networked inference

I'm taking a job as the reporter for a biweekly paper in the Upper Plains. It's probably OK with my future boss to disclose the name of the paper, but I kinda don't want to jinx it. I'm set to start in March. It's close enough to Colorado that I could get off work in the summer and be with my dog in the Rockies by sunset, and it's two hours from the closest store to "really buy men's clothes," I'm told. If you know it, don't tell me, maybe I'll see you there. It probably has decent internet access, but I don't want to stay plugged in anymore, so I don't really care. The paper doesn't have any online presence, the publisher says they don't need one, so I'm going to train to be his lead reporter/editor, and layout the copy and take it to the printer. I'm going to learn something new every day on my own, and almost definitely keep doing blog posts here on the same material, but maybe not. I'm going to b...

Fern Hill, by Dylan Thomas Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light.  And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams.  All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air And playing, lovely and watery An...

But it refers to Eagle Vision and ROVER Responsive Exploitation of Space Products for Tactical Use SMDC's EVR2EST, GIIEP quick data supported Super Bowl 50 with situational awareness https://t.co/hAi1h2CsfE — USASMDC/ARSTRAT (@ArmySMDC) February 12, 2016 It's satellite imagery, super-high-resolution, mostly used for situational awareness in disaster relief operations. Nothing terribly sensitive here, but it's probably not supposed to be accessible this way. Some of the images, even of disasters, are actually beautiful. This relatively benign product does, however, put the extent of US national technical means in sharp relief. Take a look at the image below, a "Scene" page with satellite images of a Imagery  is organized by Scene and Mission pages -- Mission pages contain multiple scene that overlap or are geographically adjacent, for example, the Washington, DC area. There are three scenes for DC, 2 orthographic regions, shown above as or...

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines by Dylan Thomas Light breaks where no sun shines; Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides; And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads, The things of light File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones. A candle in the thighs Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age; Where no seed stirs, The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars, Bright as a fig; Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs. Dawn breaks behind the eyes; From poles of skull and toe the windy blood Slides like a sea; Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky Spout to the rod Divining in a smile the oil of tears. Night in the sockets rounds, Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes; Day lights the bone; Where no cold is, the skinni...

Project Sentry is a counterterrorism data-mining application used in Afghanistan, this is an ongoing series on the program. This post is just about the software and basic identification of the users, next post we'll get into the kill list. Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive. - Ralph Waldo Emerson,  Representative Men The Sentry Federation The SENTRY project was developed to suit the data ingestion needs of a number of US and international agencies. The main US entities are the DoD, DEA, and Treasury Department, and included are international members of the ISAF in Afghanistan, as well as the Israeli Defence Force -- all stakeholders in the Afghanistan Terror Finance Cell, ATFC. The variety of data sources as well as diverse needs of the ATFC consumers presented a special problem The cell analysts, located in Kabul and Baghram had to "manually manipulate the raw intel...

Patent #9,565,390 B1 was granted February 7, 2017, and it's the best thing to happen to mass surveillance since the people who've done nothing wrong filter. From the summary: (full text PDF ,  SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR ENHANCING RECORDED OR INTERCEPTED CALLS USING INFORMATION FROM A FACIAL RECOGNITION ENGINE ) A video stream is received. The video stream can be analyzed in real-time as it is being received or can be recorded and stored for later analysis. Information within the video streams can be extracted and processed by a facial and video content recognition engine and the information derived there from can be stored as metadata. The metadata can be queried for statistical data and/or for business or security analysis. The metadata can be used to enrich the call content of a recorded or intercepted call. The information derived from the video streams can be used to determine whether or not the call should be recorded. The inventor is Ofer Shochet of Tel A...