VICINUS

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).

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.

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.

9 Most Important Elements of a Business  Osterwalder's business canvas helps illustrate how a company intends to make money. It's made up of nine key points that represent any company's complete business (for much more detail, read either The Startup Owner's Manual or Osterwalder's Business Model Design (Wiley). 

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.

If one draws links radiating outward from NATO to all of these different countries and organizations, the result is a security network that has multiple hubs and clusters - much like a map of the Internet or of planets and galaxies. This world is no longer unipolar, bipolar, or even multipolar, because the actors that matter are not single states but groups of states that are more or less densely connected. It is a multi-hub security network, in which the hubs are regional organizations of different sizes and strengths.

Fifteen years later we've made a lot of progress. Many cloud services are now switch-hitters. When a person using a browser asks them to do something, they respond with HTML for humans to read and interact with. When a computer asks - and by computer I mean a smartphone, a desktop PC, or a virtual machine running elsewhere in the cloud - they respond with data for that computer to process.

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.

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

As I have said before, I think the term "data science" is a bit of a misnomer, but I was very hopeful after this discussion; mostly because of the utter lack of agreement on what a curriculum on this subject would look like. The difficulty in defining these skills is that the split between substance and methodology is ambiguous, and as such it is unclear how to distinguish among hackers, statisticians, subject matter experts, their overlaps and where data science fits.

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.

Recorded Future offers robust tools for temporal and predictive analysis including advanced visualizations, data for predictive modelling, and fine-grain Future oriented alerts. Customers around the world are using Recorded Future Premium to monitor media on the web, understand news and forecast a variety events, track sentiment surrounding events and more.

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.

Great news browser and filter, but very limited network visualizations

See relationships among data points: Network Diagram; Scatterplot; Matrix Chart Compare a set of values: Bar Chart; Block Histogram; Bubble Chart Track rises and falls over time: Line Graph; Stack Graph; Stack Graph for Categories See the parts of a whole: Pie Chart; Treemap; Treemap for Comparisons Analyze a text: Word Tree; Tag Cloud; Word Cloud Generator; Phrase Net See the world: Massachusetts Map; World Map; US County Map; New Jersey Map

Open data initiatives such as Linked Data have begun to see adoption (e.g. NYT), with the objective of opening up and creating relationships between databases. This presents opportunities to break down the barriers that separate individual websites and their content, creating unprecedented opportunities for the reuse and combination of different data sources. A common critique of apps has been the walled-garden approach to storing data and communicating with other apps-open data promises to change that. As a consequence we will begin to see more apps that aggregate a multitude of sources, rather than remaining tethered to any particular set of content (though those will likely continue to exist). These will be apps designed for a particular scenario and user experience-their primary point of differentiation. They will use whatever data sources are available in order to best satisfy the goals of whatever experience or scenario is being designed.

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