The shortcoming of such studies is they didn't clearly apportion the effects of each factor on intelligence.

WSJ: Intelligence Changes Linked to Genes

Proponents of the singularity typically state that an intelligence explosion is a key factor of the Singularity where super-intelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds.

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Another factor: the level of so-called intelligence chatter, intercepted messages from suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.

CNN: Jeanne Meserve: Cities respond differently to terror alert

The other factor helping the army to reverse its fortunes last year was better intelligence.

ECONOMIST: Colombia

Another factor is that the United States has not developed the sort of intelligence infrastructure in this region that it painstakingly built up in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen.

CNN: Algeria attack changes terror landscape in North Africa

My co-researchers and I in our IBM Institute for Business Value study, Collective Intelligence: Capitalizing on the Crowd, we have pointed to intrinsic motivation as well as a strong factor to drive not just individual work but collective crowdsourcing.

FORBES: Does Your Job Keep You Up in the Daytime?

Fast Data can factor real-time information about millions of events (clicks or other interactions) per second into business intelligence and other decision-support applications.

FORBES: Fast Data Gets A Jump On Big Data