Explain Cloud Analytics Like I Am Five
October 10, 2016
One of Reddit’s popular subreddits is “explain to me like I’m five,” where redditors post questions they have about science, math, computing, engineering, politics, and other topics. Outside of reading textbooks or questioning experts in person, this subreddit allows intellectual discussion on a global basis…as long as the comments remain mature. “Explain to me like I’m five” is like the favorite For Dummies book series.
While Internet forums and Reddit itself have made the series semi-obsolete, For Dummies books are still a reliable reference tool when you don’t want to search and scroll on the Internet. As companies move towards cloud-based systems, you can be sure there will be a slew of cloud computing For Dummies books.
Open Source Magazine shares that “Analytics For Dummies” is available for a free download!
Cloud analytics is dramatically altering business intelligence. Some businesses will capitalize on these promising new technologies and gain key insights that’ll help them gain competitive advantage. And others won’t. Whether you’re a business leader, an IT manager, or an analyst, we want to help you and the people you need to influence with a free copy of “Cloud Analytics for Dummies,” the essential guide to this explosive new space for business intelligence.
For Dummies books usually retail around twenty dollars, so this offers the chance for a free, updated manual on the growing cloud analytics field and you can save a few dollars.
Whitney Grace, October 10, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Reverse Image Searching Is Easier Than You Think
October 6, 2016
One of the newest forms of search is using actual images. All search engines from Google to Bing to DuckDuckGo have an image search option, where using keywords you can find an image to your specifications. It seemed to be a thing of the future to use an actual image to power a search, but it has actually been around for a while. The only problem was that reverse image searching sucked and returned poor results.
Now the technology has improved, but very few people actually know how to use it. ZDNet explains how to use this search feature in the article, “Reverse Image Searching Made Easy…”. It explains that Google and TinEye are the best way to begin reverse image search. Google has the larger image database, but TinEye has the better photo experts. TinEye is better because:
TinEye’s results often show a variety of closely related images, because some versions have been edited or adapted. Sometimes you find your searched-for picture is a small part of a larger image, which is very useful: you can switch to searching for the whole thing. TinEye is also good at finding versions of images that haven’t had logos added, which is another step closer to the original.
TinEye does have its disadvantages, such as outdated results and not being able to find them on the Web. In some cases Google is the better choice as one can search by usage rights. Browser extensions for image searching are another option. Lastly if you are a Reddit user, Karma Decay is a useful image search tool and users often post comments on the image’s origin.
The future of image searching is now.
Whitney Grace, October 6, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Tech Savvy Users Turn to DuckDuckGo
May 18, 2016
A recent report from SimilarWeb tells us what sorts of people turn to Internet search engine DuckDuckGo, which protects users’ privacy, over a more prominent engine, Microsoft’s Bing. The Search Engine Journal summarizes the results in, “New Research Reveals Who is Using DuckDuckGo and Why.”
The study drew its conclusions by looking at the top five destinations of DuckDuckGo users: Whitehatsec.com, Github.com, NYtimes.com, 4chan.org, and YCombinator.com. Note that four of these five sites have pretty specific audiences, and compare them to the top five, more widely used, sites accessed through Bing: MSN.com, Amazon.com, Reddit.com, Google.com, and Baidu.com.
Writer Matt Southern observes:
“DuckDuckGo users also like to engage with their search engine of choice for longer periods of time — averaging 9.38 minutes spent on DuckDuckGo vs. Bing.
“Despite its growth over the past year, DuckDuckGo faces a considerable challenge when it comes to getting found by new users. Data shows the people using DuckDuckGo are those who already know about the search engine, with 93% of its traffic coming from direct visits. Only 1.5% of its traffic comes from organic search.
“Roy Hinkis of SimilarWeb concludes by saying the loyal users of DuckDuckGo are those who love tech, and they use they use DuckDuckGo as an alternative because they’re concerned about having their privacy protected while they search online.”
Though Southern agrees DuckDuckGo needs to do some targeted marketing, he notes traffic to the site has been rising by 22% per year. It is telling that the privacy-protecting engine is most popular among those who understand the technology.
Cynthia Murrell, May 18, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Paywalls Block Pleasure Reading
April 4, 2016
Have you noticed something new in the past few months on news Web sites? You click on an interesting article and are halfway though reading it when a pop-up banner blocks out the screen. The only way to continue reading is to enter your email, find the elusive X icon, or purchase a subscription. Ghacks.net tells us to expect more of these in, “Read Articles Behind Paywalls By Masquerading As Googlebot.”
Big new sites such as the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are now experimenting with the paywall to work around users’ ad blockers. The downside is that content will be locked up and sites might lose viewers, but that might be a risk they are willing to take to earn a bigger profit.
There used be some tricks to get around paywalls:
“It is no secret that news sites allow access to news aggregators and search engines. If you check Google News or Search for instance, you will find articles from sites with paywalls listed there. In the past, news sites allowed access to visitors coming from major news aggregators such as Reddit, Digg or Slashdot, but that practice seems to be as good as dead nowadays. Another trick, to paste the article title into a search engine to read the cached story on it directly, does not seem to work properly anymore as well as articles on sites with paywalls are not usually cached anymore.”
The best way, the article says, is to make the Web site think you are a Googlebot. Web sites allow Googlebots roam freely to appear higher in search engine results. There are a few ways to trick the Web sites into thinking you are a Googlebot based on your Internet browser, Firefox or Chrome. Check them out, but it will not be long before those become old-fashioned too.
Whitney Grace, April 4, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Natural Language Processing App Gains Increased Vector Precision
March 1, 2016
For us, concepts have meaning in relationship to other concepts, but it’s easy for computers to define concepts in terms of usage statistics. The post Sense2vec with spaCy and Gensim from SpaCy’s blog offers a well-written outline explaining how natural language processing works highlighting their new Sense2vec app. This application is an upgraded version of word2vec which works with more context-sensitive word vectors. The article describes how this Sense2vec works more precisely,
“The idea behind sense2vec is super simple. If the problem is that duck as in waterfowl andduck as in crouch are different concepts, the straight-forward solution is to just have two entries, duckN and duckV. We’ve wanted to try this for some time. So when Trask et al (2015) published a nice set of experiments showing that the idea worked well, we were easy to convince.
We follow Trask et al in adding part-of-speech tags and named entity labels to the tokens. Additionally, we merge named entities and base noun phrases into single tokens, so that they receive a single vector.”
Curious about the meta definition of natural language processing from SpaCy, we queried natural language processing using Sense2vec. Its neural network is based on every word on Reddit posted in 2015. While it is a feat for NLP to learn from a dataset on one platform, such as Reddit, what about processing that scours multiple data sources?
Megan Feil, March 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Measuring Classifiers by a Rule of Thumb
February 1, 2016
Computer programmers who specialize in machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, data visualization, and statistics are smart individuals, but they sometimes even get stumped. Using the same form of communication as reddit and old-fashioned forums, Cross Validated is a question an answer site run by Stack Exchange. People can post questions related to data and relation topics and then wait for a response. One user posted a question about “Machine Learning Classifiers”:
“I have been trying to find a good summary for the usage of popular classifiers, kind of like rules of thumb for when to use which classifier. For example, if there are lots of features, if there are millions of samples, if there are streaming samples coming in, etc., which classifier would be better suited in which scenarios?”
The response the user received was that the question was too broad. Classifiers perform best depending on the data and the process that generates it. It is kind of like asking the best way to organize books or your taxes, it depends on the content within the said items.
Another user replied that there was an easy way to explain the general process of understanding the best way to use classifiers. The user directed users to the Sci-Kit.org chart about “choosing the estimator”. Other users say that the chart is incomplete, because it does not include deep learning, decision trees, and logistic regression.
We say create some other diagrams and share those. Classifiers are complex, but they are a necessity to the artificial intelligence and big data craze.
Whitney Grace, February 1, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Getting Smart About Cutting the Cable Cord
December 21, 2015
A few years ago, I read an article about someone who was fed up with streaming content because he wanted new shows and access to all the channels so they resubscribed to cable. I have to admit the easiest thing to do would be to pay a monthly cable bill and shell out additional fees for the premiere channels. The only problem is that cable and extra channels are quite expensive. It has since become easier to cut the cord.
One of the biggest problems viewers face is finding specific and new content. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon Prime are limited with licenses and their individual content and having to search each one is time consuming. Even worse is trying to type out a series name using a remote control instead of a keyboard. Technology to the rescue!
The Verge talks about “Yahoo’s New App Is A TV Guide For Cord Cutters” called Yahoo Video Guide that allows viewers to search by a name and instantly watch it.
“Whenever users find what they want to watch, they can click a button to “Stream Now,” and the app will automatically launch a subscription service that hosts the film. If the program isn’t available online, users can buy it, instead.”
The coolest feature is that if viewers want to channel surf all they do so with GIFs. The viewer picks a GIF that fits their mood and the app will sort out content from there.
Finally, all those moving images have a different function than entertaining reddit users.
Whitney Grace, December 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Nuzzel Up to Your Content
December 3, 2015
A service called Nuzzel should aggregate content from Web sites like Dogshaming,com, Cuteoverload.com, and Reddit.com/aww. These Web sites are all overloaded with so much cute content that it would make your gums bleed. Nuzzel, however, is not meant to aggregate cute content, Gigaom tells us in “Nuzzel Update Improves New Discovery For Those Who Don’t Use Twitter” what Nuzzel’s true purpose is. Nuzzel is a content discovery service that collects and organized links from Twitter and Facebook. It will now contain an updated feature allowing users to find stories based off their interests without connect to social networks, think Feedly, Zine, and other content feeders.
There will be other changes to Nuzzel as well. Users will not be required to log into one social network, a better search function, and a swipe-based navigation system. Nuzzel is also adding a newsletter for users who do not want to download an application or a social media account. The updates are paired with a new round of funding totaling $5.1 million from the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, Mozilla, Google, and other companies.
“Connecting with Twitter remains the best way to use Nuzzel, and still provides a great personalized news experience,” Abrams said. “But a lot of people don’t use Twitter, and Nuzzel 2.0 provides a new experience for those people, that also allows non-Twitter users to enjoy the power of social curation.” So it can still help quiet the cacophony of links shared to social networks, but now it could also appeal to people who have somehow managed to avoid the din of social media.”
Nuzzel can be programmed to send users cute content from around the Internet, but it is useful for so much more and a great way to organize content and links.
Whitney Grace, December 3, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Do Not Go Gently into That Dark Web
November 26, 2015
The article titled Don’t Toy With The Dark Web, Harness It on Infoworld’s DarkReading delves into some of the misconceptions about the Dark Web. The first point the article makes is that a great deal of threats to security occur on the surface web on such well-known sites as Reddit and social media platforms like Instagram. Not only are these areas of the web easier to search without Tor or I2P, but they are often more relevant, particularly for certain industries and organizations. The article also points out the harm in even “poking around” the Dark Web,
“It can take considerable time, expertise and manual effort to glean useful information. More importantly, impromptu Dark Web reconnaissance can inadvertently expose an organization to greater security risks because of unknown malicious files that can infiltrate the corporate network. Additionally, several criminal forums on the Dark Web utilize a “vouching” system, similar to a private members club, that might require an investigator to commit a crime or at least stray into significantly unethical territory to gain access to the content.”
A novice could easily get into more trouble than they bargained for, especially when taking receipt of stolen goods is considered a felony. Leave the security work to professionals, and make sure the professionals you employ have checked out this Dark Web reading series.
Chelsea Kerwin, November 26, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Reddit’s Extended Family
October 1, 2015
I have a problem. I have a Reddit addiction. My addiction is so bad that I once meant to spend five minutes on the news site, when I ended up spending five hours. To control my compulsions, I only allow myself to read the first hundred posts and if I have finished my work, the first two hundred. I am currently in the process to kick the Reddit habit, so I will be a more productive person. But then I came across this article on Chi-Nese: “20 Great Reddit Alternatives You Should Know.”
Just as I thought I did not have enough Web sites on my RSS feed, now I have these lovely alternatives. Here is the scoop:
“Reddit is the most popular social bookmarking site celebrating 10-year anniversary of existence nowadays. Reddit has accumulated over 16 billion up-votes, over 1 billion comments and over 190 million posts, which are – compared to other Reddit alternatives – enormous numbers. Despite the fact that Reddit is a website with a massive number of users and posts, below is a list of international Reddit alternatives that have great potential, and are definitely worth a try!”
Most of these Reddit alternatives are in a foreign language (not English), but some of ones to make the list are Hubski, PushedUp, Qetzl, Voat.co, and 3tags.
I am surprised that Fark did not make the list. Fark is the “original” Reddit, but it focuses on aggregating outlandish news content. There goes my productivity!
Whitney Grace, October 1, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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