The Lighter Side
SHHHH!!!
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor


Jul 12, 2006, 00:56

The Air Force Link, official(?) website of the US Air Force, reports the �Air Force Office of Scientific Research has begun funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs.� In fact, �Blog research may provide information anal-ysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.� Why not blogism? That�s all it is. No t-word, necess . . . SHHH!

�Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.� So SHHH, bigmouth bloggers! Loose lips sink ships. And they�ll sink you, all 120 sites from A to Z. You too Online Journal, number 71, you know who you are. SHHH!

I�m whispering: this comes from an article �Blogs study may net credible information� by William J. Sharp, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Public Affairs. Drs. Brian Ulicny, senior scientist, and Mieczyslaw Kokar, president, (are these American names?) Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham Mass., will get $450 grand and (Dr. Strangelove will consult for $1 a year), to fund a three-year project, catch this, for �Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of In International Web Logs (love them at Christmas) for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.� In other words, us. SSSHHHHHHHHH!

All right, I�m whispering, whispering: the patterns they�ll be analyzing include blog contents, hyperlinks in the blog (like the one above) �allowing someone to discover the most important events bloggers are writing about.� See, like finding �the most important papers in a field by finding which ones are cited most often in research papers.� Golly. This can help the anal-ysts searches �be as productive as possible.� SSSSHHH!

Or they�re gonna have to hurt us. Ever heard of Guantanamo, Egyptian Prisons, Abu Ghraib, Siberia, the Archipelago, Interment Centers, Concentration Camps? This blog study is part of AFOSR�S new Information Forensics and Process Integration research program at Syracuse University in New York. That used to be such a nice school. What happened? They needed the money? SSSHHHHH!

Sorry, tiny whisper. Since there�s so much info to analyze, no rest for Big Brother, they�re developing a �new tool,� okay, to tell anal-ysts what we bloggers are most interested at a point in time. Sex. Money. A job at MSNBC. A new wardrobe of suits, an eye job, plastic hair, and new white teeth (to replace the old yellow ones they knock out). I SAID SSSSHHHH!

Mouse voice: �Dr. Kokar, calls the RSTC approach to blog analysis: relevance, specificity, timeliness and credibility.� Not to mention cleanliness next to godliness, so no fucking cursing. It�s against the law or code or whatever. HOW DARE YOU! SSSSSHHHHH!

okay, i�ll whisper in lower case. see, it�ll work like a search engine but with more focused approach. for example, the times a term appears in a document, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk, bush, bush, bush, bush. �the info obtained via search engine query tends to be similar among the documents returned. blog postings, however, can be much more dissimilar from one to another.�

But . . . SSSHHHHHHHH! NEIN!

tiny whisper: what they�re doing, santa�s little helpers, �is sort of information retrieval,� Dr. Ulicny said. whew, he finally said something. He was just standing there staring. �the difference is that in order to find and analyze blog entries, you need to more adequately model how the blogs work on a global scale.� SO YOU HAVE TO MONITOR EVERYWHERE. ARGGGH! SSSHHHHH! get your hands off my throat, dwork!

�Blog entries have a different structure. They are typically short and are about something external to the blog posting itself, such as a news event. It�s not uncommon for a blogger to simply state, �I CAN�T BELIEVE THIS,� SSSHHHHH, and then link to a news story.�

in this example, the good doctor Dr. Ulicny said there may not be much of interest in the blog posting, like one of these frigging run-on blogs I had a lousy day today, my cat died, my hard drive crashed, Rumsfeld made another speech, and my somethin in the oven burnt to a crisp, but I believe in faith healing and it will all turn out as Nietzsche said if I could remember what he said, right, Obie (that�s my dog, god spelled backwards). SSSSHHHHHH!

But the Doc meant like with the Muslim world going bonkers over the cartoons of Mohammad in a Danish newspaper. The original publication wasn�t noticed in the West, but bloggers rapped about this event and that possibly contributed to world riots. THAT�S RIDICULOUS, DOC! SHHHHHH.

�ze fact that the Web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts,� I, Kokar, say.

�Our research is to provide the warfighter (warfighter?)� -- what the hell is that, like a soldier, an army, Dick Cheney hunting, George Bush in jeans? -- �is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace." Now SSHHHHHHH.

�Information battlespace� Is that what�s going on in your brain, doc? And �actionable information� and the �network effect,� said Major (Dr.) Amy Magnus of AFOSR�s Mathematics and Information Sciences Directorate and the Information Forensics and Process Integration program manager or NERD for short. SHHHHHHH, Schweinhund.

Und �actionable information is associated with consequence such as evidence of a crime or an enemy�s attack plan discovered before its execution.� Like you�re planning to take absolutely all our freedom of speech away. TAKE HIM AWAY! Information forensics is both the identification and authoritative communication of actionable information. HEIL! Hell! SSSHHH. BAG HIM AND SILENCE HIM.

�The network ensures that as new users, information, and services are added, network utility increases.� Yah, mein herr. �Process integration seeks to achieve the network effect by promoting processes that share resources and user knowledge.� Ja, ja! It feels good.

Und den, Major Magnus said, �Information forensics and process integration are important study areas for the military due to the growing emphases on networked operations. The military is a complex culture �where we collect more data than can be efficiently processed.�� I�ll bet. SHHHHHH, dummkopf. The tape, Hans, on his mouth. Now!

Up yours! Mmmmphhhhh!

Der Major Magnus said, �With net-centric communications, we may soon have the ability to ask more questions than we can answer. Our goal is to evoke a discipline -- both in the scientific and social sense -- where good, insightful questions direct timely data collections and processing.�

Mmmmmmmmpphhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

SHHHHHH!

Ssssssshhhhhhit!