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- Told You SoOctober 10
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This week the Department of Homeland Security received the results from a study by the National Research Council that the DHS funded. The study's conclusion: data mining for terrorists does not work and it invades the privacy of innocent citizens. Searching for the terrorist needle in the haystack of phone-calls and emails is counter-productive.
I told you so... here, here, here, here, and here.
However, if you start with a known suspect or two, you can roll up the rest of the network with normal surveillance techniques. Rather than dig through millions of records looking for that unknown terrorist pattern, give the phone company the numbers of known suspects/terroists and have them return the 2-step network neighborhood of each number -- now you can see the terror suspect's extended social graph. This approach with social network analysis also uncloaks street gangs and criminal n - Political Patterns on AmazonOctober 8
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This week, I am blogging on one of the Amazon blogs -- Omnivoracious.
Multiple people are posting about various approaches on how book purchases may influence the upcoming 2008 US presidential election. I am grateful to be included with such experts as John Zogby, Bill Bishop, and Andrew Gelman. Each of us has a different approach for how to mine Amazon data for interesting insights.
Enjoy! - Non-Obvious TiesSeptember 18
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How many NOTs in your network? [NOT = Non-Obvious Tie]
You probably can't answer that, because the connections are...
n o n - o b v i o u s .
Ties/links/connections/relationships that are not obvious to me may be obvious to someone else, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the knowledge of those ties may not be as valuable to those those who know, than to those who do not know.
Confused? Let me share a few stories...
This afternoon I was looking through the access logs to my business web site. I saw some interesting NOTs. Two *.mil orgnaizations were visiting certain pages. Would my friends at Booz-Allen-Hamilton would find that information of great value? BAH sells products and services to DoD clients. The BAH rainmakers would love to know what military branch X and Y are interested in and what search terms they used, and what pages they spent a long time on.
Then I noticed visitors from the Dark Web [web sites that support/idolize Jihad]. I wondered... wouldn't the military folks, that visited just an hour before, like to see what the jihadi supporters were look - We confirm, You conformSeptember 14
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We have seen how obesity and smoking are affected by the network around an individual. Alas, it also works for crime and terror. From the BBC report on how people become terrorists:
The picture that emerges is of largely intelligent people finding direction in the networks of associates they keep.
"The work on pathways into terrorism indicates that it comes out of a social process; it comes out of a series of contacts that terrorists have with other individuals," Professor Canter told BBC News.
"At the broader level, everything has to be done to undermine the idea that individuals think of themselves solely in terms of any particular group of sub-group - be that fundamental Muslims or supporters of a football club . Once people only think of themselves in those terms, then that sets the seeds for conflict."
Re-read that last paragraph above.
Any group that isolates itself, by just focusing on itself, sows the seeds of conflict with the rest of society. Groups isolated from the rest of society are not automatically terrorists [look at the Amish], but they are places where confirmation [what we all think is correct] and conformation - Political Book Buying PatternsSeptember 10
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I'm surprised it took Amazon this long to exploit their own political book buying data. The Amazon maps go to where the power is -- state by state -- the Electoral College.
The Amazon maps indicate whether each state's residents purchased a larger number of red or blue books. Comparing my recent book network maps to the above pictured book volume map, seems to show that while the Left read a larger variety of books, in most states the Right buys greater quantities of a smaller set of books.
Some interesting questions remain...- are book buyers influential with voters in their social network?
- how many voters does a typical political book reader reach/influence?
- are Amazon book buyers representative of the political book buying population?
Amazon clusters the political book sales data into 60 day slices. When you go back earlier in the year 2008, you see more blue or neutral shaded states. The most recent 60 day slice of 2008 [before and after the conventions] shows a blossoming of deep red. If polemics predict [no one knows for - are book buyers influential with voters in their social network?
