBM specifically -- for better or for worse. This week, IBM showed its plan to move Watson forward. Virginia Rometty, the company's chairman, president and CEO, said IBM would invest more than $1 billion in a new business group dedicated to commercializing Watson. That figure includes $100 million for venture investments to create an ecosystem of application developers and other business partners. The challenge, though, will be to take highly technical machine learning software from the lab -- and the game show milieu -- to the business mainstream.

 http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/opinion/For-IBM-Watson-no-easy-answers-on-commercial-cognitive-computing

How the memes were won

Cerf and Kahn on Future Web

Newsmaker of 2013

Different characters vie in different circles for newsmaker of the year. My money for 2013 is on Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who systematically unmasked the great big eye growing out of central hub of the US Gov's Intelligence community more than 10 years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. When Snowden's disclosures first appeared, there was more than a little amusement in the high tech newsrooms. After all, Google has been tracking us right along, haven’t they? But Snowden's well-placed dispatches - had an cumulative effect, to highlight major changes in the technology scape in the years since 2001. Those scape shifts take the form of growth of the Internet and cell phone communications, distributed computing. Why wouldn't the powers that be take it as an opportunity for massive eavesdropping? The Patriot Act that resides behind all this activity was an antiterrorist act pure and simple – it is fair to say people don't feel the press of the terrorist they felt in the wake of 9-11. Nor did they feel the creeping vectors of digital lock-in. (The Patriot Act's most frightening aspect is the star chamber that decides who to lock on to.) At the heart of most every science fiction story it seems is a benevolent new technology (think of the World Wide Web) about to be usurped by familiar the old drive of the powerful to dominate (privacy incursion). Some defenders of the NSA activity make some good points. But the public knows this long-running antiterrorism project, coupled with escalating high-tech, invites intimidation of freedom. Snowden's release schedule has kept the cause in the news, but can that continue? Criswell predicts: "Big data" will begin to subside in Google Trends in some part due Snowden's efforts. - Jack Vaughan