Tag Archives: analytics

Official Google Blog: From the height of this place

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When data is abundant, intelligence will win
Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it at the start of his first term, “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

via Official Google Blog: From the height of this place.

It then goes on to say this:

The vast majority of computing will occur in the cloud
Within the next decade, people will use their computers completely differently than how they do today. All of their files, correspondence, contacts, pictures, and videos will be stored or backed-up in the network cloud and they will access them from wherever they happen to be on whatever device they happen to hold.

Of course google wants this for everyone will need to use services like google to access their data.  Do people really need all their data accessible to them 24/7?   Can anyone trust the security of one’s data when placed in the hands of a stranger?

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.  There is nothing more secure than a hard drive or more (one or more for backups) in a safety deposit box.   No one needs to access their tax returns from anywhere at any time just because they can.

Washington University team builds out prototype to win first GlobalHack

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Each team had to create an application that scores and weighs sales opportunities in Salesforce according to an algorithm, then displays the ranked opportunities in a graphical user interface.

Gabe Lozano, co-founder of the event and CEO at LockerDome, told Silicon Prairie News that the team built out all of the UI/UX, integrated it with Salesforce and created a prototype-grade algorithm within the 48-hour window. As a result, TopOPPS is going to expand upon the team’s work for the earliest versions of its software.

via Washington University team builds out prototype to win first GlobalHack – Silicon Prairie News.

20 superb data visualisation tools for web designers

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One of the most common questions I get asked is how to get started with data visualisations. Beyond following blogs, you need to practise – and to practise, you need to understand the tools available. In this article, I want to introduce you to 20 different tools for creating visualisations: from simple charts to complex graphs, maps and infographics. Almost everything here is available for free, and some you have probably installed already.

via 20 superb data visualisation tools for web designers | Design | Creative Bloq.

The Mathematics of Gamification

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At Foursquare, we have a simple, first-principles based method of resolving proposed venue attribute updates. We can gauge each Superuser’s voting accuracy based on their performance on honeypots (proposed updates with known answers which are deliberately inserted into the updates queue). Measuring performance and using these probabilities correctly is the key to how we assign points to a Superuser’s vote.

The Math

Let’s make this more concrete with some math.

via The Mathematics of Gamification | Foursquare Engineering Blog.

What happens to the posts you don’t publish?

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This paternalistic view isn’t abstract. Facebook studies this because the more its engineers understand about self-censorship, the more precisely they can fine-tune their system to minimize self-censorship’s prevalence. This goal—designing Facebook to decrease self-censorship—is explicit in the paper.

So Facebook considers your thoughtful discretion about what to post as bad, because it withholds value from Facebook and from other users. Facebook monitors those unposted thoughts to better understand them, in order to build a system that minimizes this deliberate behavior.

via Facebook self-censorship: What happens to the posts you don’t publish?.

Facebook Considers Vast Increase in Data Collection

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The social network may start collecting data on minute user interactions with its content, such as how long a user’s cursor hovers over a certain part of its website, or whether a user’s newsfeed is visible at a given moment on the screen of his or her mobile phone, Facebook analytics chief Ken Rudin said Tuesday during an interview.

via Facebook Considers Vast Increase in Data Collection – Digits – WSJ.

As the head of analytics, Mr. Rudin is preparing the company’s infrastructure for a massive increase in the volume of its data.

Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math to Deal With It

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Scientists like DeDeo and Vespignani make good use of this piecemeal approach to big data analysis, but Yale University mathematician Ronald Coifman says that what is really needed is the big data equivalent of a Newtonian revolution, on par with the 17th century invention of calculus, which he believes is already underway. It is not sufficient, he argues, to simply collect and store massive amounts of data; they must be intelligently curated, and that requires a global framework.

via Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math to Deal With It – Wired Science.

Among the most notable insights Euler gleaned from the puzzle was that the exact positions of the bridges were irrelevant to the solution; all that mattered was the number of bridges and how they were connected. Mathematicians now recognize in this the seeds of the modern field of topology.

In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA’s “It’s just metadata” excuse

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Storage and data-mining have come a long way in the past 35 years, Felten notes, and metadata is uniquely easy to analyze—unlike the complicated data of a call itself, with variations in language, voice, and conversation style. “This newfound data storage capacity has led to new ways of exploiting the digital record,” writes Felten. “Sophisticated computing tools permit the analysis of large datasets to identify embedded patterns and relationships, including personal details, habits, and behaviors.”

via In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA’s “It’s just metadata” excuse | Ars Technica.

I remember Ed Felton as being one of the leading researchers who uncovered the Sony rootkit fiasco.  Many years ago Sony included a rootkit installer that would install whenever someone played one of their CDs on a Windows PC.  Felton’s blog at the time covered that situation well.

The evolution of the NSA’s XKeyscore

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In the current generation of Narus’ system, the processing systems run on commodity Linux servers and re-assemble network sessions as they’re captured, mining them for metadata, file attachments, and other application data and then indexing and dumping that information to a searchable database.

via Building a panopticon: The evolution of the NSA’s XKeyscore | Ars Technica.