Don't support drilling ANWR

I don't trust the government to do any thing with drilling for oil in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_National_Wildlife_Refuge Here are my reasons -
Those responsible ...
1. could be more competent and should hire those to work for them who have ethics and respect for everyone
2. have shown a history of continuous spills, no planning, can not be trusted to get the oil out of Alaska safely
3. allowed a degenerate anti-culture to invade Alaska and now women fear walking around alone
4. need to consider other things than short term profit motives
5. could consider ANWR for an emergency - but it is not a long term solution - taking the oil means accepting a stop gap solution and having NOTHING left. Is this that last emergency?

Shipping oil unsafely by the goverment in league with private industry killed off Prince William Sound as a result of the March 24, 1989 Exxon Valdex Oil Spill. In the wake of 10.8 million U.S.gallons of oil Prince William Sound has not recovered, the land and water have not been able to clean and restore themselves to what they were prior to the spill. ("Almost 15 years after the spill, a team of scientists at the University of North Carolina found that the effects are lasting far longer than expected. The team estimates some shoreline habitats may take up to 30 years to recover. Exerpts from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill )

I loved Prince William Sound - I photographed it - my heart literarly leaped with joy to see the birds and other wildlife in the pristine blue water with white waves lapping on the beaches when I was a federal wildlife photographer there.

The Native population and other people still can not make a living from that region. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill In 1991, following the collapse of the local marine population (particularly clams, herring, and seals) the Chugach Native American group went bankrupt. According to several studies funded by the state of Alaska, the spill had both short- and long term economic effects. These included the loss of recreational sports fisheries, reduced tourism, and an estimate of what economists call "existence value," which is the value to the public of a pristine Prince William Sound.)

I was devastated because in 1979 I photographed the so called "recovery vessels" along the coast - yellow painted metal submersibles with no engine, that were not waterproof and fitted with no equipment whatsoever. What were these things - a joke I thought?

When I immediately showed government representatives photos of these yellow submarines - including the then head of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, he said they all knew about the condition of their fleet of oil spill recovery vessels: useless.

It was in fact why I left Alaska - clearly no one in the government cares enough to protect Alaska from the short term thinking and money grubbers. They did not even have an emergency plan for the inevitable spills. Drilling in a wildlife range - why not just go drill in the Outside / lower 49 state wildlife ranges if the US government likes that idea so much - first let's drill in the parks - how about if they start with Yosemite National Park?

You may not know that I worked on the Alaska pipeline in 1976. There are areas which are so easy to damage you would not believe it. If you just step on some sections of ground it turns into a soggy pond within weeks. In a year nothing can go by that area. Along the pipeline road all the animals had died out in a 4 mile radius. This is for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

How do I know? My close friend was the chief biologist stationed at Coldfoot at Camp 4 on the pipeline. She was threatened by her pipeline bosses that if she accurately documented the real effects on the environment - they'd just replace her with someone who would lie for them. I suggested she provide the real statistics under the table to the state and federal biologists so that they would at least know the truth even if it was not the official "truth".

The jackasses who came from the lower US states to build the pipeline robbed, raped, and murdered friends of mine in Fairbanks. We found one of our friends buried in a car trunk in a gravel pit. They had to have help to do that. It was like a war zone. I worked with those SOBs - it took me many years to recover - maybe this blog shows that.

The day I arrived in Coldfoot (a camp of between 400- 800 men) - there was lots of violence - some drunk 798'er (pipeline worker, welding union) attacked an old woman in her house with a huge rock - nearly killed her in a rape attempt. What is amazing is that she managed to escape although her head was broken and bleeding. How do I know? Because the only sheriff in hundreds of miles was a friend of mine - he was the one they sent for to find and arrest the asshole who did that. She had to be hospitalized - I think she was in her 60's. I was lucky because I knew how to stay safe but not everyone was so lucky.

For me I could not stand to watch the Alaska I knew as a child become the place it is now, and a place I expect will become worse. When I last visited Anchorage my friends were totally freaked out that I walked around at different times of the day and night in public. Why? Because rape is epidemic there. How do I know for sure besides the statistics? My best friend was an assistant district attorney in Anchorage.

The last thing I would ever do is put any trust into a government that has lead us by lying into an expensive war with one excuse after another and uses deceit and threats to cover up the facts about the effects.

We need to work to find alternative sources of energy - not use up our backup emergency sources in the face of their inability to plan or control the effects of removing the oil. Some areas are worth keeping just as they are because they are beautiful. We can still afford beauty can't we?

Or do we just continue to foster and support a culture of taking what we want when ever we want it - rape, lies, war.

Not me, not now, not with what I have myself seen and know - this is not from some third party source - it's from a 4th generation Alaskan.

Think of this as the last of your own wildlife reserves, and some of the last oil reserves in the country - would you use the very last of it, especially if you understood the effects it would have?

Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill for more information about the continuing problems from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill - including the "WikiScanner discovered changes made from within Exxon Mobil altering this article's descriptions of the oil spill and down playing its severity."

And the State of Alaska source: http://www.evostc.state.ak.us/

Understanding Business Intelligence

“Even though we live in the Information age, where ever increasing masses of data are at our disposal, we often struggle to understand what the data means.”

Describing Business Intelligence’s goals are three main items -
• “Making better decisions faster
• Converting data into information
• Using a rational approach to management
Making better decisions means improving any or all parts of the process; this also results in fewer poor decisions and more superior ones.”

It also seeks to analyze actions “resulting in progress towards company objectives.” Business who move too slowly “will lose out to their quicker rivals. There is a need to make not only better decisions but also better decisions faster.” In addition the “negative consequences of no information or old information can be huge” such as loosing customers or continuing to produce a product that no one wants.

Converting data into information” is a component of BI, the gap between large amounts of data and actual useful information is termed “the analysis gap.” Raw data which may be measured in gigabytes, terabytes and so forth needs to be processed to deliver information in “ relevant subsets instantly” in a form which people can relate to – “some call this ‘analysis at the speed of thought”.

Technology may be considered “a baseline definition of Business Intelligence, but this is “too narrow of a view” according to one author (Vitt, E., Luckevich, M. & Misner, S. (2002). “Understanding Business Intelligence.” In Business Intelligence. (Chap. 1). Microsoft Press. pp. 13-27.)“Often the hardest aspect of business intelligence is useful and relevant to a decision, such metrics are termed “key performance indicators (KPIs)… With advancements in e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactional systems, business intelligence is increasingly about delivering actionable information to people outside the organization – often as a revenue source.”

A rational approach to management can be characterized as:
• Seeking “measurable quantitative facts”,
• “organized methods and technologies to analyze the facts”,
• “inventing and sharing models that explain cause and relationships”,
• “experimenting with alternative approaches”,
• “understanding that people are not always rational”, and
• “running the business based on these characteristics.”

To me in all of the reading which explains the Business Intelligence model, this is the most key information being introduced. We can become educated on these business intelligence practices; we have known people who have astounding qualities and facilities of analysis and the ability to extrapolate beyond the data to its implications. But the key issue remains that we are people dealing with people’s needs, desires and wants. Both in business and in business analysis we need to remember what we are dealing with and for whom – so the closer we can get to allowing people to cleverly munge their own data, the closer we really come to real Business Intelligence, because the business of business is people.

Defining the BI cycle is “more than a attitude or enabling technology; in fact, it is a performance management frameworks, an ongoing cycle by which companies set their goals, analyze their process, gain insight, take action, measure their success,” and iterate. We call this progression – the BI cycle.”

Analysis is a filtering based on “our basic understandings and assumptions of how our business operates”, and as such can be referred to as a “mental model” or “tribal wisdom” and it can be a vision of what the business views as their goals.

Business Intelligence “systems that support freestyle analysis can help … break through the limits of … current mental models and even conceptualize new ones.” Step one of the BI cycle is to ask and answer many questions rapidly both the conventional and the unconventional. That is what real analysis is – the freedom to be curious and ask lots of really stupid questions until you ask a brilliant one.” Unfortunately in the real world not many business process analysts have a quality education, or a spontaneous or creative mind, so in the past in my own experience I have witnessed companies being lead down a garden path where there was no garden, and then cornered -- left without choices they made the only one presented, a bad one, which resulted in failure for both companies. Spontaneous reasoning, creative insight, and modeling using the open techniques described here could have resulted in more insightful investigations.

Even brainstorming has its uses in visualizing various aspects of business process analysis. “An insight is not always accepted because it is brilliant or even correct.” This being true what are the things that drive change into businesses and business modeling? – it appears to be time and success and failure. Sometimes stunning failure can be the only way for members of a company or unit to understand the results of their poor practices and decision making practices or lack thereof.

This brings us right to measurement – “key performance indicators” are fancy words for how you know you are right. Measurement is what keeps the iterative practices pointed in the right directions.

Moore’s Law corollary is that the computing power of microprocessors doubles ever 18 months but prices remain constant. For BI this means massive calculation power is increasing, and with the increase comes the ability to visual data in new and exciting ways. “The greater the quantity of data, the more certain the analysis and conclusion are correct.” This statement is humbled by two others,
1. Dirty data (quality of data), and so …
2. Asking the right questions.

By entering the “era of Information Democracy” we can hope that the privately funded research which may not have reached the right audiences does come out from behind the iron curtain of the Information Cold War, where companies zealous guard their research so that they make the profits they deserve based on their hard work – which unfortunately may mean that more friends like my friend Laura, who died of cancer two days ago in Fairbanks, Alaska will continue to die.

I am not suggesting that if "Sir Isaac Newton had observed more apples falling, he would have developed his laws of gravity sooner” because not many people were immediately and directly affected by his scientific statement of them, but in our case the potential good for data sharing of certain types is beginning to outweigh the relatively minor issue of money.

Even small businesses may soon not be able to navigate by dead reckoning any more if they could more easily afford some kind of Business Intelligence. Larger companies can afford more encouragement of “experimenting and tolerating good try failures” than smaller firms can.

To conclude, business intelligence is logical, communication, and analysis done in a timely manner to promote and provide for business needs, in a clear, rational and open way, using whatever tools are available to the practitioners, even if they are manual. There are many things that we are “dying to know” and I hope those needs will be met for ethical reasons if for no others.

Business Intelligence

Vitt, E., Luckevich, M. & Misner, S. (2002). “Understanding Business Intelligence.” In Business Intelligence. (Chap. 1). Microsoft Press. pp. 13-27.
Vitt, E., Luckevich, M. & Misner, S. (2002). ”Defining BI Technologies.” In Business Intelligence. (Chap. 3). Microsoft Press. pp. 49-63.
Vitt, E., Luckevich, M. & Misner, S. (2002). “Implementing a BI Solution.” In Business Intelligence. (Chap. 10). Microsoft Press. pp. 145-177.
Whiting, Rich, “Search and Business Intelligence: Complementary Tools,” Information Week, March 6. 2006. Accessed on 3/14/2006 from http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=181500684
Information Lifecycle

Goodwin, Phil. "Information Life-Cycle Management and Enterprise Content Management: The Confluence of Technology and Business." (2-18-2004) Accessed on 3/24/2006 from http://www.documentum.ru/pdf/analytics/reviews_meta_ILM_ECM.pdf.
Information Assessment

Outsell, Inc. “Information Management Best Practices: 2006 Product Satisfaction Scorecard – A Tool For Making Portfolio Choices,” InfoAboutInfo Briefing,Volume 9, February 10, 2006.
Knowledge Creation, Capture and Collections

Davenport , Thomas H., Thomas, Robert J. and Desouza, Kevin C., “Reusing Intellectual Assets,” Industrial Management, 4 (3), 2003, pp. 12-17.
Desouza, Kevin C., and Awazu, Yukika, “Maintaining Knowledge Management Systems: A Strategic Imperative,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56 (7), 2005, pp. 765-768.
Supplemental Readings

Business Intelligence

Vitt, E., Luckevich, M. & Misner, S. (2002). “Identifying BI Opportunities.” In Business Intelligence. (Chap. 9). Microsoft Press. pp. 113-143.
Whiting, Rich, “BI Spending to Increase,” Information Week, March 6. 2006. Accessed on 3/14/2006 from http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=181500685.
Information Lifecycle

Horton, F. Woody. "Government Information Life Cycle Management: The Mission, the Needs, the Operational Requirements, the Roles." (10-13-2002) Accessed on 3/24/2006 from http://www.nclis.gov/govt/assess/assess.appen16.pdf.
Knowledge Creation, Capture and Collections

Awazu, Yukika and Desouza, Kevin C., “Open Knowledge Management: Lessons from the Open Source Revolution,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(11), 2004, pp. 1016-1019.

Reflection Paper Week 4:
Information Sources, Quality & Presentation

For Lee Dirks
520b
University of Washington iSchool
April 18, 2007

Liz Vitt (Intellimentum) spoke to the class on April 20, 2007. How do you know the data you are recieving is even reliable - data integrity.

Key term from Phil Fawcett (Microsoft) on "optimized applications" http://research.microsoft.com/ivm/HDView/HDGigapixel.htm

TechnologyVentres - from Idea to Enterprise
Richard C. Dorf
Thomas H. Byers

Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get in touch with her Buddha nature?

"Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" is a short read on why metadata may not work in the open Internet: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

For a foretaste, check out the brief chapter headings:
* 0. ToC
o 0.1 Version History
* 1. Introduction
* 2. The problems
o 2.1 People lie
o 2.2 People are lazy
o 2.3 People are stupid
o 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself
o 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral
o 2.6 Metrics influence results
o 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something
* 3. Reliable metadata

There is nothing like the open Internet to sound out ideas. My own opinion goes more towards that metadata is a tool because information is locked away from powerful search engines which necessitates organizing it with tools such as metadata, and analysis from data experts. But this model may not really help in terms of the absolutely creative nature of human endeavor. Methinks it comes more from the realm of library science and pedagogy where finding something in a physical realm and instruction is the goal, which has not caught up to the power to SEARCH, and view others' metadata such as relationships (tagging, authority - author, etc).

Still in a nation focused on UFOs and celebrities, maybe this is what is required to indulge the great unwashed jungle, and security protects the scientific and verifiable.

I would feel much better if I knew that all drug and health-related companies shared their information on research and discoveries for example.

Maybe someday instead of this Age of the Information Cold War, we will have strategies for open information presentation and a way to nix the harassment from the identity thieves.

My personal model included metrics to influence the model on purpose - but that is "mixing metadata with data" - strictly the wrong direction according to current science.

Combining the link stats (by data mining) should provide more information. It's how Page Rank score/ hit rate combine with IP address and other long term use tracking - thus relevance is displayed that makes a difference. People are lazy and many really don't get tech - so I am thinking of a way to assemble the page to include the Page Rank score/ hit rate, to help in usability.

What I want to my frequently used websites (such as the MSIM iSchool) is for it to present ALL the data specific to me. In other words I pretty much use the same exact pages over and over again - I don't want to have to search or click or anything - I just want what I use to be presented first and foremost. The other data that the 'outfit' (the UW in this case, or a business or religious or other org) wants to present to me or makes available is also interesting but less so.

Including metrics with the metadata allows information scientists to tweak their presentation model by showing it's relevance - in effect putting in metrics to view it's context to the greater whole. But not as metadata - as other information mapped to such things as sniffing my IP address.

What I mean by Medieval Information Age is that we have lots and lots of closed information and closed data systems - I hope that these will open up but I know I will not see this happen in my life time or even in the next lifetime, Greenstone not withstanding.

Meta data is like the "thin client" of the Information World - it allows lots and lots of information to be relayed very quickly, in categories.

Will we look back on this as the Medieval Information Age? I view information as a contextual circle - I know nothing.