Strong Canadian dollar said hurting pot exports
VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) – The strong Canadian dollar has hit the illegal marijuana sector just as it has other industries that export to the United States…
Monthly Archive for September, 2007
An Evening Standard article illustrates the ineffectiveness of CCTV surveillance camera use in London England.
“London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.
But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.
A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.”
I’m certain somebody’s nephew makes a lot of money off these CCTV surveillance systems, and I’m sure it provides a lot of deserving civil servants with well paid jobs, but I’ve never thought this stuff stops crime or even helps capture criminals. Now I know I’m right.
Thanks to Be AWARE – Research Secrets & More I found an excellent article on Competitive Intelligence (CI) for SME’s by an Australian based consultant, Vernon Prior, which gives a very comprehensive description of how to do CI on a low budget. The article is entitled, DIY Detection: Competitive Intelligence for SMEs.
Misleading RCMP data undermines counterfeiting claims by Michael Geist
“The RCMP has been the single most prominent source for claims about the impact of counterfeiting in Canada since its 2005 Economic Crime Report pegged the counterfeiting cost at between $10 to 30 billion dollars annually.”
“Responding to an Access to Information Act request for the sources behind the $30 billion claim, Canada’s national police force last week admitted that the figures were based on “open source documents found on the Internet.” In other words, the RCMP did not conduct any independent research on the scope or impact of counterfeiting in Canada, but rather merely searched for news stories on the Internet and then stood silent while lobby groups trumpeted the figure before Parliament.”
A growing proportion of our research is directed at reputation management efforts. It is very easy for someone to put up a Web site or Blog that libels a company or person anonymously.
I found two excellent articles about companies that claim to erase, or at least push lower in the search engines results, negative comments about a company. The first, is on an MSNBC Blog called The Red Tape Chronicles and the second is on Forbes.
I have no idea about the effectiveness of these services, but they represent an interesting concept.
Ex.plode.us indexes people from a few sites that the other’s don’t, such as Greatest Journal, Jaiku, and Vox. It does not search MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn and it does not search names very well. For instance, you will often get fewer relevant results when searching the surname alone than if you use the given and surname. It seems best to search the given name and surname without quotations and just sort through all the results for the relevant records.
FOXNews reports that the US Department of Homeland Security will begin to share spy satellite data with domestic law enforcement agencies next year. The article pointed out that getting the data isn’t the end of the story – to be meaningful, someone somewhere has to analyze it and local law enforcement does not typically have this capability. Analysts across the intelligence community are swamped with data from foreign surveillance, and they may have little time for doing the analysis for law enforcement agencies.
yoName searches the major social networks to return results in a tabular format so you can easily navigate between the different profiles that are found. yoName also allows you to do a public records search, powered by Intelius, though it will cost you money to see detailed results.
This search engine will often uncover some very old references to the person you are investigating. Unfortunately, it is frequently very slow to respond.