VICINUS

How Big Data Became So Big By STEVE LOHR Published: August 11, 2012 This has been the crossover year for Big Data - as a concept, as a term and, yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream. First, here are a few, well, data points: Big Data was a featured topic this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a report titled "Big Data, Big Impact." In March, the federal government announced $200 million in research programs for Big Data computing.

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.

David Suzuki: The economic benefits of tackling climate change Comments (2) By David Suzuki, October 2, 2012 David Suzuki. The failure of world leaders to act on the critical issue of global warming is often blamed on economic considerations. Over and over, we hear politicians say they can't spend our tax dollars on environmental protection when the economy is so fragile. Putting aside the absurdity of prioritizing a human-created and adaptable tool like the economy over caring for everything that allows us to survive and be healthy, let's take a look at the economic reality. A new scientific report concludes that climate change is already costing the world $1.2 trillion a year and is eating up 1.6 per cent of global GDP, and rising. It's also killing at least 400,000 people every year, mainly in developing countries. That's not counting the 4.5 million people a year who die from air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.

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.

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.

The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web.

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

Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) is a Java-based application for qualitative category-based content analysis. It serves two purposes: coding statements of actors into categories, and converting these structured data into networks that are readable by UCINET, visone and other network-analytic software packages. The software can extract either bipartite (affiliation) networks or adjacency networks. It is complementary to semantic network analysis applications because it neither relies on algorithms for automatic text processing, nor does it focus on the internal meaning or mental representation of a single text or document. Instead, tags are applied to the text data by manual inspection, thus rendering it more flexible, yet at the same time more work-intensive. DNA can be used to code a large body of text documents and then convert them into graphs. The application is currently being developed, tested and heavily used in my dissertation research project on German pension politics. Updates will be posted here as soon as something has been published. If you use DNA, I would love to hear from you about your project (if possible, via the DNA-help mailing list). For more information about the software, please consult the documentation or obtain a free copy from the download page.

GeoPlatform.gov/gulfresponse is a new online tool that provides you with near-real time information about the response effort. Developed by NOAA with the EPA, U.S. Coast Guard, and the Department of Interior, the site offers you a "one-stop shop" for spill response information. The site integrates the latest data the federal responders have about the oil spill's trajectory with fishery area closures, wildlife data and place-based Gulf Coast resources - such as pinpointed locations of oiled shoreline and current positions of deployed research ships - into one customizable interactive map.

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.

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.

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.

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 may sound strange for the CEO of an investment management firm to say this, but managing your career well is much more important than managing your investments well. Good investment management - using low-cost ETFs and low-fee advice - can mean higher returns in your investment portfolio. Over time, that might add up a lot of money, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars on larger portfolios. But the economic rewards that follow from good career decisions in the technology industry are potentially much larger. Today, Wealthfront is launching a Startup Compensation Tool to help our clients with that part of their financial lives: their careers. The Tool offers data on the tech startup job market, including cash compensation and equity packages for a range of jobs, so that you can maximize the return on your career. You can embed the Tool by using the toolbar at the bottom."

He knew what that meant: this ad wasn't being shown to every person who read that page. It was being targeted to him in particular. Tax-exempt groups like Crossroads GPS have become among the biggest players in this year's election.  They're often called "dark money" groups, because they can raise accept unlimited amounts of money and never have to disclose their donors.

twittpoll.com is the opinion channel of twitter. By following @twittpoll you get the newest polls from twittpoll.com. You can vote on a poll for 24 hours. After that you will receive the overall result within your twitter account.