Feral Jundi

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Kaizen: The Launch Of A New Feral Jundi Blog Theme And Blog Features

Filed under: Cool Stuff,Kaizen — Matt @ 2:01 PM

Finally I can get back to the business of blogging.  First off, let me tell the story here about what exactly happened.  Google Adsense shut down my publisher’s account last week because I had a link somewhere on the blog that they did not agree with.  News to me, and yet the owner of that link decided to file a DMCA which Google takes seriously, and they shut down my subscription.  Hence why I do not have Google Adsense on the blog right now.

So the process here is that you send Google a letter explaining that you have removed the link with the hopes that somewhere in the Google machine, someone with some commonsense will actually reinstate my account. I have brought Google a lot of business for their advertisers to say the least, and it is Google’s loss.

In the ad spaces now are Chitika, which is a competitor of Google.  Although they are not on the same scale as Google, and the quality of ads and type of ads are not the same.  I intend to get back my account with Google Adsense, but until then, I will use Chitika or whatever else comes my way.

Now for the ‘Ad Center’ to the right. This is a cool new feature of the blog that I would like to promote.  It rotates all of those affiliates and ads, has plenty of space, and it looks sharp.  If you want to advertise on the blog here that is where I will put your graphic and link to your product/service (for $60 dollars a month of course).

If you want to do some affiliate marketing, that is where I will stick you as well (which does not cost $60 dollars a month, but is purely a profit sharing/promotional mechanism between the two parties). Jake Allen’s Security Contracting eBook and Bill Beaver’s Dangerzone and Oil Jobs ads are both affiliates, and both work through Plimus.  I highly recommend using Plimus as a way to set up an affiliate marketing plan for your product or service because it works. It benefits the author and the the folks willing to promote it (like good ol’ Feral Jundi).

Now on to the new features of the blog that I am pretty excited about.  First of all the blog is much more SEO friendly than the older blog, and I hope to get higher search ranking because of it. It is a Thesis based theme called ‘Arclite’ (I think that is a great theme for a military themed blog like mine-lol) and it is totally modified using modern WordPress plugins.  That means I can insert functionality at the press of button, as opposed to inserting code all the time.

The comments section is powered by Intense Debate. I like this set up because it allows folks to use their Facebook account to login here and make comments.  Or you can still comment the older way by entering your name and email–whichever works for you. I was also able to convert all the older comments into this new comments system.

You can also click on the ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ rating system for posts just to the right of the comment. So if you like what someone has said, definitely voice your opinion by clicking that. Although I still maintain total control of all posts–meaning everything stays civil and profanity free. Also, Akismet is still my primary safety system watching my back when it comes to filtering out spam.

The other features I am excited about is the Facebook like buttons and Twitter/Linkedin buttons.  Please…. pretty please, if you ‘like’ a post here, click that button.  It is such a simple thing to do to show your appreciation for a post and it takes a fraction of a second to do.  If you do not have Facebook, Twitter, or a Linkedin account, disregard. (although I still recommend opening accounts so you can participate in that realm of social media–FJ is very active on Facebook)

The other features are self explanatory.  I still have all the same categories and links, and nothing has changed there. You can still translate the page via Google Translate. You can still donate to the cause.  The Close Protection PSD Jobs and Secure Aspects Job Board widgets are in the ‘Jobs For Security Contractors’ block.  The social media block at the top right hand corner still has my RSS feed/email subscription, Facebook, Twitter, Scribd accounts, etc.

One cool detail that I have added to the blog is a print and PDF file creation button.  When you bring up the full post, and you see that button on the bottom of the post, just hit that and you can have formatted print screen or you can download the item as a PDF file. Hell, you can even send it as an email to someone.  In other words, it is a really handy feature to record and keep in your records, any information that you liked on FJ.

Now onto the artistic side of the blog.  That header image and logo is extremely easy to change out.  Meaning, I am all about changing that stuff from time to time to keep the blog visually interesting.  I like the flames and the big bold white ‘Feral Jundi’, but all of that can change with the click of a button. In the future you might see some interesting custom logo and background imagery that will compliment the blog’s theme.

In true Kaizen fashion, the blog will continue to be improved upon and I am always open to feedback. I think Miyamoto Musashi, Col. John Boyd, Sun Tzu, Buffalo Bill Cody, Frederick Russell Burnham and General George Washington* would all approve. –Matt

*My new Facebook Profile avatar is General George Washington in a Marine uniform. lol

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Building Snowmobiles: Man Vs. Machine–Steam Engine, Deep Blue, Ziggy, Watson…..Boyd?

Filed under: Building Snowmobiles,Kaizen,Strategy,Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 3:13 PM

     In The Art of War, Sun Tzu advised that one of the most important rules of warfare is to “know thine enemy.” At the chess table, the more you know about your opponent — how he has played in the past, his favorite moves, his strengths and weaknesses — the more likely you are to defeat him. Knowing these things requires sorting through a wealth of information — and that’s where computers come in…. 

     Kris says today’s chess players have absolutely benefited from the technology: “They are better players because of it, and they’re achieving more at a younger age. Bobby Fischer was considered an anomaly when he earned the grandmaster title at 15. Today, if you aren’t a GM by the age of 14 or 15, you probably won’t go far in chess. Talent will always matter, but technology is helping talented players learn faster and better.”

     What would a war game look like between a Boyd Machine(or just Boyd) and General Petraeus?  Or better yet, a general or political strategist with a Boyd Machine assisting in strategy and planning? These are some interesting concepts to ponder as militaries, companies, and politicians continue to seek that edge that will help them to defeat their opponents.

    If you look at the progression of machine development for Chess playing, Deep Blue was the end result of continuous improvements (kaizen) to the software.  Deep Blue ended up beating the human race’s top chess player and that is significant. It is a key point to remember when conceptualizing the Boyd Machine.

    Furthermore, I believe that Watson will at one point dominate Jeopardy.  It is doing very well now, and the four years of work on the machine is telling. Even if it doesn’t do it now, it will certainly do it in the near future because of Kaizen and because of Moore’s Law.

    So with these two examples of a machine evolution, is it a stretch to envision a computer defeating a top general or a team of generals in a war game? After all, war is the ultimate game of chess.

     I will take this a step further.  If not man versus machine in the endeavor of war, how about cyborg versus cyborg?  The way the human race is interfacing with machines in the present could easily classify us as ‘cyborgs’.  We carry around smart phones or cellphones, we check our computers daily and highly depend on both of these devices. Most humans have a hard time being away from their computer or phone, because they are so important to their lives.  This is reality.

    So with that said, imagine a general with a Boyd machine, versus another general with his machine?  Or a CEO hybrid versus a CEO hybrid.  You get the idea, and this is exactly the point of the various articles below.

     In the world of Chess, this reality has already presented itself. Will we see a similar future where strategists in political campaigns or military campaigns will be assisted by a machine for planning? I think so, because that is the natural progression, and the computing power is there thanks to Moore’s Law and Kaizen.

     Remember the rule of mimicry strategy?  Folks will copy the most successful strategies for winning, and add one little thing to it to give them the edge.  If everyone knows all the strategies and thought processes of all of mankind’s strategists and their opponent’s history, then what would give an edge to one side over the other?  Could a Boyd machine be that edge? Something that can analyze and synthesize faster than an opponent. Or help it’s human counterpart’s decision making cycle and come up with the winning strategies necessary to win that war, campaign, or competition in a market place? Interesting stuff.

    It would also be cool to see how such a Boyd machine would be constructed.  Take all of his theories and papers, as well as all of the material ever created in regards to strategy, and construct a machine that would think like Boyd?  There are plenty of individuals out there that could contribute as advisors to such a project. Best of all, it would be really cool to build a Sun Tzu machine or a Clausewitz  machine, and have cyborg teams war game against one another.  Al Qaeda or Taliban machines could be constructed as well, and I think war gaming in the future will greatly benefit from such efforts.  –Matt

Edit: 02/17/2011- Watson wins in Jeopardy, which to me is incredible because this was it’s first attempt! Watson won $77,147 to Mr. Jennings’s $24,000 and Mr. Rutter’s $21,600. Good job to the crew at IBM for building such an amazing machine.

Watson, the ‘Jeopardy!’ computer, has grander plans

IBM’s Watson Just Latest Edition of Man Vs. Machine Battle

The role of computers in planning chess strategy

The website for IBM’s Watson here.

TED: We Are All Cyborgs Now, Amber Case 

Watson, the ‘Jeopardy!’ computer, has grander plans

02/16/2011

By Hayley Tsukayama

Watson, the computer that’s winning hearts and cash on “Jeopardy!” this week, is more than just a pretty interface.

David F. McQueeney, vice president of IBM Research said that Watson’s real applications are far more practical. The computer is actually intended to help users get a handle on unstructured data such as text, e-mails and in-company mail messages.

“We’ve been working for a long time about helping humans navigate a large amount of data, ” McQueeney told Post Tech in an interview. “There’s all kinds of incredibly valuable information about the way an agency runs in unstructured data, and we’ve been working for decades on extracting meaning and structure from it.”

What McQueeney hopes IBM can do by showing Watson off on television is let people know machines have evolved to the point where they can help humans struggle with problems without having to modify all the data for a computer.

“I’m so pleased that the ‘Jeopardy!’ producers agreed to work with us,” he said, “and I’m as pleased as they are that the result was good science and good entertainment.”

(more…)

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Mexico: Juarez Cranks Up Private Security

Filed under: Industry Talk,Kaizen,Mexico — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 7:46 AM

     Oscar Macías, the Juárez-based regional director of Securitas, said that while the company’s finances have been positive overall, they have not been as high as he’d like.

     For one, he said, the company’s earnings have been eaten up by investments in equipment and salary increases.

Since 2008, Macías said, Securitas has toughened up its training and recruiting processes and upgraded technology to meet the growing expectations of an increasingly demanding clientele. 

     “We have to invest in quality to make sure the client is satisfied,” he said.

      Having to ‘invest in quality to make sure the client is satisfied’?  Now that is music to my ears. lol  Not to mention salary increases and investments in equipment sounds great too.  You have to take care of your people if you want good customer service and satisfaction.

       But most importantly, these companies have to invest in good quality management to ensure that everything operates the way it is supposed to. From the shift leader all the way up to the project manager, a company must focus on quality management. You can have high salaries for employees and the best equipment ever, but unless your guard force is well organized, trained and managed, then all of that is for not. It is that management that will ensure good customer service and satisfaction, and continuous improvement (Kaizen).

     You know what would be an interesting study is to actually do a customer and employee/contractor survey to see exactly what the companies are doing right and what they are doing wrong in Mexico. With Juarez being the most dangerous city out there, perhaps in the world, this kind of study might be pretty influential in the realm of private security research and industry best practices. –Matt

Juárez cranks up private security

Businesses spent 45 percent more than in 2009

January 2011

By Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera

JUáREZ – Confronted with the city’s bloodiest year to date, businesses in Ciudad Juárez spent 45 percent more for private security in 2010 than the year before, according to figures reported by private security companies.

Juárez “is the city with the largest increase in security investments,” said Ivette Estrada, spokeswoman for the Private Security National Council, or CNSP, an association of security firms in Mexico. It calculated the increase using data provided by its 298 members.

The average increase in private security expenditures for Mexican border cities was 33 percent, Estrada said.

At the national level, the council estimated that companies in Mexico spent an average 11.3 percent of their production costs for insurance and security services in 2010, compared to 7 percent the year before and between 3 and 5 percent in 2008.

Last year was the most violent in Ciudad Juárez so far, with a record 3,111 drug-related killings, bringing the total number of violent deaths in the city since 2008 to at least 7,488.

Faced with the inability of Mexican authorities to stem the wave of crime and brutality pummeling the city, Juarenses have invested heavily in alarm systems, closing off streets with gates and hiring private security to guard neighborhood entrances.

(more…)

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Job Tips: Secure Aspects Job Board Is Now Formated For Smart Phones

Filed under: Job Tips,Jobs,Kaizen,Mobile Apps — Tags: , , , , , — Matt @ 11:07 AM

     This is good to hear and I am glad they are going this route.  To have a smart phone friendly job board website to browse is handy and makes it easier to read for those out there that use these phones. Check it out. –Matt

From the Director of Operations

     We have been busy updating our job board to provide a better service to our users. The biggest and most exciting feature we have added is our special designed theme for our smart phone users. The Secure Aspects Group Job Board now automatically recognizes if you are accessing our site from a smart phone and will re-direct you to a smart phone friendly layout.

Give it a try and let us know how it is working for you… Use your smart phone and go here.

Secure Aspects Group

 

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Kaizen: Sergey Brin’s Search For A Parkinson’s Cure, By Thomas Goetz

Filed under: Cool Stuff,Kaizen,Medical — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 1:05 PM

     Bravo to Mr. Goetz for putting together such an interesting and informative article.  It is one of the main reasons why I keep coming back to the stuff that Wired produces every month in hard copy and online.  They bring to the front, the latest technological achievements of our time.  So why does this belong on FJ?

     This article is not just about this man’s desperate search for a cure for Parkinsons. This article to me is about problem solving using today’s technologies and ideas to make research more efficient, or a ‘continuous improvement’ over the traditional means of medical research.  This is about creating learning organizations that far outpace older models of learning.  This is some radical stuff, and the lessons can be applied to many of today’s problems in my view.  We can apply these lessons to business, to energy problems, to warfare, etc.

     And many of today’s problems have time stamps on them too.  Any means of compressing the problem solving mechanisms we apply to these problems, the better. I also hope that Sergey does find the cure for his disease, or that his work leads to someone else finding a cure. Because I definitely think his work is compressing the time required to get to that point and that is some serious Kaizen in my book.-Matt

—————————————————————-

 Wired

Can a model fueled by data sets and computational power compete with the gold standard of research? Maybe: Here are two timelines—one from an esteemed traditional research project run by the NIH, the other from the 23andMe Parkinson’s Genetics Initiative. They reached almost the same conclusion about a possible association between Gaucher’s disease and Parkinson’s disease, but the 23andMe project took a fraction of the time.—Rachel Swaby

Traditional Model

1. Hypothesis: An early study suggests that patients with Gaucher’s disease (caused by a mutation to the GBA gene) might be at increased risk of Parkinson’s.

2. Studies: Researchers conduct further studies, with varying statistical significance.

3. Data aggregation: Sixteen centers pool information on more than 5,500 Parkinson’s patients.

4. Analysis: A statistician crunches the numbers.

5. Writing: A paper is drafted and approved by 64 authors.

6. Submission: The paper is submitted to The New England Journal of Medicine. Peer review ensues.

7. Acceptance: NEJM accepts the paper.

8. Publication: The paper notes that people with Parkinson’s are 5.4 times more likely to carry the GBA mutation.

Total time elapsed: 6 years

Parkinson’s Genetics initiative

1. Tool Construction: Survey designers build the questionnaire that patients will use to report symptoms.

2. Recruitment: The community is announced, with a goal of recruiting 10,000 subjects with Parkinson’s.

3. Data aggregation: Community members get their DNA analyzed. They also fill out surveys.

4. Analysis: Reacting to the NEJM paper, 23andMe researchers run a database query based on 3,200 subjects. The results are returned in 20 minutes.

5. Presentation: The results are reported at a Royal Society of Medicine meeting in London: People with GBA are 5 times more likely to have Parkinson’s, which is squarely in line with the NEJM paper. The finding will possibly be published at a later date.

Total time elapsed: 8 months

*****

Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure

By Thomas Goetz

June 22, 2010

Buried deep within each cell in Sergey Brin’s body—in a gene called LRRK2, which sits on the 12th chromosome—is a genetic mutation that has been associated with higher rates of Parkinson’s.Illustration: Rafa Jenn

Several evenings a week, after a day’s work at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, Sergey Brin drives up the road to a local pool. There, he changes into swim trunks, steps out on a 3-meter springboard, looks at the water below, and dives.

Brin is competent at all four types of springboard diving—forward, back, reverse, and inward. Recently, he’s been working on his twists, which have been something of a struggle. But overall, he’s not bad; in 2006 he competed in the master’s division world championships. (He’s quick to point out he placed sixth out of six in his event.)

The diving is the sort of challenge that Brin, who has also dabbled in yoga, gymnastics, and acrobatics, is drawn to: equal parts physical and mental exertion. “The dive itself is brief but intense,” he says. “You push off really hard and then have to twist right away. It does get your heart rate going.”

(more…)

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