Google as a Fact Deliverer
May 31, 2013
I read “Google Adds Nutrition Info for over 1,000 Foods to Search Results.” According to the write up, “Google is incorporating nutrition data into search; beginning today, results will include “extensive” details on calories, carbohydrates, proteins, sugars, and other relevant food info.” How significant is the fact delivery adjustment? I think it is pretty important. Google can shape content based on its numerical recipes to advance an agenda via search results. Just as Google is influencing the perception of self driving vehicles and commercially sponsored connectivity in the US and Africa, Google’s ability to push buttons and spin dials in the information world will have interesting consequences.
Stephen E Arnold, May 31, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Employee Rights Regarding Social Networks Passwords and Login Information
May 31, 2013
The article BYOD Policy: Employee Rights to Social Media Privacy is Paramount on PC Advisor, advises companies on the ideal way to approach social media privacy of its employees. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies are now often legal documents with a privacy section outlining employee rights. Any attempt by an employer to access ISP’s or internet service providers can lead to a fine or imprisonment. The article explains,
“There is a legal precedent favoring employee rights: Pietrylov. Hillstone Restaurant Group in 2009, whereby a couple of employees created a MySpace page to complain to registered members about the company. Managers allegedly pressured one member, another employee, to give up her log-in ID and password to access the MySpace page. The two employees that created the MySpace page were outed and fired, yet the court upheld the jury’s verdict that Hillstone was liable for violations of the SCA.”
Janco Associates, a management-consulting firm, has a 14-page BYOD policy. But the underlying message is simple: the employer must not attempt to access the employees private social networks. Even requesting login information is dangerous because the burden falls on the employer to prove that they did not coerce the employee for the information. Being cautious and viewing employees private information as sacrosanct may be the easiest ways to avoid legal issues. To learn more about planning a safe and constructive social media strategy, visit ArnoldIT.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 31, 2013
If you are interested in gourmet food and spirits, read Gourmet De Ville.
Choosing the Right Domain Name: Short Sweet and Memorable
May 31, 2013
The article on Search Engine Journal titled How Your Domain Name Will Impact SEO & Social Media Marketing delves into what’s in a name. For some time keywords were the most sought after names but that has recently become less of a factor, having been replaced in importance by brandable domain names. The article explains how to choose,
“Your domain name must be easy to spell. Avoid commonly misspelled words, intentional misspellings and hyphens. Your domain name should sound like a trustworthy authority. As this research brief puts it, users “demonstrate a clear preference now for credibility and trustworthiness in a domain name.”… Keep your domain name short; 1 or 2 words is best. The top 100,000 websites, on average, have 9 characters in their domain names.”
Other tips include being unique (think Google), relevant, memorable and choosing .com over a less well-known extension. Finally, whether you use an obscure word, make up a word or combine words to make a portmanteau (like Pinterest), remember that your domain name will be the first and last thing people associate with your brand. ArnoldIT‘s staff of social media professionals also provide great tips on how to go about formulizing a social media strategy, because while your domain name is vital, it won’t matter unless people see it!
Chelsea Kerwin, May 31, 2013
If you are interested in gourmet food and spirits, read Gourmet De Ville.
Change Passwords and Administrative Statuses Before Firing Employees
May 31, 2013
The article Sacked HMV Employee, A Lesson In Social Media Security on Veronica Pullen is a cautionary tale for all business owners interested in social media. HMV, a music retailing company centered in London, learned the hard way that if you are going to fire a huge swath of staff, it might be best to take charge of the Twitter account beforehand. Fired employees began live-tweeting about the firings and badmouthing the company. The article discusses social media responsibility,
“Many business owners don’t know for sure exactly who has access to their Facebook and Twitter passwords, and if you don’t keep a tight rein on access info, you could be leaving yourself at risk too. One of the first things I do when I start working with a new client is to check who the administrators are for their Facebook Page, and who has access to Twitter.”
Even though HMV’s marketing staff eventually gained control back over the account later that day and erased the earlier posts, they didn’t count on a delighted audience taking screen shots of the inflammatory Tweets immediately after they were posted.
To avoid being put at the mercy of disgruntled employees, the article recommends paying close attention to social media account administrators and passwords. At ArnoldIT a staff of professional social media experts offer an abundance of information on implementing the right social media strategy for your business.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 31, 2013
If you are interested in gourmet food and spirits, read Gourmet De Ville.
Cloudera Falls Short in Big Data Security
May 31, 2013
Hadoop and its surrounding landscape are a big discussion point among not just the open source crowd, but also the entire discussion of enterprise data management. Cloudera is a leading contender for this interested in value-added solutions based on Hadoop. However, recent findings show that Cloudera is troubling some experts when it comes to security. Read more in the Cloud Tweaks article, “Cloudera Not Cutting It With Big Data Security.”
The article begins:
“Cloudera is, for the moment, a dominating presence in the open source Hadoop landscape; but does it have staying power? While Cloudera’s Big Data platform is the darling of the Hadoop space, they and their open source distribution competitors have so far failed to adequately address the elephant in the room: enterprise data security.”
When it comes to the enterprise, security failings cannot be easily overlooked. However, for those who are interested in harnessing the power of Hadoop, but maintaining the highest security standards, MapR recently launched a partnership with LucidWorks that does just that. MapR’s interest in LucidWorks was to bring powerful and secure analytics to Big Data through Hadoop. LucidWorks has a long record of industry trust and success, so enterprises can feel better about entrusting their data to a tested name in enterprise.
Emily Rae Aldridge, May 31, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Arnold in London: Big Data and Search
May 30, 2013
Stephen E Arnold appears in a two minute video. This program provides a summary of his main point in his lecture at the Enterprise Search Summit, May 15-16, 2013. What about Big Data magic? Watch the video here and find out. Navigate to http://youtu.be/CXap21nNjm8.
Don Anderson, May 30, 2013
Thomson Reuters Embraces the Economist Approach
May 30, 2013
One of my two or three readers sent me a link to “Thomson Reuters Hires Economist Group Chief to Head news Agency Arm.” One of the characteristics of large, traditional publishing companies is that when one executive is needed, the go-to source for a qualified person is another traditional publishing company. Thomson Reuters has returned somewhat lackluster revenue growth in the last few years. Will the Economist approach change the course of the aircraft carrier?
According to the write up:
Rashbass, a former managing director of Economist.com who became chief executive in 2008, said that Reuters was well positioned to drive commercial growth.
We agree. Now the task is to deliver revenues, not magazines. Lord Thomson of Fleet is probably watching and hoping for greater success for his outfit.
Stephen E Arnold, May 30, 2013
Sponsored by Augmentext
Parsing and Coding Guide to Extract Main Sentence Topics
May 30, 2013
The article An Efficient Way to Extract the Main Topics from a Sentence on The Tokenizer, explores methods of parsing sentences to get the correct results. The author, using Python, found the while the results he uncovered were correct, the performance speed was not up to par. The article explains some of his technique, which involved a mixture of parsing and coding. When it was discovered that parsing might go farther than required,
“For example CYK algorithm has the complexity of O(n^3 * |G|) !…Full-parsing was a bit of an overkill for what I wanted to achieve.First, I decided to define my own Part of Speech tagger. Luckily I found this article which was very useful. Second, I decided to define some “Semi-CFG”, which holds the patterns of the Noun Phrases. So in one sentence – My code just tags the sentence with my tagger, then searches for NP patterns in the sentence.”
The article also provides a summary of the coding utilized. For example, tokenize_sentence equals splitting a sentence into single words, whereas extract equals splitting the sentence, tagging it, and searching for patterns. The article concludes that parsing, while the ideal method, sometimes slows down the process too much. All handy information for the search developer’s notebook.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Use and Misuse of p Values
May 30, 2013
The article Friends Don’t Let Friends Calculate p-values (Without Fully Understanding Them) on The Scottbot irregular blog is about p-values, the probability of a statistic being significant. The danger of misuse of p-values is the point of the article. Wikipedia lists 7 typical ways p-values are misrepresented, including Lindley’s paradox and the prosecutor’s fallacy. The blog uses the example a coin toss to explain further.
“Calculating how often 10 coin-tosses of a fair coin will result in a 7/3 split (or 8/2 or 9/1 or 10/0) will give you a different result than if you calculated how often waiting until the third tails will give you a 7/3 split (or 8/3 or 9/3 or 10/3 or 11/3 or 12/3 or…). The space of possibilities changes, the actual p-value of your experiment changes, based on assumptions built into your experimental design.”
What is not mentioned in an experiment can be incredibly significant, and that makes it possible for people to manipulate data into saying very different things. If you are interested in p-values, you should certainly read this article in its entirety, and then go back and check your math and your assumptions.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Richard Hickman Can Restore Deleted Snapchat Pictures For a Price
May 30, 2013
The article Some Jerk Has Figured Out a Way to Recover Your “Deleted” Snapchat Photos, on BetaBeat reports that a once safe space has now been made dangerous by a Utah security firm. By altering the extension on the deleted pictures (which are in reality just being stored, but cloaked with the affixed “.NOMEDIA” extension) Richard Hickman found the deleted pictures on an Android phone. Hickman said,
“Then it’s most likely put into unallocated space, where here it’s actually allocated,” Hickman said. “It’s not that it’s deleted — it just isn’t mapped anymore. It says okay, that spot where that picture was stored is now available to be overwritten. That’s what would happen with a regular camera.” He wants to further ruin your life–he’s working on a way to trace the sender’s information and developing the same recovery capability for iPhones.”
Adding to the bad news for Snapchat users, Hickman has begun to offer his ability to people for a small fee ($300-$500). As if your digital footprint isn’t hard enough to erase, now “erased” data might not be really gone. While this may be of immediate concern to some people (Snapchat “sexters”), it should make us all think of the possibilities. Maybe online data never truly goes away.
Chelsea Kerwin, May 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
