Four Visualization Tools to Choose From
February 12, 2015
MakeUseOf offers us a list of graphic-making options in its “4 Data Visualization Tools for Captivating Data Journalism.” Writer Brad Jones describes four options, ranging from the quick and easy to more complex solutions. The first entry, Tableau Public, may be the best place for new users to start. The write-up tells us:
“Data visualization can be a very complex process, and as such the programs and tools used to achieve good results can be similarly complex. Tableau Public, at first glance, is not — it’s a very accommodating, intuitive piece of software to start using. Simply import your data as a text file, an Excel spreadsheet or an Access database, and you’re up and running.
“You can create a chart simply by dragging and dropping various dimensions and measures into your workspace. Figuring out exactly how to produce the sort of visualizations you’re looking for might take some experimentation, but there’s no great challenge in creating simple charts and graphs.
“That said, if you’re looking to go further, Tableau Public can cater to you. It’ll take some time on your part to really understand the breadth of what’s on offer, but it’s a matter of learning a skill rather than the program itself being difficult to use.”
The next entry is Google Fusion Tables, which helpfully links to other Google services, and much of its process is automated. The strengths of Infoactive are its ability to combine datasets and a wealth of options to create cohesive longer content. Rounding out the list is R, which Jones warns is “obtuse and far from user friendly”; it even requires a working knowledge of JavaScript and its own proprietary language to make the most of its capabilities. However, he says there is simply nothing better for producing exactly what one needs.
Cynthia Murrell, February 12, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Lexalytics Now Offers Intention Analysis
February 12, 2015
Lexalytics is going beyond predicting consumers’ feelings, or sentiment analysis, to anticipating their actions with what they call “intention analysis.” Information Week takes a look at the feature, soon to be a premium service for the company’s Semantria platform, in “Big Data Tool Analyzes Intentions: Cool or Creepy?” Writer Jeff Bertolucci consulted Lexalytics founder and CEO Jeff Catlin, and writes:
Catlin explained via email how intention analysis software would deconstruct the following tweet: “I’ve been saving like crazy for Black Friday. iPhone 6 here I come!”
“There are no words like ‘buy’ or ‘purchase’ in this tweet, even though their intention is to purchase an iPhone,” wrote Catlin. Here’s how an intention analysis tool would tag the tweet:
– intention = “buy”
– intended object = “iPhone”
– intendee = “I”
Grammar-parsing technology is the engine that makes intention analysis work.
“Intention is kind of the sexy feature, but the grammar parser is the key that makes it go, the ability to understand what people are talking about, regardless of content type,” said Catlin. “We’ve built a grammar-parser for Twitter, which deals with the fact that there’s bad punctuation, weird capitalization, and things like that.”
Companies can use the technology to determine buying patterns, of course, and may use it to ramp up personalized advertising. Another potential market is that of law enforcement, where agents can use the tool to monitor social media for potential threats.
Lexalytics has been leaders in the sentiment analysis field for years, and counts big tech names like Oracle and Microsoft among their clients. Designed to integrate with third-party applications, their analysis software chugs along in the background at many data-related organizations. Founded in 2003, Lexalytics is headquartered in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Cynthia Murrell, February 12, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
SharePoint Development Firms Are Big Business
February 12, 2015
SharePoint is a big contender in the world of enterprise, and it is not just big business for Microsoft, but for lots of other firms that do consulting or add-on work. MarketWired has listed the best SharePoint consulting firms that are off to a good start in 2015. Read the full list in their story, “10 Top SharePoint Development Firms Named By bestwebdesignagencies.com for January 2015.”
The article begins:
“bestwebdesignagencies.com has named the ten best SharePoint consulting companies for the month of January 2015. The ratings consist of web design solution providers which have years of experience in providing remarkable solutions. The ratings are created through a thorough examination process which involves the inspection and benchmarking of top competing companies to establish which are most effective at supplying their solutions.”
This proves that there is a great need for extra help when it comes to SharePoint installations. Stephen E. Arnold provides some of that help to his readers on his Web site ArnoldIT.com. He has made a career out of all things search, including SharePoint. In fact, his SharePoint feed highlights the latest news, tips, and tricks that user and managers will find helpful when trying to navigate a SharePoint installation, on any budget.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 12, 2015
Enterprise Search: Security Remains a Challenge
February 11, 2015
Download an open source enterprise search system or license a proprietary system. Once the system has been installed, the content crawled, the index built, the interfaces set up, and the system optimized the job is complete, right?
Not quite. Retrofitting a keyword search system to meet today’s security requirements is a complex, time consuming, and expensive task. That’s why “experts” who write about search facets, search as a Big Data system, and search as a business intelligence solution ignore security or reassure their customers that it is no big deal. Security is a big deal, and it is becoming a bigger deal with each passing day.
There are a number of security issues to address. The easiest of these is figuring out how to piggyback on access controls provided by a system like Microsoft SharePoint. Other organizations use different enterprise software. As I said, using access controls already in place and diligently monitored by a skilled security administrator is the easy part.
A number of sticky wickets remain; for example:
- Some units of the organization may do work for law enforcement or intelligence entities. There may be different requirements. Some are explicit and promulgated by government agencies. Others may be implicit, acknowledged as standard operating procedure by those with the appropriate clearance and the need to know.
- Specific administrative content must be sequestered. Examples range from information assembled for employee health or compliance requirements for pharma products or controlled substances.
- Legal units may require that content be contained in a managed system and administrative controls put in place to ensure that no changes are introduced into a content set, access is provided to those with specific credential, or kept “off the radar” as the in house legal team tries to figure out how to respond to a discovery activity.
- Some research units may be “black”; that is, no one in the company, including most information technology and security professionals are supposed to know where an activity is taking place, what the information of interest to the research team is, and specialized security steps be enforced. These can include dongles, air gaps, and unknown locations and staff.
An enterprise search system without NGIA security functions is like a 1960s Chevrolet project car. Buy it ready to rebuild for $4,500 and invest $100,000 or more to make it conform to 2015’s standards. Source: http://car.mitula.us/impala-project
How do enterprise search systems deal with these access issues? Are not most modern systems positioned to index “all” content? Is the procedures for each of these four examples part of the enterprise search systems’ administrative tool kit?
Based on the research I conducted for CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access and my other studies of enterprise search, the answer is, “No.”
IBM Layoffs or Resource Action Numbers
February 11, 2015
I keep looking for information about Watson. That’s the super smart search system pegged to generate a billion in revenue in a year or so. I came across a fascinating analysis of IBM’s layoff in my quest for Watson info. The article is “Which IBM Layoff Numbers Add Up?” The write up is a collection of estimates about how many IBM professionals and contractors have an opportunity to find their future elsewhere.
One comment jumped out for me:
63,000: The number of current employees in excess of what IBM’s business model can sustain, according to an analysis by David Ing, a former president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences (and former IBMer)posted here. IBM today should have about 350,000 workers; it’s current staff numbers are at about 413,000.
It looks to me as if this “expert” suggests that IBM has 63,000 people which the company cannot keep in the flock.
Watson, what’s your analysis? The Business News Network offers a possible response to this question. How does financial engineering sound? I think the phrase was “total disaster.”
Stephen E Arnold, February 11, 2015
Watson to Learn about the Samurai Way of Lingo
February 11, 2015
I am taking language lessons. Believe me. At age 70, I marvel at how my memory has changed as I drift toward total obsolescence. My language instructor is a multi degreed human who is a native speaker with a good command of English. I did not consider hiring an investment firm to teach me a new language. Watson is, by golly, going to learn Japanese and work wonders in next generation computing.
IBM, however, appears to see the world through different lenses tinted with the glow of the recent Resource Actions. For background, see the employee comments on the Endicott Alliance site.
I learned in “IBM’s Watson Turns Japanese and Moves Into Robots” that:
IBM and SoftBank Telecom have agreed to bring the technology behind Watson — the IBM computer that won the television game show “Jeopardy!” — into Japan.
There you go. SoftBank and its telco outfit. Softbank is thrilled with the tie up:
Naoyuki Nakagaki, a spokesman for SoftBank Telecom, said in an email that his company would look to the Japanese-enabled Watson to “create new value in the Japanese market.” The company expects to make both business and consumer products. “We believe Watson will help differentiate SoftBank Telecom’s product offerings among telecommunications and other commoditized services,” he said by email.
My view is that Watson will have to generate a lot of money to hit the magical figure of $10 billion in revenue once projected for the Lucene based system.
If the deal does not yield big bucks, I wonder if the executives involved in this commercialization of near magical software will have to learn about bushi, the rules, and the actions expected when a defeat has been suffered.
I had a Japanese customer who delighted in telling me about various samurai customs. He alleged that he was a direct descendent of a samurai. The founder of the company of which he was president also shared this background. Believe me, I made sure I did not screw up with this outfit or my customer who was the managing director of a big Japanese outfit.
I recall his explaining suppuku, which some Americans call harakiri. Suppuku involves killing oneself to release the samurai’s spirit to the afterlife. The idea is that a failure is atoned in a fairly messy way.
According to Asian History,
The more common form of seppuku was simply a single horizontal cut. Once the cut was made, the second would decapitate the suicide. A more painful version, called jumonji giri, involved both a horizontal and vertical cut. The performer of jumonji giri then waited stoically to bleed to death, rather than being dispatched by a second.
Question: How would Watson commit suppuku? I can figure out what the executives should do, but I am not sure a computer, even one as super smart as Watson, could pull its plug.
Well, maybe Watson could. It can talk, calculate, create recipes with tamarind, cure cancer, and do financial cartwheels for investment firms. Pulling a plug seems easy.
Will an IBM pull Watson’s plug when the billions fail to materialize in the next quarter or two?
Stephen E Arnold, February 11, 2015
Facebook Gains Natural Language Capacity with Via AI Acquisition
February 11, 2015
Facebook is making inroads into the natural language space, we learn from “Facebook Buys Wit.ai, Adds Natural Language Knowhow” at ZDNet. Reporter Larry Dignan tells us the social-media giant gained more than 6,000 developers in the deal with the startup, who has created an open-source natural language platform with an eye to the “Internet of Things.” He writes:
“Wit.ai is an early stage startup that in October raised $3 million in seed financing with Andreessen Horowitz as the lead investor. Wit.ai aims to create a natural language platform that’s open sourced and distributed. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but indicates what Facebook is thinking. As the social network is increasingly mobile, it will need natural language algorithms and knowhow to add key features. Rival Google has built in a bevy of natural language tools into Android and Apple has its Siri personal assistant.”
Though the Wit.ai platform is free for open data projects, it earns its keep through commercial instances and queries-per-day charges. Wit.ai launched in October 2013, and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
Cynthia Murrell, February 11, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Ross Delivers a Digital Lawyer
February 11, 2015
Text mining and predictive analytics are hailed as the best technological advances to hit law practices since paralegals. What is the next big thing for legal firms? Powered By Ross might have the answer to “The Future Of Legal Research.” Powered By ROSS is a spartan Web site that is following the current designs used by many Internet businesses. It begs to wonder if the product is legitimize, especially with very little contact information. Reading the product’s description, though, is another story.
ROSS is an artificial intelligence attorney that improves research. It can understand natural language questions and respond with citations and suggested reading. How can ROSS do this? Read more of the description below:
“ROSS is built upon Watson, IBM’s cognitive computer. Almost all of the legal information that you rely on is unstructured data—it is in the form of text, and not neatly situated in the rows and columns of a database. Watson is able to mine facts and conclusions from over a billion of these text documents a second. Meanwhile, existing solutions rely on search technologies that simply find keywords.”
It was only a mater of time before Watson was used for legal research. It still remains suspicious, however, that ROSS has not been talked about more, even by IBM. IBM is looking for all the positive publicity it can get to increase sales. ROSS pushes it a little hard with a JFK quote about the future. While ROSS might be real, it is light years from the systems described in cyber osint at www.xenky.com/cyberosint
Whitney Grace, February 11, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Cyber Threats Boost Demand for Next Generation System
February 10, 2015
President Obama’s announcement of a new entity to combat the deepening threat from cyber attacks adds an important resource to counter cyber threats.
The decision reflects the need for additional counter terrorism resources in the wake of the Sony and Anthem security breaches. The new initiative serves both Federal and commercial sectors’ concerns with escalating cyber threats.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a public release: “National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center mission is to reduce the likelihood and severity of incidents that may significantly compromise the security and resilience of the Nation’s critical information technology and communications networks.”
For the first time, a clear explanation of the software and systems that perform automated collection and analysis of digital information is available. Stephen E. Arnold’s new book is “CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access” was written to provide information about advanced information access technology. The new study was published by Beyond Search on January 21, 2015.
The author is Stephen E Arnold, a former executive at Halliburton Nuclear Services and Booz, Allen & Hamilton . He said: “The increase in cyber threats means that next generation systems will play a rapidly increasing part in law enforcement and intelligence activities.”
The monograph explains why next generation information access systems are the logical step beyond keyword search. Also, the book provides the first overview of the architecture of cyber OSINT systems. The monograph provides profiles of more than 20 systems now available to government entities and commercial organizations. The study includes a summary of the year’s research behind the monograph and a glossary of the terms used in cyber OSINT.
Cyber threats require next generation information access systems due to proliferating digital attacks. According to Chuck Cohen, lieutenant with a major Midwestern law enforcement agency and adjunct instructor at Indiana University, “This book is an important introduction to cyber tools for open source information. Investigators and practitioners needing an overview of the companies defining this new enterprise software sector will want this monograph.”
In February 2015, Arnold will keynote a conference on CyberOSINT held in the Washington, DC area. Attendance to the conference is by invitation only. Those interested in the a day long discussion of cyber OSINT can write benkent2020 at yahoo dot com to express their interest in the limited access program.
Arnold added: “Using highly-automated systems, governmental entities and corporations can detect and divert cyber attacks and take steps to prevent assaults and apprehend the people that are planning them. Manual methods such as key word searches are inadequate due to the volume of information to be analyzed and the rapid speed with which threats arise.”
Robert David Steele, a former CIA professional and the co-creator of the Marine Corps. intelligence activity said about the new study: “NGIA systems are integrated solutions that blend software and hardware to address very specific needs. Our intelligence, law enforcement, and security professionals need more than brute force keyword search. This report will help clients save hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Information about the new monograph is available at www.xenky.com/cyberosint.
Ken Toth, February 10, 2015
Google Health Info: An Old Fashioned Solution to Misleading Content
February 10, 2015
Short honk: I want to call attention to “A Remedy for Your Health-Related Questions: Health Info in the Knowledge Graph .” According to the write up:
So starting in the next few days, when you ask Google about common health conditions, you’ll start getting relevant medical facts right up front from the Knowledge Graph. We’ll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is—whether it’s critical, if it’s contagious, what ages it affects, and more. For some conditions you’ll also see high-quality illustrations from licensed medical illustrators. Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor.
Makes sense, right?
I find this interesting because it may be the first step to cleaning up outputs that are disinformation, misinformation, or reformations of other information. Will this have an impact on other Google activities? My hunch is that this is an important shift at the GOOG.
What’s the value to an advertiser? To a parent seeking info about a child’s malady? To a Google party with access to the usage info? To Google’s “Digital Gutenberg” services?
Stephen E Arnold, February 10, 2015
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