Posts Tagged ‘culture’
02
Sep
2010
SwiftRiver: Intelligence for the Information Age
What humanitarian crisis management has to do with brand monitoring and natural language.
Information management is easily the greatest challenge of the digital age, only intensifying as we go forth. While most of us make do with a careful selection of tools and a handful of trusted content curators, a holistic solution to information overload has been largely missing. Until now. Enter SwiftRiver, a brand new open-source intelligence gathering platform for managing real-time streams of data.
Developed by our friends at Ushahidi, whose platform of crowdsourced crisis information was the single most effective data management platform during the Haiti earthquake, SwiftRiver offers five different web services for validating and filtering real-time information:
- SiLCC is a natural-language processing tool that extracts semantic value from text — essentially, figuring out the human meaning of digital bits
- SULSa adds location context to content, which can be a life-or-death factor when responding to crisis information
- SiCDS reduces the number of duplicates, such as RT’s on Twitter that relay identical information without adding semantic value
- Reverberations measures the influence of content by weighing its popularity as it propagates across the social graph
- River ID scans the other four services to determine what and who is of value to different communities
Swift isn’t about replacing humans — it’s about maximizing their time.” ~ Jon Gosier
What makes SwiftRiver particularly noteworthy is its incredible range applications — from humanitarian crisis management to brand monitoring to political intelligence and beyond. What’s even more valuable is the multi-dimensional, relational way in which it approaches content — because the value of information is rarely absolute but, rather, relative to the context of who we are, what we do, where we live, and what else we know.
We have high hopes for SwiftRiver as the first tangible ray of hope for “curaggregation” — the holy-grail intersection of curation and aggregation. Give it a try.
via White African
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31
Aug
2010
Fault Line Living
Geysers, mud pots, and what Barba Papa has to do with the benefits of geothermal energy.
Fault lines are cracks in Earth’s crusts where tectonic plates converge. As you’d expect, these areas have an extraordinarily propensity for earthquakes due to the constant geodesic activity going on beneath. And yet millions of people around the world live on and around fault lines, in a constant state of alertness, with the sound of the earthquake drill alarm growing more familiar than the doorbell.
Faul Line Living is a 15,000-mile expedition from Iceland to Iran documenting the lives of people who live along the world’s most notorious fault lines. The multi-media project explores the human stories that populate these high-risk natural environments, working with school students, seismologists and citizens of each country along the way to better understand how different communities adapt to the challenges of life in fault zones.
Broken jug, damaged in the 1976 earthquake at Kopaska, belonging to Jon Halldorsson
The Blue Lagoon – despite the wind and rain, the warm waters of the Blue Lagoon provide a fillip to tourists and locals alike
Faul Line Living won the 2010 Go Beyond bursary from the UK’s Royal Geographical Society and Land Rover, a £10,000 award encouraging winners to push past their own limits as a way of promoting a wider understanding and appreciation of geography.
Fun after the rain
Steaming mud pots at Namafjall
On July 31, the UK-based team — Tamsin Davies, Serena Davies and Adam Whitaker — embarked upon their journey into these collision zones of nature and humanity. For 12 weeks, they will drive across the UK, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, learning to use a seismometer and delving into the social anthropology of fault line living through photography, interviews and real-time mapping.
Honeycomb basalt formations at Dimmuborgir
Barba Papa house at Seysdisfjordur
Explore the project’s breathtaking gallery and follow along vicariously on Twitter. Meanwhile, keep yourself grounded by appreciating the geological stability of your own locale.
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