mostly research stuff
i am not going to write another one of those blog-roller columns that goes, “dear (insert cute pet name here), there are sooo many blogs, but these are my most wicked favorite - call me!”…in fact, i’m not even going to tell you what i’m reading (if you’d like to know, then ping me and maybe i’ll cough up an OPML file for you). …i am also not going to type yet another rss tool review, (as in, “what the shit? there are sooo many rss readers that i think i might hurl, but here’s the one that sucks the least!”)…i just want to talk about two quick things.
first, a tool note: feeddemon. no deep or meaningful review, just this comment: i have tested four million rss readers (web based and local client) and this beats them all (so far). it’s like rss meets personalized newspaper meets radio (in terms of their newspaper/radio metaphor, you’ll have to see it for yourself).
the second item: how to keep a pulse on what everybody in the online world is thinking about right now with furl’s rss feed. it is the zeitgeist of the web (oh, and a gestalt) so seemingly simple that i find myself coming back to look at updates more often than howard dean says, “no, just the check thanks.”….why? Read the rest of this entry »
surprised to hear this? i’m not…not with at least one new corporate opprobrium welcoming me each new morning…to recap: according to research notes in new scientist based on the work of two uk psychologists, “Monkeys and apes who are good at deceiving their peers also have the biggest brains relative to their body size…finding backs the “Machiavellian intelligence” theory, which suggests the benefits of complex social skills fueled the evolution of large primate brains…monkeys might feign disinterest in tasty food so that others do not come and steal it.”
let’s translate this to any given corporate macaques…are morally bankrupt researchers smarter? perhaps we need to rethink corporate espionage and how we look for new ways to spot it (and will you please stop just relying on ’security software’?) - maybe we need to start looking a bit more closely at incidents like THIS (thanks to bonnie at scip for that). this guy from huawei (tech company) got nabbed gathering ‘tradeshow intelligence,‘ - something which many scip members sell as a service to america’s leading corporations (and most corps really dig this kind of service).
is the ability to be this sneaky and do this kind of work relegated so that buyers might keep an arm’s length from the transaction? or is this a sign that corporations are fans of buying services from potential info-gathering-grifters whose outsourced brains exceed the quality of their own salaried gray-matter? Read the rest of this entry »
remember when i suggested that the cia world factbook is kinda crappy? to update you stats-hungry researchers, a new “super world fact book” has arrived with a wicked hokey name - it’s NationMaster (as in, “vee ah zee nayshun-maztuh, kum viss us if yoo vont to leeve”). from their site: “..a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. NationMaster is a vast compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, UNICEF and OECD…you can generate maps and graphs on all kinds of statistics with ease…currently have 4,050 stats…the web’s one-stop resource for country statistics on anything and everything, whether it be soldiers , olympic medals, tourists, English speakers or wall plug voltages. You can also view profiles of individual countries including their maps and flags….use correlation reports and scatterplots to find relationships between variables…a full encyclopedia with over 200,000 articles.”
one thing that this site can NOT touch is the quality of data and statistics on world religion at Read the rest of this entry »
hah! got this bit from LIS’ website (library and info science news) - “EUGENE, ORE. - A 33-year-old man has been sentenced to six years in prison for stealing library books from the University of Oregon and selling them on eBay….In one case, he staged a bookstore burglary with his mother….computer records showing …hundreds of books for sale … had taken in about $20,000 in the past year. Not all the books were stolen.”…here’s the full story from katu … and also the LIS snippet/link
pick me! pick me! …it’s when you have to register ‘for free’ just to read something and give up valid private info (real email), even if you do make up a stupid fake name (well, at least i still make up stupid names)…but no longer! a group with the tagline, “Common sense isn’t” has produced a way for consumers of free content to completely bypass the tedium of registration and drift closer to one man’s vision of a bob’s-big-boy style internet… (”what’s the soup-du-jour” - “it’s the soup of the day” - “mmmhh, that does sound good!” - dumb & dumber)
it’s bugmenot.com…a collective effort by the some to avail the many (feels a tad sophomoric - they’ve completely forgotten about a little something called COPPA compliance and that’s going to hurt!)… here’s how they describe it: “BugMeNot.com was created as a mechanism to quickly bypass the login of web sites that require compulsory registration and/or the collection of personal/demographic information (such as the New York Times).” it is definitely not rocket science, it’s just a repository of working usernames and passwords for free-content sites that require real registration…and no (!), you do NOT need to register to use bugmenot, and no, they do NOT offer un/pw combinations for paid content sites. Read the rest of this entry »
this blog is mostly safe for work, though i sometimes throw around a 'fuck' or two. you'll find a bunch of my articles from CI Magazine, SCIP online, other research pieces and some other crap. enjoy. there's lost of content here related to getting information about, around, from and through people and organizations...