Language Found to Reveal Hierarchies
January 5, 2012
Isn’t it great when technology is used to pursue answers to the burning questions of our day? MIT’s Technology Review announces, “Computer Scientists Create Algorithm That Measures Human Pecking Order.” Cornell University’s John Kleinberg, known for his work on the HITS Web page ranking algorithm, and associates have discovered that language usage can reveal power differences between humans. The article states:
They say the style of language during a conversation reveals the pecking order of the people talking. ’We show that in group discussions, power differentials between participants are subtly revealed by how much one individual immediately echoes the linguistic style of the person they are responding to,’” say Kleinberg and co.
Particularly, the researchers look at functional words like articles and conjunctions. It seems that, while top dogs feel no compunction to copy the speech or writing of others, those lower on the totem pole do. Unconsciously, of course.
Though these findings may seem like a simple curiosity, the article points out potential real world ramifications. Companies might analyze email exchanges to determine the leaders among their employees. Also, if done in real time, the technique could influence key conversations like negotiations and interviews.
Perhaps we have another way to explore privacy and manipulate?
Cynthia Murrell, January 5, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Search Engines May Take Action Against Pirate Web Sites
January 3, 2012
From the Sooner or Later Department:
Google has been in the news a lot lately for being biased when it comes to search result ranking. According to a the recent Telegraph article “Google May Give Pirate Sites Lower Ranking,” that bias may be leading to positive results. A new code will force Search engines to automatically rank pirate websites lower than official ones and give priority to those that were certified under a recognized scheme.
The article states:
According to research by the Publisher’s Association, Google searches for the 50 best-selling books in one week in March returned an average of four illegal links in the top 10 listings. The previous year that figure was closer to two.
Under the code, Google as well as other search engines would stop allowing illegal sites to advertise and would step up their efforts in delisting pirate websites as soon as they are flagged by legitimate rights holders.
While the search engines have yet to respond to the proposal, we believe that if this is policy goes into effect, there may be some unforeseen consequences. Exciting to be the one to define “pirate”.
Jasmine Ashton, January 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Useful for 2012
December 31, 2011
This is not search related, but we noted the item and wanted to share it with our two or three readers.
Privacy is a luxury that few can afford in the Internet age that we live in. However, technology allows you to use this fact to your advantage. The days of anonymous prank calls are over, thanks to the new reverse phone service WhoIsThisPhone.com.
KillerStartups reported on this free and convenient reverse-phone search service in the article “WhoIsThisPhone.com Reverse-Phone Search.”
WhoIsThisPhone.com allows anyone to research its extensive phone database and find a phone number and exact geographical location from any caller who may be trying to hide his or her identity.
The description states:
People calling you up in the middle of the night and hanging up without speaking a word, people leaving strange messages into your machine, people who keep on calling and requesting to talk to someone that you have already explained doesn’t live there. WhoIsThisPhone.com is going to assist you in all such scenarios. You’ll get to know who’s behind such calls. And once you know as much, you’ll be able to begin doing what it takes to make them stop.
While the basic site is free, there are marginal charges that can be incremented by having reports generated.
Jasmine Ashton, December 31, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
New People Search: Just What You Wanted
December 10, 2011
Killer Startups reported on a new search engine designed specifically to find people in the post Zopeo.com Online People Search.
Zopeo seeks to be a global white pages and according to it’s website, has a mission to provide the most comprehensive people search on the web and to empower and enable people everywhere to search for their family and friends on the Web. The new system allows users to search by inputting the name of the person that you are looking for, along with the place where you think that they may live.
the article states:
The search will take just a couple of seconds, and if it’s indeed successful then you’ll be learning not just that person’s whereabouts and contact information but also a detailed 20 year history. So, catching up with any friends that had vanished from your life is a piece of cake.
In addition to getting the current address and phone number of long lost friends or family members, you can also use Zopeo to run background checks on potentially shady characters. The background checks are interesting, and if you have not probed an individual, you may want to dive in and check out the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Zopeo delivers known aliases / maiden names, relatives, current and past roommates, property ownership, nationwide criminal records, bankruptcies, tax liens, civil judgments, assets, Web site ownership, and more. Put on your tin foil hat and give Zopeo a go.
Jasmine Ashton, December 10, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
A Surprise: Google Employees on Privacy
November 8, 2011
That Google lacks privacy protection should be news to no one. However, that a couple of its employees admit it is surprising. In his Slight Paranoia blog, Christopher Soghoian reports, “Two honest Google employees: our products don’t protect your privacy.” He opens,
Two senior Google employees recently acknowledged that the company’s products do not protect user privacy. This is quite a departure from the norm at Google, where statements about privacy are usually thick with propaganda, mistruths and often outright deception.
The first employee cited is Will DeVries, a privacy lobbyist for the company. In response to an article Soghoian wrote about the need for journalists to learn more about computer security, DeVries commented with wholehearted agreement. He added that journalists should take time to learn about and use free security measures. Soghoian extrapolates: if Google security were tight, wouldn’t DeVries specifically name Google products here? Perhaps, but this may be a bit of a stretch.
The next comment is more straightforward. In a conference in Kenya, Soghoian spoke on the same panel as Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist (that’s his real title.) In that discussion, Cerf agreed with Soghoian’s observation that securely encrypting user data fundamentally conflicts with the company’s ad-based business model. That is quite the admission, and confirms that Google is unlikely to put user privacy first anytime soon. Information or disinformation? We will be asking this question frequently in the run up to 2012.
Cynthia Murrell November 8, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google, Search and Privacy
November 2, 2011
With all the excitement surrounding Google+, you may not even know about Google’s first social networking attempt, Buzz. Few noticed the failing service, particularly the privacy concerns being handled by the FTC.
We noticed.
The Federal Trade Commission announced it has finalized a settlement with Google. Complaints centered around Buzz, which created a social network out of people’s Gmail contacts. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint, and the FTC took action. Google is now required to create a privacy program and submit to independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.
We learn more in the MediaPost News’ story, “FTC, Google Settle Buzz Privacy Case.” It tells us:
Google also promised that it will obtain people’s express consent before sharing their information more broadly than its privacy policy allowed at the time of collection… While Google has been the subject of several complaints by privacy advocates, this case marked the first time the FTC filed charges against the company. The FTC alleged that Google violated its own privacy policy and used deceptive tactics when it launched its social network Buzz.
Several Gmail users have filed lawsuits in addition to this action, a class-action suit settled with $8.5 million. Google announced earlier this month that it was going to end Buzz. Buzz is dead. We think that search may also be on its way out. Google is changing quickly, and like privacy, the notion of precision and recall is undergoing what I think of as revisionism.
Andrea Hayden, November 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Spotlight: Mindbreeze Information Pairing
November 2, 2011
We wanted to continue our spotlight on Mindbreeze, a unit of the highly regarded Fabasoft. You will want to bookmark the Mindbreeze blog at this link and take note of “Information Pairing. Knowledge Match Making for Your Company.”
With companies flopping like caught trout in the bottom of a fishing boat, the ability to locate the person in your organization with information germane to your work is essential.
The challenge, according to Mindbreeze, is to locate the individual with the experience, information, and insight to assist in answering a business question. Walking around no longer works because many companies have employees who are at client locations, working from a different facility, or responding to email from an airport waiting lounge.
The blog article asserts:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze has the answer: Information pairing. This involves the boundless networking of company relevant information within an enterprise or organization and placing it in the Cloud. In my opinion acting in this way in all business issues is reliable, dynamic and profitable – the basis for competitive advantage.
The method relies on the Mindbreeze core technology which delivers information with pinpoint accuracy. The write up continues:
Existing identities and access rights to company-internal and Cloud data remain preserved. The user only receives information displayed for which he/she has access rights for. This ensures that Fabasoft Mindbreeze fulfills the strictest compliance requirements. Furthermore, Mindbreeze is certified according to all relevant security standards.
The Mindbreeze technology for “information pairing” allows in a unique way to enrich documents and information in a secure and highly efficient way with enterprise and even content from the Cloud. Information gets dynamically annotated with “knowledge” extracted and harvested from cloud services (public and private ones), e.g. like Wikipedia or Fabasoft Folio Cloud. This is a very innovative and impressive way to combine information effectively and annotate existing and preprocessed entities on the fly.
So for instance: You need to know everything about a lead? Mindbreeze combines every information in your enterprise, like your CRM and connects the information with suitable content from sources like Wikipedia, LinkedIn, social media like Facebook and even on your web analytics account and comes up with a unified view of all the information that’s available for this lead.
Unlike some search and content processing vendors, Fabasoft has taken care to ensure that privacy and security work as the organization intends. Fabasoft and Mindbreeze hold SAS70 and ISO 27001 certifications for their cloud services. This is unique in the enterprise search space. According the write up, the focus has been on putting “values” about these important norms in the firm’s software and systems.
Take a look at www.mindbreeze.com.
Stephen E. Arnold, November 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Data Breach Leaves 5 Million Patients Holding the Bag
October 11, 2011
A data breach of military health care records from the past 19 years has left nearly 5 million past and current patients vulnerable to identity theft and other acts of malintent.
Tricare, the healthcare program serving current and former military service members, revealed that contractor Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) lost backup tapes containing health data and other personal information of about 4.9 million people. The tapes were stolen out of an SAIC employee’s car during a Sept.13 burglary.
Tricare released a statement saying that the risk of harm to patients has been judged low and this is why the do not intend to provide the people affected with credit monitoring services.
According to the Information Week article, Military Health Plan Data Breach Threatens 4.9 Million, Ruby Raley, director of healthcare solutions at IT integration and security company said:
Unlike HIPAA, FTC regulations don’t require entities to sign agreements with ‘business associates’ that hold third parties to the same standards when handling sensitive data. Also, HIPAA regulations require organizations to provide a year of credit monitoring to anyone who may have been affected by a breach. They’re only [offering] fraud protection for 90 days.
While no financial records were stolen, this incident leads us to wonder whether government enitites should be forced to follow HIPAA regulations, instead of less strict FTC regulations. This may prevent similar problems from occuring down the road.
Jasmine Ashton, Oct 11, 2011
Paving Stones of Good Intentions
October 9, 2011
Even Orwell didn’t foresee this, not specifically. From Kindergarten through college, students are now subjected to more forms of monitoring than I could have conceived of when I was a little rabble rouser. From cameras to RFID badges, it’s an entirely different world.
Now Michael Morris, is a lieutenant with the University Police at California State University-Channel Islands, is calling on universities to take surveillance to a whole new level. NetworkWorld reports on this in “Privacy Nightmare: Data Mine & Analyze all College Students’ Online Activities.” That’s right, the good lieutenant recommends recording every little thing college students do online and analyzing the data to predict and prevent “large-scale acts of violence on campus.” What’s more, it would be easy enough to do with today’s data management tools. Wrote Morris,
Many campuses across the country . . . provide each student with an e-mail address, personal access to the university’s network, free use of campus computers, and wired and wireless Internet access for their Web-connected devices. Students use these campus resources for conducting research, communicating with others, and for other personal activities on the Internet, including social networking. University officials could potentially mine data from their students and analyze them, since the data are already under their control. The analysis could then be screened to predict behavior to identify when a student’s online activities tend to indicate a threat to the campus.
Take a moment to reflect on the side effects of such a large-scale invasion of privacy. What other behavior, unrelated to potential violence, will be “predicted?” And how will those predictions be acted upon? The possibilities are endless.
Look, I get it. I once attended Virginia Tech, after all, and now I have a child in college myself. Not much scares me more than visions of some nut-job with guns descending on that campus. But I also realize that throughout history, fear has been the key to gaining citizen acceptance of the unacceptable. And now we have technology that allows the unacceptable to reach heights like never before.
Cynthia Murrell October 9, 2011
Recrawl Searches Your Browser History
September 19, 2011
You know you saw a website, but you don’t have the URL and you can’t remember how you got there. Ever happened to you? It happens to everyone in our culture of technological ADHD. Shallow thinking is encouraged by our “click and browse” society. For all of us there is help – there is Recawl.
Recawl is a fast and efficient way to find information and pages from your browsing history. The idea was borne out of frustration at not being able to find a page, despite knowing that it had already been visited . . . Recawl automatically indexes every page you visit and lets you do full-text search on the content of all those pages. This makes recalling information from your browsing history much faster & easier, without the need to bookmark anything.
Your history is available for search on any computer via the Recawl site. The extension is currently only available for Chrome. However, we can see a demand for this sort of service, one that elevates or potentially eliminates the bookmarking trend.
This new angle on search of course poses security questions. No doubt privacy will be a concern.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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