http://www.wtop.com/index.php?nid=104&sid=842543
July 7th, 2006
"ACLU Sues Over Security for Bush Protest"
Jul 6th - 9:46pm
By JEFF BARNARD Associated Press Writer
ARTICLE SNIPPET: "MEDFORD, Ore. (AP) - The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Thursday alleging the U.S. Secret Service and state and local police protecting President Bush during a 2004 campaign appearance discriminated against protesters when they cleared the streets outside where the president was eating dinner."
http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123022538
"Blogs study may net credible information"
by William J. Sharp
Air Force Office of Scientific Research Public Affairs
ARTICLE SNIPPET: "6/29/2006 - ARLINGTON, Va. (AFPN) -- The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has begun funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs.
Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.
Drs. Brian Ulicny, senior scientist, and Mieczyslaw Kokar, president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the three-year project titled, "Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information."
"It can be challenging (for information analysts) to tell what's important in blogs unless you analyze patterns," Dr. Ulicny said.
Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog. Within blogs, hyperlinks act like reference citations in research papers, allowing someone to discover the most important events bloggers are writing about. This is the same way a person can find the most important papers in a field by finding which ones are cited most often in research papers. This type of analysis can help information analysts' searches be as productive as possible.
The blog study is part of AFOSR's new Information Forensics and Process Integration research program at Syracuse University in New York. The new portfolio of projects consists of three areas of research emphasis: incomplete information and metrics; search, interactive design and active querying; and cognitive processing.
One of the problems analysts may have with blog monitoring, Dr. Ulicny said, is there is too much actionable information for the analyst to properly analyze.
"We are developing an automated tool to tell analysts what bloggers are most interested in at a point in time," Dr. Ulicny said."