Now anyone can sign up for a free trial of Recorded Future Premium. You’ll get full use of premium research tools that allow you to analyze past trends and better understand the potential future of almost anything! No credit card and no commitment required. We’d love to hear your feedback.
Be sure to test out our newest tool, the Network view. Click the image below for an interactive view of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s network.
We recently Tweeted a shared link showing coverage and gaining online momentum for the Occupy Wall Street movement. When we look more carefully at influencers in this discussion using our Influencer Map, we find that Iran Press TV is the second largest influencer after the US Media!
Iran Is Top Contributor of Information
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Press TV reporting has a distinct slant. Check out this except from one of the Press TV hits:
An American scholar says peaceful anti-corporatism protests known as “Occupy Wall Street” in New York are ‘nonexistent’ in mainstream media in the US, Press TV reports. “Apparently it is too threatening to corporate interests to acknowledge it,” James H. Fetzer, founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, told Press TV on Thursday.
First of all, we’ve been tracking Occupy Wall St in the mainstream media for quite some time. This screen shot shows hits (shaded) in the mainstream media over time:
Mainstream Media Coverage
And for those who are unaware Scholars for 9/11 Truth is an organization who list: Scholars for 9/11 Truth (S9/11T) is a non-partisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affairs, psychology, and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11.
Regardless, Iran’s Press TV seems disproportionally interested in covering these events. In nearly every other US geopolitical top contributors are typically UK and Canada after the US (check out this example of Tea Party coverage and influencers over the same period). Iran’s increasing online coverage and influence should certainly be noted.
When: Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11AM Eastern
Where: WebEx Conference (see details and register)
Need to better understand what your competitors are doing during the next 90 days or what technologies are expected to affect the market during the next five years? Join us next week to learn how Recorded Future can help you find the answers.
Next Tuesday (10/11) at 11am Eastern, we’ll host a live presentation exploring how temporal analytics applied to the real-time web supports more efficient and comprehensive competitive intelligence. The focus of this event will be on research in the defense and government services industry.
During the webinar, we’ll explore the following:
As for the presentation, we’ll keep it to 30 minutes and provide a general introduction to Recorded Future before diving into use case demos and concluding with a Q&A session. Register today or contact us if you have questions!
Over the past decade, China has become nearly synonymous with economic growth. The country has continually posted double digit GDP growth and the IMF predicts that China may become the largest economy by 2016. These predictions have some US economic analysts pondering: “should we be concerned about China?”
We can evaluate factors affecting the answer to this question by using Recorded Future to analyze open source information about the Chinese economy, specifically infrastructure projects. By examining China’s highly touted innovation and leadership in high-speed rail, we find that recent safety issues, government censorship, and public doubts over safety expose a likely slowdown in progress for the country’s infrastructure.
China’s Ambitious Rail Plans
There is no doubt that the high-speed railway market in China has been red hot in recent years, and one source indicates that China’s high speed railroad track mileage may exceed 16,000 kilometers by 2020. The government is also spending billions to expand into less-populated areas, “as the first long-distance high-speed rail line in west China, the second line of Lanxin Railway has a planned investment of more than 140 billion yuan ($21.91 billion).”
What else can we learn about the future of the Chinese high speed railroad network?
Discussions of future railway projects in China
But not all is well with the development of the Chinese high-speed rail system, and a deadly crash this past July exposed serious safety and regulatory shortcomings.
Public Criticism and Falling Investment
The subsequent attempt by the Chinese government to censor information about the disaster evoked tremendous public backlash that now threaten to significantly slow proposed projects. Bloomberg also reported that many projects were temporarily halted following the accident, which is likely to have an impact on the completion date, if not the long term development, of China’s expanding rail system.
What kind of impact did the train crash have on the rail industry in China?
What was said about the high-speed rail industry following the crash?
Above, we filtered results about China’s railway system to only those articles published after the crash on July 23rd. What do we find? We quickly see that China’s high-speed rail system is in big trouble.
Railway industry analyst Lu Zhou seems to have summed it up best: “A Great Leap Forward-style movement in China’s high-speed railway is changing abruptly to a period of silence, and that could last a few years”. Investment in high speed rail has already taken a substantial hit, with seven out of 28 railway firms in China reporting losses.
Two key points from the Xinhua News Agency that are particularly troubling:
The train crash in Wenzhou had a significant impact on the high-speed rail industry in China. For the first time since the 1990s, train speed is expected to slow down. Some train makers have halted production, and the $5 billion expected IPO of Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway was suspended after the crash. One Chinese official indicated that, “upcoming safety checks on the country’s high-speed railway network are necessary to raise the government’s credibility”. These indicators suggest that a serious problem exists within the Chinese high-speed rail system.
Understanding Public Sentiment in China
Another angle to consider when using Recorded Future is the data mined from Chinese language sources. In the graph below, we conducted a search similar to the one above but using only Chinese language texts. One article on China Dialogue discusses the end of the invincibility myth of the Chinese high-speed rail system. An editorial in the Financial Times then defends the railroad system and urges for its continued development.
Chinese language discussions about the industry following the crash
We also performed a search for any future facing railway information in Chinese. One of the most useful articles was a translated version of another Financial Times article that discussed the recent accident. The article discusses potential problems that the government may now face in rail, “5 years ago, the Chinese government invested heavily in the hope that [it would] in record time…[become] the world’s largest high-speed rail network. Intention is to stimulate the construction of high-speed rail and improve the efficiency of national pride, but [the railway] has now become…embarrassing”.
Chinese language discussions about railway projects in China
Potentially even more interesting is the wealth of social media data can be found at the bottom of the article in 116 comments. These comments were made by Chinese speakers, most of whom are located within China, and some are particularly candid: “I am struggling to find confidence in the government, but it is really difficult. Too much logic lies.”
Conclusion:
Debates like these are fairly rare in China where citizens are often discouraged from criticizing the government. The railroad system is a crown jewel for the Chinese government, and it is clearly not too pleased with the criticism. However, the government faced tremendous public backlash that forced it to reduce the level of censorship.
The very nature of this debate can be seen within the above mentioned comments as nationalists and government skeptics battled it out online. Thousands of people viewed these comments and over a hundred commented, showing that this became a highly salient issue in China. The end result, based on media analysis, public sentiment, and financial data suggests that Chinese high-speed rail development is in serious trouble and may be slowed for years.
Wired’s Danger Room posted a piece yesterday on the US awarding a no-bid defense contract to Russian state-run weapons exporter Rosoboronexport. The real eyebrow raiser is the Russian company’s history of arms deals with Syria and Iran that led to sanctions imposed (since lifted) by the US. So aside from the two “bad guy” names in the Danger Room post, what other countries can the company claim as customers?
We’ll use Recorded Future to first analyze the web for mentions of Rosoboronexport and company activity taking place between 2005 and 2009:
Rosoboronexport 2005-2009 - Click for live view
Highlighted in grey are events mentioning both the company and India, and below the timeline, you can see a number of other countries associated with the company in news, blogs, and so on. Aside from those locations clearly in view, if you click through to the live visual, you’ll find links to deals with Libya, Belarus, Burma, Algeria, Sudan, and more.
And how have things looked since the US lifted it’s freeze on trade with the company? We can see lots of activity with interests ranging from Western governments to southeast Asia to Africa.
Rosoboronexport - From 2010 into the Future - Click for Live Details
Some of the juiciest points that stand out include the supply of weapons or military vehicles to both sides of serious conflicts on the horizon for China. We’re talking the simultaneous provision of arms for China and India (neighboring superpowers that seem almost certain to butt heads), and separately, selling submarines to Vietnam, which is on tense terms with China due to ongoing conflict over the South China Sea.
Presumably there is quite a bit about Rosoboronexport buried in the open source intelligence available on the web that may be useful to government and risk analysts. Click the second of the images above to keep tabs on future developments related to the Russian arms company or head over to our website and get started with your own temporal analysis of the web.
Now live in Recorded Future Premium are our new source metrics which allow you to quickly find the most predictive sources on the web for any given entity or event. You can also identify those sources first to report news for any specific event, as well as segment by media type (blogs, mainstream news, and social media for example). I’m finding blogs to be far ahead in their reporting many events, but for things like official travel by leaders and diplomats, government sources are still the leader, followed by mainstream news agencies.
Click to enlarge: Sources Forecasting Iran's Future
