data management

Reasons Why Data Catalogs Are Vital for Data Management

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data catalogsWhat is the point of collecting and storing data if accessing it is going to suck? To a large extent, data access is the light of the entire data management circuit and thus needs to shine bright. However, easy access to data has never been a swift task for data owners. For your available data sets to make any business value, cataloging your database proves to be an excellent solution. Read on to what data catalogs are and essential for overall data management.

Data Catalog Defined

A data catalog collects metadata integrated with appropriate search tools to help an analyst or a data user find a particular data set. When adequately built by the right data experts, data catalogs can serve as a data warehouse for business users and other stakeholders listed as beneficiaries. However vast or small, this repository of datasets is vital for all the processes in managing data. Continue reading →

70 years after providing key technology to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, IBM is now lending computing power to U.S. drone strikes

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IBMJ. D. Heyes – More than seven decades after the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi-inspired Third Reich on battlefields that left much of Europe in shambles, U.S. technology giant IBM – which played a major role in all phases of the Holocaust – is once again in the business of killing.

As reported by investigative news site The Intercept, a secret brief discussing the Pentagon’s drone strike program in Somalia and Yemen dated February 2013 was produced for the Defense Department by IBM analysts.

“On its surface, it’s simply an analysis by the Defense Department’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task Force of the ‘performance and requirements’ of the U.S. military’s counterterrorism kill/capture operations, including drone strikes, in Somalia and Yemen,” The Intercept reported. “However, it’s also what a former senior special operations officer characterized as a ‘bitch brief’ – that is, a study designed to be a weapon in a bureaucratic turf war with the CIA to win the Pentagon more money and a bigger mandate.”

It’s a safe bet to assume that the study outlined in the brief was an opportunity for IBM to show that it is capable of producing quality analyses specific to the Defense Department as well as for current Pentagon employees to network with a potential future employer.

Building target packages like a corporation tracks customers

However, experts say there is more to the presentation. For one, it’s a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the military-industrial complex, where assassination technologies and corporate sales merge, shrouded in lifeless language as dead as the target of a “kinetic engagement.” Continue reading →