In light of the recent flurry of leaks by the so-called “deep state”, which includes such agencies as the NSA and FBI and which last week lead to the resignation of Mike Flynn after a phone recording of his phone conversation with the Russian ambassador was leaked to the WaPo and other anti-Trump publications, an article published on January 12 by the NYT has generated renewed interest. […]
In my view right now I can see six smartphone and tablet chargers. They’re all plugged in, and there are no devices attached to them. How much power are they using? Should I unplug them? See also: Yes, you can build your own smartphone The Internet of Things 10 types of enterprise deployments As businesses continue to experiment with the Internet of Things, interesting use cases are […]
Michigan Republicans are reportedly mulling a Senate run for heartland heartthrob Kid Rock, a country and rock star, who loves to “sit in the backyard sun and drink beer with dad,” according to his autobiographical song, “Drinking Beer With Dad.” Once unthinkable, Kid Rock for Senate is hardly unthinkable now: A professional wrestler has served multiple terms as governor of Minnesota, Christine “I dabbled in witchcraft” O’Donnell […]
Current economic conditions around the world provide a good foundation for growth. But unprecedented levels of market uncertainty mean that organizations have to be ready to change strategy faster than ever before. Growth around the world In the US, President Donald Trump has inherited an economy with strong fundamentals: low inflation, and the lowest unemployment rate since 2007. He has promised a pro-business economic agenda with lower […]
Paraphrasing Garrison Keillor, it’s been a quiet week in the Apache Spark community – at least compared to last year, where the definitive Spark 2.0 was unveiled. Last week, Spark Summit pulled into Boston, and so did one of those nor’easters that make Boston so alluring in February. And so the Spark project, for now, is engaging in the blocking and tackling chores of cleaning up or […]
Submitted by Nick Kaman of Letters from Norway Introduction: Norwegians are just now starting to grapple with the effects of their “single cylinder” economy, mostly dependent on oil and gas (ca. 60% of exports). Despite optimism about $50-$70/barrel oil, American crude output is surging, on track to be the highest ever, since 1970, while cracks start to form in OPEC’s latest agreement. In addition to the oil […]
Good morning. Critique by “Sid Vicious” not pretty If things had gone differently, Washington would now be gossiping about the role of Sidney Blumenthal within a Clinton White House. A congressional inquisition over his much-publicized emails with then-Secretary of State Clinton, his longtime friend, now seems so distant, doesn’t it? But it’s still fitting the journalist-activist and historian should weigh in on Donald Trump. A cerebral but […]
“Now we have all the prospects of a fresh start,” Ilnur Cevik, a senior adviser to Mr. Erdogan, said during an interview at the presidential palace in Ankara, the Turkish capital. “We have an opening with Mr. Trump.” Continue reading the main story Turkish-American relations frayed over differing views on the war in Syria and the widespread belief in Turkey that the United States played a role […]
The phone’s display acts as the light source, beaming colors at an object while the camera captures details about the reflected color. Image: Udo Seiffert/Fraunhofer IFF The makers of an industrial hyperspectral camera called HawkSpex have created an app that lets you use your smartphone’s existing camera and display to scan an object and see what’s inside it. German firm Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation hopes consumers […]
When searching for a picture of a “gang” on the internet, you’d better not go with an image of your average rap group. It’s too late for the Daily Mail, whose Australian iteration published a photo of UK rappers Section Boyz in an article about a local gang in Melbourne. The picture has since been removed from the article, following a tweet from TV show Media Watch […]
Image from Wikipedia User experience is not just about pretty design and attractive software screens. It encompasses every link in the chain that influences interactions between a user and the system. Historically, the enterprise software industry prioritized features and functions over usability. The industry’s poor reputation is a predictable result of this legacy. Although front-end design is most obvious, it is almost impossible to create a great […]
Nick Thompson was on his way to the subway when he got an email from his boss, New Yorker Editor David Remnick. The subject line? “Morning piece.” It was 8:17 a.m. on Sept. 8, and Remnick had just watched libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson ask “what is Aleppo?” live on national television. “I wrote back and said, ‘great!’” said Thompson, the former digital editor at The New […]
“Singapore companies are confident of their ability to detect a sophisticated cyber attack,” read an enthusiastic press release earlier this month. “80 percent of the Singapore respondents share that sentiment, surpassing the global average of 50 percent.” On face value, that sounds like a big thumbs-up for doing business in Singapore. But let’s dig down into this. First, though, some background. The press release was from the […]
Buying cycles are already very long in the IT industry. With the rise of fake news and general mistrust in corporate media content of all kinds — those buying cycles will get longer. And sales and marketing costs will skyrocket for IT companies. As an IT buyer relying on high quality information from your peer groups won’t help much because their information sources will be also be […]
At the end of Trump’s speech to a room filled with 400 employees of the CIA, Trump said, rather cryptically, that maybe he’d build them a bigger room ‘by someone who knows how to build and we won’t have columns, do you understand that?’ Here is the full speech. For those of you who are fucking retards and haven’t the slightest clue what that could mean, I suggest you […]
YouTube recommendations are a prominent example of applying advanced analytics on a massive scale to improve a service, the experience users get out of it, and the bottom line of the vendor behind it — Google. Previously, we explored the rationale behind it and pondered as to how this type of analytics could be classified. It’s time to pick up where we left off and explore how […]
Submitted by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com, Conventional wisdom suggests National Front candidate Marine le Pen will make it to the second round in French elections, then lose in a landslide to whoever her opponent happens to be. I believe le Pen’s odds of winning it outright are far better than most think. Current Polls Chart from Wikipedia, with image clips added. Top Five candidates Marine le Pen: […]
Donald Trump has attacked civil rights icon John Lewis on the weekend that the US celebrates the life of Martin Luther King Jr, sparking another controversy for the president-elect just days before he is due to take office. Mr Trump took to Twitter to criticise Mr Lewis after the long-serving Democratic congressman spoke out against Jeff Sessions, Mr Trump’s nominee for attorney-general and alleged that he did […]
Digital transformation must be one of the most over-hyped, least concrete terms around. Like every such term, it can mean different things to different people. It can also be a huge stress-generating, money-squandering machine for organizations. Because “if you’re not doing it, your company will die and you will lose your CIO or IT leadership job. You’ll be disrupted! Or fail the wrong side of the Innovator’s […]
While we learned earlier that John McCain was responsible for handing over the 35-page “dossier” of compromising, if arguably fake, revelations about Trump’s connections to Russia over to the FBI, the identity of the actual creator, who was said to be an ex-British intelligence service, remained a mystery. No longer. Courtesy of the WSJ, we now know his name: the former MI-6 officer, now working for a […]
Since the dawn of the century, Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) has been at the core of many, if not most, enterprise web-centric, service-oriented, cloud-capable computing assemblies. Lately, though, even its proponents have been asking if the venerable framework has outlived its usefulness, and is being supplanted by lighter, nimbler and simpler setups, such as containers, cloud services, or APIs. Photo: Joe McKendrick All this is happening […]
Most Popular 1 Donald Trump Is Not Too Big to Fail 2 Courageous House Progressives Raise ‘Justice and Fairness’ Objections to Certifying Trump 3 Sherrod Brown Is the First Senator to Say ‘No’ to Jeff Sessions 4 This Monday, Join Protests Across the Country to Block Trump’s Climate-Denying Cabinet Picks 5 Why Workers Everywhere Should Be Scared by Kentucky’s Assault on Unions A Fascist Original Having said […]
PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to [email protected]. Western Economist Fingers Russia as “Panama Papers” Source (Gerry) The hackers who released the huge cache of files known as the Panama Papers […]
There are two stories we can tell about US higher education. In the first, public two- and four-year colleges face increasing student service costs, 20 percent less state support than they received before the recession, and a shortfall they pass onto students, who now graduate with an average of $30,000 of debt. In the second story, those institutions have contained costs, keeping tuition increases at inflationary levels, […]
In 300 B.C., Carthage was one of the world’s largest cities with up to 700,000 people living within its walls. The Carthaginian republic was a force to be reckoned with, controlling inconceivable amounts of wealth and land all around the Mediterranean. However, just over a century later in 146 B.C., Carthage was burnt to the ground by the Romans. The destruction of Carthage was so thorough that […]
Submitted by Federico Pieraccini via Strategic-Culture.org, Understanding the objectives and logic that accompany the expansion of nations or empires is always of paramount importance in helping one draw lessons for the future In this series of four articles I intend to lay a very detailed but easily understandable foundation for describing the mechanisms that drive great powers. To succeed, one must analyze the geopolitical theories that over […]
2016 was fact-checking’s finest year [1]. No it wasn’t, it was the year of “post-truth” [2] — some preferred “post-fact” [3] — and fact-checking is a fool’s errand. The discussion about facts in journalism worldwide has rarely been as fractured and animated as it has been in 2016, so we collected 366 links, one for each day of the year, to try and make sense of what […]
Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com, On December 9, a panel of 3 judges in the Netherlands convicted Geert Wilders of incitement to discrimination, and also of insulting an ethnic group. Nonetheless, the two most recent polls show Geert Wilders, an anti-Islam, anti-migration politician far ahead of the pack. Wilders Heads Polls A quick check of Opinion Polling for the Dutch General Election, 2017 shows Wilders strongly […]
Amazon’s Echo Dot, a hands-free voice-controlled Alexa-enabled device, has enjoyed pretty rave reviews upon its release, simply because the device, a minute puck-shaped plaything, is far more capable than what its size suggests. Yes, the tiny flat cylinder sports Amazon’s proprietary voice-enabled virtual assistant Alexa, which is by and large its headline feature. It hears its owners, even when outputting loud music from its speakers, and it […]
When it emerged from stealth in 2011, MapR was an outlier in the Hadoop community. At the time, Hadoop was defined largely by two projects adapted from Google research: MapReduce, which introduced highly linear, massively parallel processing to big data, and the HDFS file system, which could accommodate data by the petabyte. And at the time, Hadoop was defined as an Apache open source platform. MapR’s message, […]
