Tag: obama

US Congress cedes cyber-war to Executive Branch

From–

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?_r=2

Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran

By
Published: June 1, 2012

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons,

From–

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/76973.html

Can the White House declare a cyberwar?

By JENNIFER MARTINEZ and JONATHAN ALLEN | 6/1/12
“When we see the results it’s pretty clear they’re doing it without anybody except a very few people knowing about it, much less having any impact on whether it’s happening or not,” said Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.).

McDermott is troubled because “we have given more and more power to the president, through the CIA, to carry out operations, and, frankly, if you go back in history, the reason we have problems with Iran is because the CIA brought about a coup.”

 

From–

http://www.house.gov/house/Constitution/Constitution.html

Article. I.

Section 1.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section. 8.

The Congress shall have Power

—

Clause 11: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

 

Related-

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/09/obama-wins-nobel-peace-pr_n_314907.html

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

KARL RITTER and MATT MOORE   10/ 9/09 11:02 PM ET

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/media

Statement Regarding Barack Obama 

The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as “Senior Lecturer.”

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year.

 

Text Mining Barack Obama using R #rstats

  • We copy and paste President Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech in a text document and read it in. For a word cloud we need a dataframe with two columns, one with words and the the other with frequency.We read in the transcript from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/us/politics/08text-obama.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0  and paste in the file located in the local directory- /home/ajay/Desktop/new. Note tm is a powerful package and will read ALL the text documents within the particular folder

library(tm)

library(wordcloud)

txt2=”/home/ajay/Desktop/new”

b=Corpus(DirSource(txt2), readerControl = list(language = “eng”))

> b b b tdm m1 v1 d1 wordcloud(d1$word,d1$freq)

Now it seems we need to remove some of the very commonly occuring words like “the” and “and”. We are not using the standard stopwords in english (the tm package provides that see Chapter 13 Text Mining case studies), as the words “we” and “can” are also included .

> b tdm m1 v1 d1 wordcloud(d1$word,d1$freq)

But let’s see how the wordcloud changes if we remove all English Stopwords.

> b tdm m1 v1 d1 wordcloud(d1$word,d1$freq)

and you can draw your own conclusions from the content of this famous speech based on your political preferences.

Politicians can give interesting speeches but they may be full of simple sounding words…..

Citation-

1. Ingo Feinerer (2012). tm: Text Mining Package. R package version0.5-7.1.

Ingo Feinerer, Kurt Hornik, and David Meyer (2008). Text Mining
Infrastructure in R. Journal of Statistical Software 25/5. URL:
http://www.jstatsoft.org/v25/i05/

2. Ian Fellows (2012). wordcloud: Word Clouds. R package version 2.0.

http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=wordcloud

3. You can see more than 100 of Obama’s speeches at http://obamaspeeches.com/

Quote- numbers dont lie, people do.

.

Jill Dyche on 2012

In part 3 of the series for predictions for 2012, here is Jill Dyche, Baseline Consulting/DataFlux.

Part 2 was Timo Elliot, SAP at http://www.decisionstats.com/timo-elliott-on-2012/ and Part 1 was Jim Kobielus, Forrester at http://www.decisionstats.com/jim-kobielus-on-2012/

Ajay: What are the top trends you saw happening in 2011?

 

Well, I hate to say I saw them coming, but I did. A lot of managers committed some pretty predictable mistakes in 2011. Here are a few we witnessed in 2011 live and up close:

 

1.       In the spirit of “size matters,” data warehouse teams continued to trumpet the volumes of stored data on their enterprise data warehouses. But a peek under the covers of these warehouses reveals that the data isn’t integrated. Essentially this means a variety of heterogeneous virtual data marts co-located on a single server. Neat. Big. Maybe even worthy of a magazine article about how many petabytes you’ve got. But it’s not efficient, and hardly the example of data standardization and re-use that everyone expects from analytical platforms these days.

 

2.       Development teams still didn’t factor data integration and provisioning into their project plans in 2011. So we saw multiple projects spawn duplicate efforts around data profiling, cleansing, and standardization, not to mention conflicting policies and business rules for the same information. Bummer, since IT managers should know better by now. The problem is that no one owns the problem. Which brings me to the next mistake…

 

3.       No one’s accountable for data governance. Yeah, there’s a council. And they meet. And they talk. Sometimes there’s lunch. And then nothing happens because no one’s really rewarded—or penalized for that matter—on data quality improvements or new policies. And so the reports spewing from the data mart are still fraught and no one trusts the resulting decisions.

 

But all is not lost since we’re seeing some encouraging signs already in 2012. And yes, I’d classify some of them as bona-fide trends.

 

Ajay: What are some of those trends?

 

Job descriptions for data stewards, data architects, Chief Data Officers, and other information-enabling roles are becoming crisper, and the KPIs for these roles are becoming more specific. Data management organizations are being divorced from specific lines of business and from IT, becoming specialty organizations—okay, COEs if you must—in their own rights. The value proposition for master data management now includes not just the reconciliation of heterogeneous data elements but the support of key business strategies. And C-level executives are holding the data people accountable for improving speed to market and driving down costs—not just delivering cleaner data. In short, data is becoming a business enabler. Which, I have to just say editorially, is better late than never!

 

Ajay: Anything surprise you, Jill?

 

I have to say that Obama mentioning data management in his State of the Union speech was an unexpected but pretty powerful endorsement of the importance of information in both the private and public sector.

 

I’m also sort of surprised that data governance isn’t being driven more frequently by the need for internal and external privacy policies. Our clients are constantly asking us about how to tightly-couple privacy policies into their applications and data sources. The need to protect PCI data and other highly-sensitive data elements has made executives twitchy. But they’re still not linking that need to data governance.

 

I should also mention that I’ve been impressed with the people who call me who’ve had their “aha!” moment and realize that data transcends analytic systems. It’s operational, it’s pervasive, and it’s dynamic. I figured this epiphany would happen in a few years once data quality tools became a commodity (they’re far from it). But it’s happening now. And that’s good for all types of businesses.

 

About-

Jill Dyché has written three books and numerous articles on the business value of information technology. She advises clients and executive teams on leveraging technology and information to enable strategic business initiatives. Last year her company Baseline Consulting was acquired by DataFlux Corporation, where she is currently Vice President of Thought Leadership. Find her blog posts on www.dataroundtable.com.

Opera Unite- the future of cloud computing browsers

The boys (and ladies) at opera have been busy writing code , while the rest of the coders on the cloud were issuing press releases, attending meetings or just sky diving from the cloud. Judging by the language of apps and extensions, it seems that the  engineers de Vikings et Slavs were busy coding while the Anglo Saxons were busy preparing for IPOs.

I really like the complete anonymity offered by Opera and especially Opera Unite

1) The Adblock option blocks all ads (same as other extensions)

2) The lovely Opera Unite has incredible apps for peer to peer sharing. You can create your own spotify, host your own chat application, transfer files, remote manage your computer. C’est magnifique!

Some really awesome apps on Opera Unite

All these apps can make your own desktop into a remotely managed website- so SOPA is irrelevant even if passed without any protest or non violent protests

(SOPA- an acronym for STOP OBAMA or STOP A (?) , since OBAMA is the one the internet really supports , and he is dependent on that goodwill for fundraising or A is the acronym of a legendary media myth of an imaginary web based organization (imaginary as in iota)

QUOTE–

I think it would be a good idea.

 Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization

Using #Rstats for online data access

There are multiple packages in R to read data straight from online datasets.
These are as follows- Continue reading “Using #Rstats for online data access”

How to make a bomb

A trip-wire triggered pipe bomb mock-up used t...
Image via Wikipedia

How to make a bomb search activity using Google CoRelate

First we search for how to make a bomb, it seems this has annual spikes.

http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=how+to+make+a+bomb&t=weekly

Then we shift series by 6 weeks, assuming the dumbass takes 6 weeks to actually make the bomb.

http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=how+to+make+a+bomb&t=weekly&shift=6

Note -corelation between making pipe bombs and tattoo art is not the same as causation. corelation is not causation unless google comes out with http://causation.google.com

and we see West Virginia likes to search for “how to make a bomb ” 🙂 yeah, right 😉

but heres the big oops.

http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=how+to+make+a+joke&t=all

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Book Reviews- Hindu Myths- Mere Christianity

A statue of Hindu deity Shiva in a temple in B...
Image via Wikipedia

Over the month long break I took, I was helping firm up my ideas for R for Analytics , I also took a break and read some books. Here are brief reviews of two, three of them-

1) Hindu Myths

This is a classical book translated from original Sanskrit written by Professor Wendy O Flaherty of University of Chicago. I found some of the older myths very interesting in terms of contradictions, retelling the same story in a modified way by another classic, the beautiful poetic and fantastic imagery evoked by Hindu myths. Some stories are as relevant in prayers, fasts and religious ceremonies as they were around 11000 years while most have morphed , edited or even distorted.

It should help the non Indian reader understand why hundreds of millions of conservative Indians worship Shiv Ling ( or literally an idol of the Phallus of Shiva), the Hindu two cents of creation of the universe, and the somewhat fantastic stories on super heroes /gods/ in the ancient world.

The book suffers from a few drawbacks in my opinion-

1) Sanskrit is a bit like Latin- you can lose not just the flavor but original meaning of words and situational context. Some of the stories made better sense when i read a more recent Hindi translation.

2) An excessive emphasis on sexual imagery rather than emotional imagery. The author seems wonder struck to read and translate ancient indians were so matter of fact about physical relationships. However the words were always written in discrete poetic than crass soft pornography.

3) Almost no drawings or figures. This makes the book a bit dense to read at 300 pages.

I liked another book on Hindu Myths (Myth= Mithya which I read in 2009) and you can see if you can read it if you find the topic interesting.

A Handbook of Hindu Mythology

Hindus have one God.
They also have 330 million gods: male gods, female gods, personal gods, family gods, household gods, village gods, gods of space and time, gods for specific castes and particular professions, gods who reside in trees, in animals, in minerals, in geometrical patterns and in man-made objects.
Then there are a whole host of demons.
But no Devil.


Mere Christianity by C S Lewis is a classic book on reinterpreting Christianity in modern times. However the author wrote this when World War 2 was on and it seems more like a British or Anglo Saxon interpretation of beliefs of Christ Jesus– who was actually a Jewish teacher born in Middle East Asia.

While the language and reading makes it much easier to read- it is recommended more at Western audiences, than Eastern ones, as it seems some of the parables are a more palatable re interpretation of the New Testament. The Bible is a deceptively easy book to read, the language is short and beautiful-and the original parables in the Gospels remain powerful easy to understand.

C S Lewis tends to emphasize morality than religiosity or faith, and there is not much comparison with any other faith or alternative morality. Dumbing down the Bible so as to market it better to reluctant consumers seems to be Mr Lewis intention and it is not as scholarly a work as an exercise in pure prose.

However it is quite good as a self improvement book and is quite better than the “You Can Win” kind of books or even business concept books.

Note- I find reading books on religion as good exercises in reading the fountain source of philosophies. As a polytheist- I tend to read more than one faith.

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