Data Anxiety

The Federal Times @fedline filled in additional details of the original story that appeared last weekend in Wired Magazine:

Wired’s Danger Room has the story of @PrimorisEra … whose mysterious, sexy photos and national security know-how may have enticed military and intelligence officials to disclose information during flirty social media conversations. @PrimorisEra claimed to be a Defense Department employee or contractor when talking to some men. To others, she claimed to work for the CIA… Some found her habit of pushing for information on their contacts and deployments “creepy.”

Last Friday, a fed-up female Defense contractor accused @PrimorisEra (on Twitter, no less) of being a social networking *honey pot. Almost immediately, @PrimorisEra shut down most of her social media accounts and disappeared… The Pentagon opened an investigation to see if anyone broke security rules when talking to her.

Via Federal Times blog post Twitter, Sex, Facebook and Maybe Espionage

*Note: That is not the information security standard definition of “honeypot” that I am familiar with!

News spreads even faster through social media.

@40deuce of Sysmos (the social sentiment/ marketing/ metrics etc service) gives a full rundown with all the gritty details:

Unless you have been totally disconnected from any sort of news over the past 12 hours, you’ve no doubt heard that Osama Bin Laden has been found and killed.

Barack Obama, President of the United States, announced this late last night, but wasn’t the first one to break the story… Most people who are active on Twitter (and who weren’t asleep at the time) first heard the news there… where it spread like wildfire.

Read more (including so many time lines, frequency counts and other details that even even my persistent curiosity was sated) on the Sysmos blog.

chaoticplanet:

Five Website Blunders That Need to Die - PCWorld Business Center

So what are they then?

• Get Adobe Reader
• Your Computer Needs This Plug-in to Continue
• You must upgrade your browser to continue
• Sites That Redirect to Country-specific Sites Without Asking
• Accessing Via a Phone? Then You’ll Need Our Mobile Site 

via johnskylar:

I am a scientist by day.  It’s pretty uncommon for a scientist to believe in any sort of deity, and it’s even less common for that belief to be something they broadcast.  Belief in a deity is unsupported by data, and that means it’s not something you talk about in scientific discourse.

Lots of scientists don’t believe in any deity, and that’s good for them and consistent with their careers.  More power to them. However, there seems to be some degree of perception that

• in order to be a self-consistent religious person, you have to reject certain elements of science, or 
• in order to be a self-consistent scientist, you have to reject religion.

A lot of people these days have a belief in science as some kind of magical religion of supported statements.  I have a surprise for you: for a long, long time, the data produced by scientists “supported” all manner of notions that are not true or at least unsupported today.  This includes, but is not limited to, the notion of deities… There are many things taken as dogma by today’s society… that will turn out not to be true in coming years.  This is a fact of science; the data collected is constantly revised … improved.

Science, dear reader, is not a set of beliefs.  It is not a set of facts.  These beliefs and facts are produced by a process known as science.  You cannot do things in the name of science, because science, simply, is a methodology. It can be used for the formation of ideologies, but it is not itself an ideology.

Science is a tool, and when it produces facts that disagree with you, it is not science that is to blame for that. Read More