CIA Prophet Pointed to Big Data Future by Issac Lopez.
Issac writes:
“What does the size of the next coffee crop, bull flight attendance figures, local newspaper coverage of UN matters, the birth rate, the mean daily temperatures or refrigerator sales across the country have to do with who will next be elected president of Guatemala,” asks Orrin Clotworthy in the report, which he styled “a Jules Verne look at intelligence processes in a coming generation.”
“Perhaps nothing” he answers, but notes that there is a cause behind each vote cast in an election and many quantitative factors may exist to help shape that decision. “To learn just what the factors are, how to measure them, how to weight them, and how to keep them flowing into a computing center for continual analysis will some day be a matter of great concern to all of us in the intelligence community,” prophesied Clotworthy, describing the challenges that organizations around the globe face fifty years after the report was authored.
I’m not sure if Issac means big data is closer to measuring the factors that motivate people or if big data will seize upon what can be measured as motivators.
The issue of standardized tests is a current one in the United States and it is far from settled whether the tests measure anything about the educational process or do they measure the ability to take standardized tests? Or measure some other aspect of students?
You can read the report in full here.
Issac quotes another part of the report but only in part:
IBM has developed for public use a computer-based system called the ‘Selective Disseminator of Information.’ Intended for large organizations dealing with heterogeneous masses of information, it scans all incoming material and delivers those items that are of interest to specific offices in accordance with “profiles” of their needs which are continuously updated by a feed-back device.
But Clotworthy continues in the next sentence to say:
Any comment hear on the potential of the SDI for an intelligence agency would be superfluous; Air Intelligence has in fact been experimenting with such a mechanized dissemination system for some years.
Fifty (50) years later and the device that needs no description continues to elude us.
Is there a semantic equivalent to NP-complete?