Disinformation: A Useful Factoid
June 3, 2011
When can too much information be bad? When it comes to a group, so says Wired Science in “Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds.”
Newly-released research on crowd wisdom finds that “when test participants were told about their peers’ guesses,” test results when awry. It appears that “knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines collective wisdom.”
The results confirm one of James Surowiecki’s tenets behind crowd analytics from his 2004 book “The Wisdom of Crowds.” In it, he discusses four conditions necessary to promote the phenomenon, one of which is that each individual in the group should have private information.
The news that the information people receive influences their decision making is no revelation to advertisers and educators, who have relied on it for years. In theory, members of the group would come to valid conclusions based on good data. However, the crowd can just as easily be influenced by bad information, giving a new meaning to garbage in, garbage out.
Disinformation has another tool methinks.
Stephen E Arnold, June 3, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Ahoy, Some Pirates Wear Dresses
June 2, 2011
ReadWriteWeb reports, “Survey Finds E-Book Piracy Occurs Among a Surprising Demographic.” The Digital Entertainment Survey is conducted annually by Wiggin, a British law firm. According to it, one in eight female e-reader owners over 35 admits to downloading at least one illegal e-book copy. Quite a surprise from the older female demo!
The article observes,
“If copyright infringement is indeed becoming more popular among an age group that’s never really participated in digital piracy, that’s certainly bad news for publishers. . . . After all, it isn’t just women over 35 that are putting unlicensed content on their e-readers. Across all ages and both genders, some 29% of e-reader owners admitted that they pirate books. And for tablet owners, that number is even higher – 36%. It doesn’t stop there: 25% of these people said they planned to continue to download pirated material.
So women aren’t the only ones, but now we know many of them are indeed crooks. At least women crooks are nicer. And they read. In general, women pirates may be better dressed, more polite, and more skilled at negotiating than the average cut throat.
Cynthia Murrell, June 2, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Consultant Benchmarks Business Intelligence
May 27, 2011
Business intelligence has seen tremendous growth and with so many different companies on the market all vying for clients it can become difficult for business owners to know exactly which one will adequately fit their needs.
We learned that InetSoft is a sponsor of the Aberdeen’s Group Agile BI Benchmark Study, which provides a detailed survey and analysis of how companies are currently using their business intelligence products and how they improve.
We found the notion of agile business intelligence interesting. Traditionally business intelligence required trained specialists and programmers with the ability to convert an end user’s dreams into the cold, hard reality of a report. Today end users want to do their own report building and data analysis. In our experience, this sounds great in a pitch focused on reducing headcount. However, in some situations, flawed data leads to even more suspect business decisions.
We learned from the announcement about the study that:
Agile BI is business intelligence that can rapidly adapt to meet changing business needs.
Okay.
Many of those surveyed admitted they were not delivering their business intelligence products on time and found it difficult to make timely decisions. Those companies that earned “Best In Class” were those that were able to provide fully interactive BI to their users. The write up asserted:
Managers need to get “hands-on” to interact with and manipulate data if they are to meet the shrinking timeframe for business decisions that they face.
Without building a solid foundation and taking control BI cannot be fully effective and is like a bird with no wings.
You can obtain a free complimentary copy of the report please visit http://goo.gl/3WujV. We have no idea how long the free report will be available. Act quickly.
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2011
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Will Office 365 Cloud Issues be 24/7?
May 26, 2011
As I write this, I heard about Amazon’s super reliable, scalable, elastic, whiz bang cloud service struggling to deliver a pop icon’s album to fans. I have concluded that Amazon’s service can fail and not scale. But Amazon is just one cloud marketer struggling to make the dreams of the marketing department into the reality of cloud services as ultra reliable.
Consider Microsoft, please.
If there is one rule left in the business environment, it is that you do not mess with a worker’s email. Perhaps Microsoft did not get that memo? Last week MS’s latest incarnation of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Office 365, had some serious cloud issues. According to “Microsoft’s Handling of BPOS Outage an Ill Omen for Office 365”, users saw delays totaling up to fifteen hours spread across a three-day span.
The author himself admits that it isn’t so much the outages that are the cause for concern but the manner of handling the issue by Microsoft. Not that the inhabitants of your average cube farm won’t automatically freak out over any interruption in email services, but they could rest easier if they at least had an idea of what was happening behind the scenes.
To calm the harried nerves of its customers, Microsoft created the Online Service Health Dashboard, with an intention to provide up to the minute status of cloud services and tools. If you think you can rest easy now, not so fast. The article said:
The first detailed Dashboard notification I can find on the Tech Center forum is time stamped 9:40 a.m. on Thursday. That’s two full days after the original notice. Dave Thompson notified the world about the problems, via his blog, at 6 p.m. But there were two full days of widespread intermittent email outages without any explanation from Microsoft. Yes, there were service degradation icons on the Dashboard earlier, but no explanations or ETA for a fix.
Call me naive, but what’s the point in having a notification board when it takes two days to post notifications?”
And Google? Well, its vaunted technology failed during its I/O conference when executives were chatting up the reliability of the Google cloud. Blogger.com, however, must have been on break. That service went down for 20 hours.
Welcome to the cloud, a sometimes gray area where you are not privy to the same information on controls and status you would find within an average business enterprise.
That, my friends, can be the trade-off for convenience. Besides, if your company is anything like mine, you wouldn’t be getting much more support from your in-house IT anyway.
But when I can save $11 on a hot new album, I am flexible. For work, I am not so flexible. My hunch is that others may have a similar view. What happens when cloud based search fails? I won’t be able to find my documents. Not good.
Sarah Rogers, May 26, 2011
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Holy *$@#, Facebook
May 25, 2011
Short honk: I am not a Facebookoid. I am neither surprised nor disappointed. Navigate to “47% of Facebook Walls Contain Profanity.” Here’s the factoid I found interesting:
Users are twice as likely to use profanity in a post on their Facebook Wall, versus a comment. Whereas friends are twice as likely to use profanity in a comment on a user’s Facebook Wall, versus a post.
What are friends for? Parse that.
Stephen E Arnold, May 25, 2011
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AOL: Polishing a Older Online Service
May 24, 2011
The America Online brand polishing continues. That’s no easy job, even for the “real” public relations professionals. PR is a stellar occupation. The Facebook initiative demonstrates how reliable certain “real” PR can be.
I enjoyed “AOL’s Chief Upbeat on Rebooting the Brand.” At a time when Apple is the top brand and Google a lesser top brand, maybe AOL sees an opportunity to climb up the brand rankings. Brand rankings, like the inclusions in those college league tables, are entertaining but often disconnected from reality.
The passage I found memorable was:
Q: …you mention a Web site AOL owns like tech blog Engadget, some people say, “Oh, they own that?”
A: Right. I think a lot of it was just that old perception. If people used our services, they usually had a lot of complaints about them. But about six months ago, something started to change. The difference between the last six months and probably two years ago is when people stop me now, they say: “Oh, I’m addicted to the front page of AOL. I love it. I love the new way the e-mail’s been designed.” Forget about the financial industry and forget about our stock and all that other stuff. Our number-one lead indicator of this company being successful is the people who touch our products and services actually physically seeing the level we care about internally translated externally. I think that’s starting to happen, and that’s eventually what is going to change the AOL brand.
To check the addictive aspect of AOL.com’s front page, I visited it for the first time in quite a while, maybe five or six years. Here’s what I saw:
There must be something wrong with my chemistry. Not only was I not tempted to click, I was puzzled by the skull and cross bones and the “You’ve Got: Checklist All Women Must Know.”
My hunch is that Ms. Huffington will end up running the show. Googlers with soft degrees and a few years in the land of controlled chaos are not the stuff of “reboots”. Top line revenue growth, an increase in stakeholder value, and traffic are the components of a successful reboot. PR not so much. The search experience was enhanced by Lady Gaga, which looked like Lady Gaga results on the new, consumerized Google. Maybe Google should buy AOL so there is a reunion of Googlers and a more seamless integration of that old time instant messenger magic?
Stephen E Arnold, May 24, 2011
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Search: An Information Retrieval Fukushima?
May 18, 2011
Information about the scale of the horrific nuclear disaster in Japan at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex is now becoming more widely known.
Expertise and Smoothing
My interest in the event is the engineering of a necklace of old-style reactors and the problems the LOCA (loss of coolant accident) triggered. The nagging thought I had was that today’s nuclear engineers understood the issues with the reactor design, the placement of the spent fuel pool, and the risks posed by an earthquake. After my years in the nuclear industry, I am quite confident that engineers articulated these issues. However, the technical information gets “smoothed” and simplified. The complexities of nuclear power generation are well known at least in engineering schools. The nuclear engineers are often viewed as odd ducks by the civil engineers and mechanical engineers. A nuclear engineer has to do the regular engineering stuff of calculating loads and looking up data in hefty tomes. But the nukes need grounding in chemistry, physics, and math, lots of math. Then the engineer who wants to become a certified, professional nuclear engineer has some other hoops to jump through. I won’t bore you with the details, but the end result of the process produces people who can explain clearly a particular process and its impacts.
Does your search experience emit signs of troubles within?
The problem is that art history majors, journalists, failed Web masters, and even Harvard and Wharton MBAs get bored quickly. The details of a particular nuclear process makes zero sense to someone more comfortable commenting about the color of Mona Lisa’s gown. So “smoothing” takes place. The ridges and outcrops of scientific and statistical knowledge get simplified. Once a complex situation has been smoothed, the need for hard expertise is diminished. With these simplifications, the liberal arts crowd can “reason” about risks, costs, upsides, and downsides.
A nuclear fall out map. The effect of a search meltdown extends far beyond the boundaries of a single user’s actions. Flawed search and retrieval has major consequences, many of which cannot be predicted with high confidence.
Everything works in an acceptable or okay manner until there is a LOCA or some other problem like a stuck valve or a crack in a pipe in a radioactive area of the reactor. Quickly the complexities, risks, and costs of the “smoothed problem” reveal the fissures and crags of reality.
Web search and enterprise search are now experiencing what I call a Fukushima event. After years of contentment with finding information, suddenly the dashboards are blinking yellow and red. Users are unable to find the information needed to do their job or something as basic as locate a colleague’s telephone number or office location. I have separated Web search and enterprise search in my professional work.
I want to depart for a moment and consider the two “species” of search as a single process before the ideas slip away from me. I know that Web search processes publicly accessible content, has the luxury of ignoring servers with high latency, and filtering content to create an index that meets the vendors’ needs, not the users’ needs. I know that enterprise search must handle diverse content types, must cope with security and access controls, and perform more functions that one of those two inch wide Swiss Army knives on sale at the airport in Geneva. I understand. My concern is broader is this write up. Please, bear with me.
Search, Sharing, and a Shift in Content
May 18, 2011
Sharing is caring, and Digital Inspiration’s “How People Share Content Online and with Whom?” has the numbers to prove it.
When folks want to share content with friends, 92 percent use social networks. When it comes to family, that number dips to 76 percent. Other popular ways of sharing content with friends and family are via e-mail and blogs.
So the survey begs the question, why search when you can quickly and easily ask your friends and family – people you know and trust? The implications for Google should not be underestimated. It isn’t enough to be a search engine anymore. How far behind Facebook is Google. You be the judge. Here are five Google social media efforts as noted in March 2010 by TopRank’s “Google the Social Media Company”: Google Social Search, Google Buzz, Twitter and Facebook feeds in search results, various social acquisitions, and Google Wave. The clock is ticking as market and mind share slips away.
What’s this mean? Brute force search is not likely to work in this new information sharing space.
Rita Safranek, May 18, 2011
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Tracking: Does It Matter?
May 11, 2011
A news story broke this week that was more difficult for many to ignore; it seems our beloved iPhones and iPads are paying us the same attention we lavish on them. It turns out these Apple devices keep an internal log of every cell tower or hot spot they connect to, in essence creating a map of the user’s movements for as long as ten months. It gets better. The log file is highly visible and unencrypted, making it accessible to anyone with your device in their hands.
Getting the scent. Source: http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2011/feb/07/wsweat01-beagle-found-in-a-jiffy-by-tracking-dogs-ar-760887/
This news stems from a couple of British programmers who stumbled upon said “secret” location file. In the midst of the melee that ensued from outraged consumers and lawmakers alike, I was directed to a Bloomberg article titled “Researcher: iPhone Location Data Already Used By Cops”.
Interestingly enough, a rendition of this same story has been covered by the press months ago, only featured in a different light courtesy of an individual studying forensic computing. Per the write-up: “In a post on his blog, he explains that the existence of the location database—which tracks the cell phone towers your phone has connected to—has been public in security circles for some time.
While it’s not widely known, that’s not the same as not being known at all. In fact, he has written and presented several papers on the subject and even contributed a chapter on the location data in a book that covers forensic analysis of the iPhone.”
Google I/O Toggled Off
May 11, 2011
How much does it cost to kill the Google media buzz? Give up? With its alleged $8.5 billion purchase of Skype, that’s the price. According to “Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion; Creates New Business Division,”
In its press release announcing the deal, Microsoft played up the potential synergies between Skype and its own communications offerings.
The operative word is “press release.” When the news hit, the toggle for Google I/O, the super cool conference, was flipped to “off.” Various aggregation services put the Skype story at the top of the pile, pushing the Google I/O news down, down, down. With the buy and the precisely timed news release, the Google looked off balance and out of focus.
Will Microsoft turn the Skype deal to big money? Probably not. Will Google recover from the PR drubbing administered with surgical precision? Sure. But for now, Microsoft looked a bit like its old self with one key difference: Giving Google a PR lesson cost a lot of money.
What about the other news, other conferences, and other dust ups in the Webby world? Nuked, gentle reader. When the provenance indifferent Internet grabs a big money story, an information weaponization sends out shock waves.
And what about the Skype voice thing? I think killing Google I/O may be the story.
Stephen E Arnold, May 11, 2011
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