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Daily Archives: January 5, 2006
Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon’s Wishlists
A MUST Read:
Tom Owad writes about an issue we all need to be aware of:
It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people. Most of us don’t have access to the databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources. Here’s an example.
There are many websites and databases that could be used for this project, but few things tell you as much about a person as the books he chooses to read. Isn’t that why the Patriot Act specifically requires libraries to release information on who’s reading what? For this reason, I chose to focus on the information contained in the popular Amazon wishlists.
Northwest’s Pilot Scope Clause Contract Negotiations
Sort of an abstract issue, but relevant for Madison, particularly with the growth of 50 to 100 seat aircraft in and out of Madison
: Interesting look
Northwest’s scope clause is, in fact, particularly onerous relative to scope clauses at other major airlines. United, Delta, American & US Airways can outsource (to regional airlines) aircraft up to at least 70 seats (US Airways can even outsource some aircraft of 86 seats). Continental’s limit is 59 seats, but can do a virtually unlimited number of those.
The issue at Northwest is particularly acute because Northwest flies smaller mainline aircraft than any other major airline. Northwest itself flies over 100 DC-9s (photo above). These geriatric aircraft (many of them over 30 years old or more) have just over 100 seats. Click here for further DC-9 data.