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You might want to watch the video below before you check in, update your status, or snap and share that photo of you at lunch with your smartphone. The Guardian got hold of this 2010 video demonstration from Raytheon, a big-time contractor that also develops things like missile systems for the Department of Defense, which shows an online tracking tool called Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or RIOT.

"In a post-fact era, you can be an elected official and have a remarkably flexible relationship with the truth. Take climate science: more than 97% of scientists agree that climate change is a man-made phenomenon, but conservative politicians--and more than 65% of Republicans in Congress--outdo one another to demonstrate just how little they believe in science."

Sentiment Analysis is a terribly difficult problem. The problem is in defining the problem - the input is the problem - but you can't avoid it, IT IS the future, and I'm very optimistic about it! Professor Bing Liu started off the Sentiment Analytics Symposium yesterday with the statement above and I couldn't agree more. Subsequently he gave the pre-workshop audience a detailed 3.5 hour overview of the state of text analytics. It was not surprising to me that almost a quarter of the audience were young developers (MacBook Pro in hand), with the hopes to learn how to incorporate their own sentiment analysis engines into their business applications.

Third Annual  JITP Conference, May 16 & 17, 2011 - UW, Seattle, WA   Early Registration Period: Register by March 20, 2011 to save $50 Students $50, Others $75

SecLists.Org Security Mailing List Archive Any hacker will tell you that the latest news and exploits are not found on any web site-not even Insecure.Org. No, the cutting edge in security research is and will continue to be the full disclosure mailing lists such as Bugtraq. Here we provide web archives and RSS feeds (now including message extracts), updated in real-time, for many of our favorite lists

GigaPan Time Machine enables simultaneous exploration of space and time across massive datasets that could not previously be interactively explored at full spatial and temporal resolution.

Great news browser and filter, but very limited network visualizations

Statistics at the State and Local Levels Statistical resources for state and local governments.

For the past year and two I have noticed a lot of statistical analysis using #rstats /R on unstructured text generated in real time by the social network Twitter. From an analytic point of view , Google Plus is an interesting social network , as it is a social network that is new and arrived after the analytic tools are relatively refined. It is thus an interesting use case for evolution of people behavior measured globally AFTER analytic tools in text mining are evolved and we can thus measure how people behave and that behavior varies as the social network and its user interface evolves.

Stefan Sagmeister recently introduced me to a unique forthcoming book, "a worthwhile endeavor, showing scientists the fundamentals of how to design a complex graphic," he said. Incidentally, he is the designer and a consultant. The title may be a mouthful, Visual Strategies: A Practical Guide to Graphics for Scientists and Engineers by Felice Frankel and Angela DePace (Yale University Press), yet it is more than worthwhile, it is an essential guide to literacy for fields that are essential to all our lives.

Amnesty International USA and the Standby Task Force have launched an ambitious campaign to crowdsource analysis of Syrian satellite imagery for military movements, demonstrations, and checkpoints. So far, volunteers have tagged more than 2,000 potential troublespots. Is DIY intelligence analysis the future of human rights work?

A non-profit tech company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.

wiki

The problem isn't just that the study itself is misleading and riddled with errors (which it is). It's that in their efforts to win public favor, the fracking industry increasingly hides behind academia to circulate  misinformation - and the University of Buffalo is the latest cover.

Rioting and related intra-crowd dynamics are significant human processes, but we know less about the basic behavioral science and subsequent processes that drive and shape rioting than we would like to. This is due, in large part, to the difficulty in studying riots on the ground and to the sheer complexity of riot phenomena. We know even less about the geographical dynamics of rioting, even though there is a dedicated (but only general) appreciation that geography is important. Existing work has, for the most part, adopted the most straightforward path to discovery, by examining coarse (city-scale) geographies of rioting, or in the few instances where intra-crowd riot dynamics are considered they have focused on stylized abstractions of behavior. Because of the difficulties of using standard social science inquiry to study riots (surveys, ethnographic analysis, interviews), many researchers have turned to computer modeling to create synthetic riots that can be configured, sampled, and experimented with. But, building models of something as bewilderingly complex as rioting is really quite difficult and so many short-cuts are taken. In particular, models are usually cellular-based in form (where rasters represent people and their local environment) and founded on physical interactions between relatively "dumb" particle-people (where continuum mechanics, random walks, or particle-particle forces serve as a substitute for socio-spatial interaction and behavior).

Five of the nation's largest banks were required to pay states a total of $2.5 billion as part of this year's mortgage settlement. The money was intended to alleviate the foreclosure crisis, but many states aren't exactly using the funds that way. We made a map of what each state is doing with the millions of dollars it received.

It is well known that Canada is an urban nation. Most people now live in cities. But most growth is occurring in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas and in nearby towns and cities. Yet academic research has often focused on our central cities. Better understanding of suburbs as places, and suburbanization as a process, have less frequently been explicit aims of research.