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, […]
Submitted by Duane via Free Market Shooter blog, On Thursday, December 1st, Yasmin Seweid was allegedly assaulted by Trump supporters in NYC. According to BuzzFeed and the NY Daily News, the attack took place at the uptown 6 train stop at 23rd Street in midtown Manhattan. The assaliants allegedly called Seweid a terrorist, broke her bag strap, followed her when she tried to get away from them, […]
Submitted by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org, Was the Cold War against communism, or against Russia? Russia was our ally in World War II, and we’d have a Nazi world today if 26 million Russians hadn’t died from Hitler’s bombs and attacks while Russia fought on with courage amidst desperation, finally to crush his regime. But Russia was communist, so the Cold War developed after that alliance (the Allies in […]
A new technique devised by MIT researchers can take data sets with huge numbers of variables and find approximations of them with far fewer variables. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology One way to handle big data is to shrink it. If you can identify a small subset of your data set that preserves its salient mathematical relationships, you may be able to perform useful analyses on it […]
We’ve all been warned that it is coming, but as SHTFPlan.com’s Mac Slavo notes, what is disturbing is that while technology surrounds us and *some* have concerns about privacy, most shrug at the massive amounts of data they are collecting about our lives, and the incredible level of control the system now has over each individual. This bill passed, clinging to the broadest base of “good intentions” […]
When I first moved to Mexico, I started working with a really cool organization called Palabra Radio, which is a community radio organization here in Oaxaca. I was really impressed with how communities were operating, owning, and sort of dealing with everything that comes with operating their own low power FM radio station. That gave me the idea to try and do something similar with mobile communication, […]
What are Australia’s policy options for responding to the internet threats of 2022? This question was explored in the 360° Cyber Game conducted jointly by RAND Corporation and the National Security College (NSC) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra on Thursday. RAND has conducted two of these games before, in Washington DC and in Silicon Valley, and has written up the methodology and results in […]
NoHold, a Milpitas, California-based artificial intelligence (AI) company that pioneered chatbots in the 1990s, has launched a “quickstart” platform targeted towards small to medium size businesses (SMBs) and individuals interested in creating virtual assistants quickly, easily, and cheaply. The Sicura Quickstart platform allows SMBs and individuals to create a virtual assistant automatically by uploading word documents, tables, PDFs, and images. No programming or advanced technical skills are […]
Frank Land and Dame Stephanie Shirley unveil a plaque to mark the site of the world’s first business computer, installed 65 years ago. Photo: LEO Computers Society A plaque has been installed in Hammersmith, west London, where Lyons, the tea-shop company, ran the world’s first electronic business computer 65 years ago. Nothing remains of Cadby Hall, the two-acre site where Lyons had its head office, several bakeries, […]
