Alex Burns

Personal Research Program

The Analysis of Breathtaking Risk research note and applied summary.

George Packer reads the McChrystal Report on Afghanistan, after The Washington Post‘s editors delayed its public release.

Michael O’Hanlon’s Foreign Affairs article on the retreat of US missile defence in Europe.

Scenes from the Violent Twilight of Oil.

Entertainment Economy

Slate‘s Louis P. Masur on the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run.

Tweet Memes

Why Richard Posner Became A Keynesian.

Newly Declassified Files Detail Massive FBI Data-Mining Project.

Leximancer is data mining software that enables you to find statistically significant text patterns in unstructured data.  The software uses a collections/processing approach to gather a cohort of documents, specify filters and rules, run a batch process, and then displays a graphical concept map with causal and statistically significant relationships.  M&A, competitive intelligence, legal and market research teams may find this approach useful for document support.

University of Queensland researchers developed Leximancer, the UniQuest incubator commercialised it, and London’s Imprimatur Capital provided seed capital investment.  The team also recently launched a Customer Insight blog and portal which will explore Leximancer applications in customer experience, surveys and social media.  Its data analytics and statistics capabilities may make Leximancer the evidence-based management solution for those Technorati forecasters who suffer from optimism bias about keywords and the creation rate of new blogs.