Stop Typing Linguastat Does It For You
March 22, 2014
Web content is a way for companies to attract attention and keep the organization in relevant social media feeds and search results. It is time consuming to generate content. Linguastat claims it offers a solution combining the power of big data and content.
Linguastat tells users that it will turn “haystacks into gold.” It is an interesting tagline, but not as believable as Linguastat’s software description:
“Built on proprietary natural language and artificial intelligence our cloud-based Content Transformation Platform ™ reads, understands, and transforms the vast amount of Big Data found in the world and automatically publishes unique, insightful, and optimized digital stories…at massive scale…at a fraction of the cost!”
If your company is tired of hiring third-parties or using valuable employee time developing Web content, Linguastat offers a solution. It will annotate and analyze your big data and the software’s AI will generate “optimized digital stories.” It also saves typing time and spares people from inflamed carpal tunnel syndrome.
Without seeing the finished product and the less than appealing “turning haystacks to gold” tagline, it is wise to be skeptical about Linguastat. They might be worth researching, however, and getting a trial run.
Whitney Grace, March 22, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Glass Myths: No Mention of Self Assembly
March 21, 2014
I find Glass interesting. I find the work of Babak Amirparviz (also publishing as Babak Parviz and some variants) thought provoking. The combination of Dr. Amirparviz and Glass is fascinating. I read “The Top 10 Google Glass Myths.” I did not read about a woman cited for driving with Google Glass, stories about bar fights among non Glass wearers and Glass owners, or Google’s own how to not be a “glasshole.” Tasty, right?
In the myths there was no mention of these myths or semi factoids:
- Glass is part of a larger project involving self assembly of devices within a human body
- The contact lens is a version of work done at the University of Washington and partially supported by Microsoft
- The bioengineering work requires specialized facilities, not a run of the mill Silicon Valley cube
- The health research involves protein manipulation that could maybe permit fixing up genetic issues like hereditary health time bombs
- The Google robot acquisitions have a relationship to the nanotech work underway at Google.
Since no one knows about these five points, I suppose these are not really myths. The Google myths are more like marketing statements, not comments anchored in the engineering that underpins Google Glass and contact lens. Not worth worrying about since nanotech is not search. Google is a search company, not a synthetic biology outfit.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2014
Tech Knows Best Asserts a Google Employee
March 21, 2014
I highly recommend that you read Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Bluff (La Bluff technologique) (1988) available from Amazon and at this link as of March 21, 2014.
I read “Occupy Founder Calls on Obama to Appoint Eric Schmidt ‘CEO of America’.” According to the write up, Justine Tunney, a Google engineer (who must be really smart by definition, right?) “is demanding that the tech industry take over the US government.”
Like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” I find the idea interesting. No doubt Mr.Schmidt is flattered by one of the Google elite’s idea. According to the write up:
Yasha Levine, a reporter for Silicon Valley publication Pando Daily, noted the seeming discrepancy between Tunney’s former anarchist beliefs and her current role at Google. Since her arrival at the firm, he writes, “she has become an astroturfer par excellence for the company, including showing up in a comment section to bash my reporting on Google’s vast for-profit surveillance operation.”
Amusing in a way. Now back to Ellul. His informed monograph points out that solving a problem via technology and technologists may not deliver the solution anticipated. I am confident that Justine Tunney is familiar with Ellul’s viewpoint and rejects it.
An old French theologian-philosopher is definitely not Google material. I would suggest that the alleged recommendations to retire all government employees with full pensions, transfer administrative authority to the tech industry, and appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America are rational within the Googley world.
For an old person in rural Kentucky, the ideas seem to ignore Jacques Ellul’s insights and remind me of the crazy lists that IDC type writers cook up to seem informed.
Around the cast iron stove in Harrod’s Creek, the ideas might be greeted with considerable skepticism. If you work at an outfit that wants to defeat death and build a phone inside a human body via self assembly nanotech, Justine Tunney’s ideas make perfect sense. At least that’s my assumption.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2014
Another Week, Another Enterprise Search System
March 21, 2014
Cloud? Check.
Azure chip consultant reference? Check.
Social angle? Check.
Support for distributed information? Check.
Consumerized interface? Check.
Reference to value? Check.
Automatic alerts? Check.
Customer reference? Check.
Big company pedigree? Check.
Open sourciness? Check.
Exotic technology? Check.
There you have the recipe for a new enterprise search system, at least according to eWeek’s “Highspot Brings Machine Learning to Enterprise Search.” Highpoint’s Web site describes itself this way:
Built for the cloud era, Highspot uses advanced machine learning to help organizations capture, share, and cultivate their most valuable working knowledge.
The pricing information, omitted from the eWeek story just as azure chip consultants omit enterprise search fees, begins at free and comes out of the gate at $20 per user per month or $240 per user per year. For an organization with 400 users, the annual fee works out to about $96,000 for an open source, machine-learning system, a bargain compared to the Google Search Appliance but more expensive than downloading Solr, Searchdaimon, or Elasticsearch and having one staff get search up and running. A less expensive option that works reasonably well is dtSearch, but you need to love the color blue for this search system. If you want an appliance, check out Maxxcat’s systems. These are far less expensive than other appliances, and the new systems are easy to set up and deploy. For cloud action, take a look at Blossom Software’s solution. Chances are your state, country, or municipal government is using the Blossom system built by a former Bell Labs’ whiz kid.
Net net: The enterprise search market is flooded with options. With big, waddling outfits like HP and IBM getting increasingly desperate to make their billion dollar bets pay off, you have high end options as well as free downloadable systems from organizations in Denmark, Norway, Russia, and elsewhere.
Will the pricing hold if a business licensee points the system at 50 million documents? My hunch is that there will be some fine print. Google charges about $900,000 for its appliance capable of processing tens of millions of documents with three years of support. You can check the latest US government discount prices at www.gsaadvantage.gov. Just search for “Google Search Appliance” and peruse the government’s price. A commercial price may vary.
The key is that the engines of many systems are open source. The “solution” is software wrappers and checklists that hit the marketing hot buttons. Keep up with Highspot via the company’s blog at http://blog.highspot.com/.
Stephen E Arnold, March 21, 2014
Infogistics: Slow Update?
March 21, 2014
Upgrading system software can take a long time, especially depending on how large the update is. For instance, a small OS update requires less time than upgrading to a brand new OS. The same situation applies to an individual vs. larger groups. Upgrading an individual will not take as long as doing an entire organization. The case in point is that Infogistics has been upgrading its RealTerm Search software and hardware since 2006.
The two sentence statement explains:
“Infogistics regrets that Infonetware.com will be down until December 10th 2006 for a software and hardware upgrade. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this outage, which was caused by an unforeseen hardware failure.”
Either the update stopped responding or they took an extended holiday vacation and decided to never return. Where did the company go? The company Web site offers less insight as its last update was in 2005, when it posted a note about communication problems due to moving complications. Did Infogistics leave its clients in the lurch?
Looks like the “power through knowledge” is offline.
Whitney Grace, March 21, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Infobright at the Mobile World Congress Focuses on Big Data and the Internet of Things
March 21, 2014
The article titled 2014 Mobile World Congress Highlights—Musings of an MWC Veteran on Infobright offers some of the sunny spots from this year’s Mobile World Congress. The event has been held in Barcelona for the past 8 years, and this years boasted some 70,000 attendees and keynote speaker Mark Zuckerberg. It was also, as the article describes, Infobright’s first year exhibiting on the trade show floor. The article explores such areas of interest as the Internet of Things, “monetization” and the boosted attendance of mobile commerce vendors. The article states,
“There was a noticeable increase in the presence of mobile commerce vendors. Again, this ranged from transaction processing infrastructure to user experience applications for transactions, making payments, transferring funds, etc. The major credit card vendors’ presence was highly visible in this area. In underserved/under developed parts of the world, mobile platforms create a tremendous opportunity for enabling the movement of money and commerce.”
In answer to the self-imposed question, what does Infobright have to do with MWC, the article exclaims, Big Data, that’s what! The article describes the “avalanche” of data that all of this technology revolves around. Infobright promises that it is just the man for the job of analyzing big data with the flexibility and speed necessary. Infobright offers a solution if you want to query machine data.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 21, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Appen Uses Humans to Improve Non-English Search Relevance
March 21, 2014
The Appen explanation titled Query Relevance delves into the work that the language, search and social technology company has done recently to improve natural language search. Linguist PhD Julie Vonwiller founded the company in 1996 with her engineer husband Chris Vonwiller. In 2010, Appen merged with Butler Hill Group and began making strides in language resources, search, and text. The article explores the issues at hand when it comes to natural language search,
“Even a query as seemingly simple as the word “blue” could be looking for any of the following: a description or picture of the color, a television show, a credit card, a misspelling of an electronic cigarette brand, or a rap artist. By analyzing what the most likely user intent is and returning valid and appropriate results in the correct order of relevance, we encourage a relationship whereby the user will return again and again to our client’s search engine.”
Appen has established a “global network” of locals who are trained experts in the language and local culture. This team allows for the most accurate interpretations of queries from regional users. The company is continually working to improve their processes, both through collaboration with users and advances in the program to provide the best possible results.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 21, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Conference 2014 Keynote
March 21, 2014
The opening keynote of SharePoint Conference often helps set the tone for the event and signals what Microsoft wants to focus on in coming initiatives. This year kept with the usual pattern. Jeff Teper delivered the keynote, which is available to watch online on, “Keynote: Connect. Reimagine. Transform.”
The summary of the video says:
“Join Jeff Teper and the Microsoft SharePoint team for the opening keynote of SharePoint Conference 2014. The keynote will introduce the main themes of the conference and highlight new innovations across SharePoint, Yammer and Office 365.”
Stephen E. Arnold also keeps a close eye on all things SharePoint. He has made a career out of following search and reporting on its highlights on his Web site, ArnoldIT.com. One of the keys to a successful SharePoint deployment is being able to update and customize successfully, so staying on top of changes is essential.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 21, 2014
Open Source Management: A Work in Progress
March 20, 2014
I have attended a couple of “open source” events over the year. Most of the attendees are male, serious, bright, and similar to the fellows in my advanced high school math class and our math club.
The few women present were notable because there were so darned few of them. I attended the first Lucene Revolution with two exceptionally competent females, one a law librarian and one a PhD in operations management.
My recollection is that no one from Lucid, the sponsoring organizations, or the general attendance group paid either much, if any, attention, even when I introduced them.
As I recall, one of the then-senior executives of Lucid Imagination (now Lucid Works) blew off suggestions made by my PhD colleague. It was not what the Lucid person said. It was the facial expression that communicated, “Wow, do I have to listen to yet another idea from a PhD from Kentucky. I have better things to do with my really valuable time.”
I found the meeting amusing.
The female PhD did not share my point of view. Eighteen months later, that male Silicon Valley “superstar” was sucked by Lucid’s revolving door and spit into the ever sunny Silicon Valley job market. My team and I moved on, concluding that at least one open source search company was pretty much like my high school classmates in the math club. Others? Who knows? Who cares?
So what?
Well, I read a fascinating East Coasty article in the April Harper’s Magazine. The story is “The Office and its Ends”, a book extract from Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. Harper’s is into the Trotula recycling approach to content. Nikil Saval and his publisher Doubleday are, no doubt, thrilled by the East Coasty endorsement. Book sales are the name of the game.
Here’s the passage I noted. The extract is describing the workplace at GitHub, where much search source codes resides. The GitHub begins on page 14. You will have to snag a hard copy of the library on a newsstand, even though these are getting hard to find in rural Kentucky. Good hunting, gentle reader.
GitHub seems to be a case example of how to do the workplace.
The hook is in my opinion:
Chacon [the GitHub CIO and a founder] described this [the GitHub workplace approach] as having developed from the open source model: ‘You have all these projects that you can work on, and people choose the crossover of what they’re good at… Leadership can be ephemeral.’
No doubt about leadership ephemerality in open source companies. The whizzing of the revolving door can be discerned in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky.
This passage struck me as one to underline:
Yet Scott Chacon, one of the company’s founders and its current CIO, kept referring to the value of employees’ being able to ‘serendipitously encounter’ one another throughout the workday. When I [Mr. Saval] asked Chacon how this was supposed to occur if most of the staff wasn’t actually required to come into the office, he explained that he wanted these encounters to be rare, once every month or two, and to ‘deeper interactions.’…’That’s way more valuable to me that ‘I saw this person when I was going to the bathroom,’ or ‘I had to wait in line behind them when I was waiting for food.’ It seemed to me [Mr. Saval] a valid rebuke to the lazier ideas the proliferated in office-design-speak around the world.
I think Mr. Saval sees GitHub as a model for other companies to emulate. There you go. A model for alleged harassment.
By chance, I came across a CNNMoney article “GitHub Suspends Founder over Gender Harassment Claims.” I have no idea if CNN was able to put sufficient resources into researching GitHub because most of the “news” efforts are directed at a missing airplane story. Nevertheless, I will assume the write up is semi-accurate. Here’s the snippet I noted:
“I’ve been harassed by ‘leadership’ at GitHub for two years,” she wrote. “I’m incredibly happy to moving to join a more healthy work environment, with a team who doesn’t tolerate harassment of their peers.”
I circled this passage as well:
It’s hardly the first time a female entrepreneur has pointed out sexism in tech. Last year, tech developer Adria Richards posted to Twitter after taking offense to a sexual reference made by male attendees at tech conference PyCon. One of the men who made the reference was fired, and in a bizarre twist, Richards was also fired for “publicly shaming the offenders.” In another incident at annual tech conference TechCrunch Disrupt, entrepreneurs came under fire for pitching controversial apps…
Several observations:
- I wonder how Mr. Saval perceives this situation. I am not sure the GitHub workplace is where I want my daughter to work. If Mr. Saval has a daughter, a wife, a female cousin, I wonder if he would use his connections at GitHub to get one of these females a job.
- I wonder if the Lucid Imagination former executive is aware that my PhD colleague could have interpreted his treatment of her as untoward behavior. My hunch is that the disconnect between this Silicon Valley warrior an an African American PhD was so great that bridging the gap was impossible. I wonder if the fellow from Lucid Imagination even knew there was a gap.
- What does this Janus-like approach at GitHub say about open source management methods? I have a few ideas, but I will tuck them in my pocket for now.
To wrap up, the East Coasty approach to open source is intriguing. How will other open source companies manage. Will the guy-centric math club approach change? At my 50th high school reunion, the math club folks sat by themselves. Some behaviors are consistent through time I believe.
The major challenge open source faces is management. I will clutch this assertion until someone demonstrates that whiz bang, I’m too busy, my plane is late methods really do deliver value to stakeholders and employees. With venture funding pouring into “open source plays”, how will these companies generate sufficient revenue to pay off the investors? Do Facebook, Google, IBM, and Yahoo have sufficient resources to buy every open source start up?
A decade ago even Google was smart enough to admit that it needed adult supervision. Even with an adult on the job, Google is a case study cornucopia; for example, the alleged relationship between a Google founder and a Glass marketer. Ample evidence appears to exist that high tech management has not found its sweet spot outside of the high school math club. If tech is the future of America’s industrial performance and open source software is the heir to proprietary software, when will management manage? One hopes in time to prevent the alleged unfortunate problems at GitHub from becoming more widespread.
Stephen E Arnold, March 20, 2014
Google: A Small Discontinuity
March 20, 2014
I read the BBC summary of Larry Page’s TED interview. You can find the BBC write up in this story: “Ted 2014: Larry Page on Google’s Robotic Future.” The statement in the allegedly accurate article I noted is [emphasis added by me]:
Mr Page was also asked about the Edward Snowden revelations, following a surprise appearance from the whistle-blower at Ted. “It is disappointing that the government secretly did this stuff and didn’t tell us about it,” said Mr Page. “It is not possible to have a democracy if we have to protect our users from the government. The government has done itself a tremendous disservice and we need to have a debate about it,” he added.
Clear enough, if accurate.
Next, I noted “US Tech Giants Knew of NSA Data Collection, Agency’s Top Lawyer Insists.” Again I don’t know if the information in the Guardian article is accurate. Nevertheless, I noted this passage:
Asked during a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.” [Rajesh De is the NSA general counsel]
The Guardian story then tosses in:
Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had “never heard” the term Prism.
A small thing. A discontinuity. Probably just a misunderstanding. It is more fun to think about Google smart watches, Google balloons, and improving “search.” Precision, recall, accuracy—hmmm.
Stephen E Arnold, March 290, 2014
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