mining

Americans leave behind countless digital footprints from everyday activities like making a phone call or using a credit card--footprints government agencies regularly track as part of their counterterrorism efforts.

The collection, retention, and dissemination of this information has dangerously escaped public oversight and congressional scrutiny, public sector experts warned Congress on Wednesday. If the next Congress and administration do not take steps to rein in these programs that are bloating the federal government, they said, it will come at the expense of both civil liberties and national security.

Policy experts laid out their concerns to the House Homeland Security Committee … Read more

We Feel Fine is “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.” The site, created by Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris and Stanford computational math professor and former Google employee Sep Kamvar, looks like exactly the result of these two minds combined: emotional data mining with a human touch and an artistic interface -- a particularly beautiful application of moodgraphics.

The site is driven by a huge database that browses the web for emotional expressions around the globe and maps them graphically: “Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases ‘… Read more

Data mining used to be an expensive, somewhat esoteric affair. But as Forbes highlights in a recent article on Maltego, a new "open-source intelligence" tool, new technology "lets just about anybody do the kind of data mining that in the past only fraud investors, government specialists, and hackers typically could do."

Should we be worried?

Not really. Maltego doesn't snoop into closed data repositories, but instead mines publicly available data and helps to make inferences and connections between the disparate data sets. Here are two examples:

Worried about information leaks your company? Input lists of … Read more

That's the dog-sized Bluetooth headset you can buy to go with today's real news item, the new BlackBerry Storm: announced but not released. Until it comes out, though, it's basking in the warm glow of the "meeting and maybe exceeding expectations" judgments coming from the media. In sum, it sounds cool. And Google decides it's high time they made some money on that whole YouTube thing.

BlackBerry Storm 9500 hands-on http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/08/blackberry-storm-9500-hands-on/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10059498-1.html

YouTube adds … Read more

Shares of data warehouse management company Teradata jumped nearly 7 percent in trading Tuesday, following an analyst report that the company would make a good fit with enterprise software applications behemoth SAP.

And while JMP Securities analyst Pat Walravens, notes that SAP has "hinted in recent weeks" it may be considering another acquisition and he believes Teradata would make a good fit, SAP sources say no such transaction is in the immediate works.

Teradata, which has a market capitalization of $3.94 billion, would … Read more

Simbol Mining, which plans to plans to extract lithium for making batteries for electric cars and consumer electronics, has secured $6.7 million in series A funding.

MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures and Firelake Capital led the funding round.

The start-up has set the bold goal of meeting within 10 years one-fourth of global demand for the lithium carbonate, which could become a $1.5 billion market by 2015.

Simbol describes its process as "zero waste" because it will piggyback on geothermal power plants. Simbol will mine commodity metals from the salty water that gushes up from 10,000 feet … Read more

Earlier this week I spoke with representatives from Networked Insights, a Madison, Wisc., company that tracks social network data and works it into analytics and "customer intelligence" for clients. It's a niche that might raise a few eyebrows for its watching-your-every-move nature, but let's face it--there are search analytics and blog analytics, so we shouldn't be a bit surprised that social network analytics are starting to take off.

Networked Insights is set to announce Wednesday that it has relaunched its Customer Intelligence Platform, an interface that clients can use to gauge what members of social-media … Read more

If Simbol Mining's plans work out, within a decade it will deliver one-fourth of the world's increasing demand for lithium, used in batteries of hybrid and electric cars without creating waste or pollution.

The start-up eventually aims to mine more than 100,000 tons of lithium carbonate each year from geothermal sources. That's more than the current annual market for the compound; the company expects demands for it to quintuple by 2013.

Current mining methods won't provide enough for the future need for lithium-ion batteries, according to Meridian International Research.

Geothermal power plants bring silica, lithium, … Read more

Here's another reason to get off that antisocial kick and get with the networking.

The Air Force is developing a data-mining technology meant to root out disaffected insiders based on their e-mail activity--or lack thereof, according to an article in this month's International Journal of Security and Networks.

The technology, based on something called Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PDF), scours an organization's e-mail traffic and constructs a graph of social network interactions illustrating employee activity. If a worker suddenly stops socializing online, abruptly shifts alliances within the organization, or starts developing an unhealthy interest in "sensitive … Read more