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Tag Archives: Google
Using Google Image search for OkCupid Profile Images
- Suppose you like some one on OKCupid. Click to navigate to photos.
- Click Save as to save the webpage completely. All Images are now in a folder on your laptop
- Use Google Image Search Upload to one by one . The biggest privacy drawback, Google Image search doesn’t find Instagram or Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn profile images so well, but does it extremely well for Google Plus Profile Image. Lolcat!
- Solution- have two sets of photos that make you look good, one for friends, other for OKCupid or other online dating shenanigans!
I interview Stephen, awesome Face Recognition hacker here, and I think his solution is the best for privacy- use a robots.txt equivalent for images, just as you use it for websites.
I hope they find a solution, in time for wearable computing to take off properly.
In the meantime, I am telling people on OK Cupid that I am a fortune teller. It is really working awesome!
Writing on APIs for Programmable Web
I have been writing free lance on APIs for Programmable Web. Here is an updated list of the articles, many of these would be of interest to analytics users. Note- some of these are interviews and they are in bold.
PW Interview: Jeh Daruwala CEO Yactraq API, Behavorial Targeting for videos
PW Interview: Michael Schonfield of Dwolla API on Innovation Meeting the Payment Web 2013/05/02
PW Interview: Stephen Balaban of Lamda Labs on the Face Recognition API 2013/04/29
PW Interview: Amber Feng, Stripe API, The Payment Web 2013/04/24
PW Interview: Greg Lamp and Austin Ogilvie of Yhat on Shipping Predictive Models via API 2013/04/22
Google Mirror API documentation is open for developers 2013/04/18
PW Interview: Ricky Robinett, Ordr.in API, Ordering Food meets API 2013/04/16
PW Interview: Jacob Perkins, Text Processing API, NLP meets API 2013/04/10
Amazon EC2 On Demand Windows Instances -Prices reduced by 20% 2013/04/08
Amazon S3 API Requests prices slashed by half 2013/04/02
PW Interview: Stuart Battersby, Chatterbox API, Machine Learning meets Social 2013/04/02
PW Interview: Karthik Ram, rOpenSci, Wrapping all science APIs 2013/03/20
Viralheat Human Intent API- To buy or not to buy 2013/03/13
Interview Tammer Kamel CEO and Founder Quandl 2013/03/07
YHatHQ API: Calling Hosted Statistical Models 2013/03/04
Quandl API: A Wikipedia for Numerical Data 2013/02/25
Amazon Redshift API is out of limited preview and available! 2013/02/18
Windows Azure Media Services REST API 2013/02/14
Data Science Toolkit Wraps Many Data Services in One API 2013/02/11
Diving into Codeacademy’s API Lessons 2013/01/31
Google APIs finetuning Cloud Storage JSON API 2013/01/29
Springer APIs- Fostering Innovation via API Contests 2012/11/20
Statistically programming the web – Shiny,HttR and RevoDeploy API 2012/11/19
Google Cloud SQL API- Bigger ,Faster and now Free 2012/11/12
A Look at the Web’s Most Popular API -Google Maps API 2012/10/09
Cloud Storage APIs for the next generation Enterprise 2012/09/26
Last.fm API: Sultan of Musical APIs 2012/09/12
Socrata Data API: Keeping Government Open 2012/08/29
BigML API Gets Bigger 2012/08/22
Bing APIs: the Empire Strikes Back 2012/08/15
Google Cloud SQL: Relational Database on the Cloud 2012/08/13
Google BigQuery API Makes Big Data Analytics Easy 2012/08/05
Your Store in The Cloud -Google Cloud Storage API 2012/08/01
Predict the future with Google Prediction API 2012/07/30
The Romney vs Obama API 2012/07/27
Related articles
- API Evangelist (programmableweb.com)
Dashboard Design: Google Activity
I quite like Google’s monthly email on account activity. It is the Google way to offer free services, as well as treat users as special, that continues to command loyalty despite occasional exasperation with corporate thingies.
See this dashboard-
Notice the use of Bigger Font for overall number of emails as well as smaller bar plots- I would say they are almost spark lines or spark bar plots if you excuse my Tufte.
The medium range font shows persons sent/from statistics, and the color shades are done to empahsize or de-emphasize the metric
Colors used are black/grey, green and blue coincident with the Corporate Logo.
However some of the JS for visualizations need to be tweaked. Clearly the hover script ( an integral part of Dashboard design ) needs better elucidiation or formatting)
I would also venture my neck and suggest that rather than just monthly snapshots, atleast some way of comparing snapshots across periods or even the total time period be enabled- rather than be in seperate views. This may give the user a bit more analytical value.
Overall, a nice and simple dashboard which may be of some use to the business user who makes or views a lot of reports on online properties. Minimal and effective- and in keeping with Open Data- Data Liberation Principles. I guess Google is secure in the knowledge that users do not view time spent on Google services as a total waste , unlike some of the other more social 
websites they spend time on.
Visual Guides to CRISP-DM ,KDD and SEMMA
UPDATED- Here are three great examples of a visualization making a process easy to understand. Please click on the images to read them clearly.
1) It visualizes CRISP-DM and is made by Nicole Leaper (http://exde.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/a-visual-guide-to-crisp-dm-methodology/)
2) KDD -Knowledge Discovery in Databases -visualization by Fayyad whom I have interviewed here at http://www.decisionstats.com/interview-dr-usama-fayyad-founder-open-insights-llc/
and work By Gregory Piatetsky Shapiro interviewed by this website here
http://decisionstats.com/2009/08/13/interview-gregory-piatetsky-kdnuggets-com/
3) I am also attaching a visual representation of SEMMA from http://www.dataprix.net/en/blogs/respinosamilla/theory-data-mining
Google’s Product Strategy
- Copy an idea from existing product. Make worse interface, but give more freebies. Do not charge money ( or charge vastly reduced ). Launch without warning.
- Write a blog post every three month on the launched product
- Watch product lose money as they did not charge any/some money to begin with.
- Close the product down without warning.
- Repeat.
RGoogleAnalytics Package Updated! Works for OAuth 2.0 #rstats
Only the Linux version of the updated package is here , but for Windows users (like say 80% of the USERs) you can just source the 2 R files within the package sub structure after unzipping the downloaded tar.z file TWICE. The package takes care of taking you to the correct link for authentication after the line access_token <- query$authorize(), you need to
1) sign in to your Google account
2) click grant access (blue button)
3) click exchange tokens (blue button)
4) paste the access token at the prompt specified within the R console
access tokens stay active for 3600 seconds !
library(rjson) library(RCurl) source('C:\\Users\\KUs\\Desktop\\RGoogleAnalytics_1.2.tar\\RGoogleAnalytics\\R\\QueryBuilder.R') source('C:\\Users\\KUs\\Desktop\\RGoogleAnalytics_1.2.tar\\RGoogleAnalytics\\R\\RGoogleAnalytics.R') query <- QueryBuilder() access_token <- query$authorize()
ga <- RGoogleAnalytics() ga.profiles <- ga$GetProfileData(access_token) ga.profiles query$Init(start.date = "2012-06-18", end.date = "2012-12-18", dimensions = "ga:date,ga:pagePath", metrics = "ga:visits,ga:pageviews,ga:timeOnPage", sort = "ga:visits", #filters="", #segment="", max.results = 99, table.id = paste("ga:",ga.profiles$id[3],sep="",collapse=","), access_token=access_token) # 4. Make a request to get the data from the API ga.data <- ga$GetReportData(query)# 5. Look at the returned data head(ga.data)
Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org
Interested in using R for Web Analytics? Use it from here http://code.google.com/p/r-google-analytics/
Great work by the Google team (Michael Pearmain et al) and Tatvic team working together!
SAS Thought Leader declares war on data scientists on Valentine Eve
It all started because of the Google Guy, Hal Varian
| Feb 25, 2009 – I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. … Hal Varian, The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2009. … |
Then these guys ( Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil) made us sexy -that too in the Harvard Business Review.
Jill Dyche* is a thought leader. That’s what her job says. that too at SAS which took over her start-up Baseline Consulting. (* In addition to this, she writes forewords for struggling poets here )
She says here-
If the importance of data scientists is growing with the advent of big data, the sooner we understand what exactly it is they do, the better.
That is fair enough. But to add grievous injury to data scientists, She adds
(For fun I wrote a blog post on being a data scientist’s girlfriend.)
Actually the blog post was-Why I Wouldn’t Have Sex with a Data Scientist
But there’s no use. The data scientist is preoccupied. Preoccupied with finding, accessing, analyzing, validating, cleansing, integrating, provisioning, modeling, verifying, and explaining data to his management, colleagues, end-users, and friends.
And this is the year of the statistician ??
This is bare knuckles tactics. The art of Vaseline Insulting? Perish the thought. Geeks and Data Scientists rule.
Dont we? and we are perfect? right.
We statisticians (and data scientists and big dataists and data miners and business analysts and …)
are bringing sexy back!
(and we need a hug too.)
