How to be a BAD blogger?

Here are some tips to being a BAD blogger. This assumes that –

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you are intelligent enough to know what you speak ( NO- STUPID CLAUSE),
are otherwise an interesting person in your offline life,
have a good story to tell about yourself, your product or your company ( NO BORING CLAUSES),
can spell-check (mostly) (NOT LAZY CLAUSE),
can create a free account on wordpress.com or have access to a website where you can post material (NOT LAZY AND STUPID CLAUSES)
AND otherwise have a desire to try and be a good blogger.

Step 1

Credibility

On the Internet everyone is an experienced expert in something.

Ways to wreck credibility-

Offer ads from Adsense before your blog traffic crosses 100 average a day and maximum 200 visitors a day( not views).
Take offers like free travel, books, software from people, products and companies- dont disclose that- and pump them up by flattering reviews.
Scratch the back of a fellow blog monkey- Also known as you praise me in my blog- I will praise you in mine and we think we fooled everyone that we are just networking.
Use shock words and images to differentiate.
Offer ads from Non Adsense advertisers before your traffic crosses 500 average a day and maximum 1000 visitors a day( not views)
Have only ONE advertiser and offer PRIME placement to news of it AND IGNORE corporate rivals completely.
Claim to know people intimately whom you only know via Facebook Mafia Wars.
Offer stuff to guest blogger and forget to follow up on the promise.
Spam people on email and tell them how you are spamming them to HELP them with NEW stuff.
Take money from sponsors, and free content from people. Call it aggregation and community. Pocket all the money
Accept advertising from pornography. Claim you did not know what it was.
Give tips on hacking websites. What goes around will never come around, right?

That should wreck your credibility completely. To build up your credibility , do the reverse of the above.

Hard Work

Hard work never killed anyone, but try to blog on boring stuff. Or on politics ,guns, gays and religion (preferably at the same time)

Post a stupid picture of yourself in the about page and tell yourself people don’t care on photos anyway.
Touch up your photo image by ADOBE Photoshop or Post an image 10 years younger (or 10 pounds thinner).
Choose a bad theme. Like Violet background and yellow font.
Post images of your kids or your vacation in a professional blog OR /AND post images of your computer or conferences in a personal blog.
DO NOT SPELL CHECK.
Use HTM4.0 . Pretend that CSS is a hit TV show.
Pretend SEO , Tags and Categories is for others. DO NOT make it easy to search your blog.

WRITING

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman’s name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer – and if so, why?

Bennett Cerf ( from http://koti.mbnet.fi/pasenka/quotes/q-writ.htm#Writing%20is%20hell

Write on politics and guns on a tech blog, or technology on a politics blog.
Write dis jointed sentences in a hurry and claim it’s okay people wont notice anyways.
Write only in text without ANY Images.
Write 5 posts a day. or Write once in 5 weeks.
Never explore VIDEO or AUDIO in your blog. Podcasts are for frozen peas.
Have an ego bigger than your talent. Write about it.
Be an expert in social media without crossing 1.5 years of blogging, or 25000 unique visitors. or 100,000 views on Internet. Twitter followers and Linkedin connections doesn’t count. Facebook Fans don’ count either.
Generally make an ass of yourself by not editing or not proof reading your posts.

This should generally make sure that you become a BAD blogger, your blog traffic never crosses into two digits a day and you get back to work on your day job which you are probably good at.

If you do that, tell everyone blogs don’t matter in the 2010’s just as websites never mattered in the 1990’s, or Novels in the 1980’s, or TV in the 1950’s or Talking Pictures in the 1930’s.

Yup.

Born in the USA?

Here is some econometric search-ing I did

Using Google Public Data-and Wolfram Alpha and The Bureau of Labour Statistics

United States

United States – Monthly Data
Data Series	May 2009	June 2009	July 2009	Aug 2009	Sept 2009	Oct 2009
Unemployment Rate (1)	9.4	9.5	9.4	9.7	9.8	10.2
Change in Payroll Employment (2)	-303	-463	-304	-154	(P) -219	(P) -190
Average Hourly Earnings (3)	18.53	18.54	18.59	18.66	(P) 18.67	(P) 18.72
Consumer Price Index (4)	0.1	0.7	0.0	0.4	0.2	0.3
Producer Price Index (5)	0.2	1.7	(P) -1.0	(P) 1.7	(P) -0.6	(P) 0.3
U.S. Import Price Index (6)	1.7	2.7	(R) -0.6	(R) 1.5	(R) 0.2	(R) 0.7
Footnotes (1) In percent, seasonally adjusted. Annual averages are available for Not Seasonally Adjusted data. (2) Number of jobs, in thousands, seasonally adjusted. (3) For production and nonsupervisory workers on private nonfarm payrolls, seasonally adjusted. (4) All items, U.S. city average, all urban consumers, 1982-84=100, 1-month percent change, seasonally adjusted. (5) Finished goods, 1982=100, 1-month percent change, seasonally adjusted. (6) All imports, 1-month percent change, not seasonally adjusted. (R) Revised (P) Preliminary

United States – Quarterly Data
Data Series	3rd Qtr 2008	4th Qtr 2008	1st Qtr 2009	2nd Qtr 2009	3rd Qtr 2009
Employment Cost Index (1)	0.6	0.6	0.3	0.4	0.4
Productivity (2)	-0.1	0.8	0.3	6.9	9.5
Footnotes (1) Compensation, all civilian workers, quarterly data, 3-month percent change, seasonally adjusted. (2) Output per hour, nonfarm business, quarterly data, percent change from previous quarter at annual rate, seasonally adjusted.

And also included are the average wages for salary of teachers and average salary per hour of some offshore prone industries

http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm#b25-0000

http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes_nat.htm#b11-0000

and

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=usunemployment&met=unemployment_rate&idim=state:ST370000:ST540000:ST510000&tdim=true

WHAT THEY PAY TEACHERS (MAY 2008)

Education, Training, and Library Occupations top
			Wage Estimates
Occupation Code	Occupation Title (click on the occupation title to view an occupational profile)	Employment (1)	Median Hourly	Mean Hourly	Mean Annual (2)	Mean RSE (3)
25-0000	Education, Training, and Library Occupations	8,451,250	$21.26	$23.30	$48,460	0.5 %
25-1011	Business Teachers, Postsecondary	69,690	(4)	(4)	$77,340	1.0 %
25-1021	Computer Science Teachers, Postsecondary	32,520	(4)	(4)	$74,050	1.0 %
25-1022	Mathematical Science Teachers, Postsecondary	45,710	(4)	(4)	$68,130	0.9 %
25-1031	Architecture Teachers, Postsecondary	6,430	(4)	(4)	$75,450	1.9 %
25-1032	Engineering Teachers, Postsecondary	32,070	(4)	(4)	$90,070	1.1 %
25-1041	Agricultural Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary	10,000	(4)	(4)	$77,770	1.6 %
25-1042	Biological Science Teachers, Postsecondary	51,930	(4)	(4)	$83,270	2.7 %

WHAT THEY PAY THEMSELVES

Management Occupations top
			Wage Estimates
Occupation Code	Occupation Title (click on the occupation title to view an occupational profile)	Employment (1)	Median Hourly	Mean Hourly	Mean Annual (2)	Mean RSE (3)
11-0000	Management Occupations	6,152,650	$42.15	$48.23	$100,310	0.2 %
11-1011	Chief Executives	301,930	$76.23	$77.13	$160,440	0.5 %
11-1021	General and Operations Managers	1,697,690	$44.02	$51.91	$107,970	0.2 %
11-1031	Legislators	64,650	(4)	(4)	$37,980	1.1 %

and JOBS PRONE TO SHORTAGE /OFFSHORING

Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations top
			Wage Estimates
Occupation Code	Occupation Title (click on the occupation title to view an occupational profile)	Employment (1)	Median Hourly	Mean Hourly	Mean Annual (2)	Mean RSE (3)
15-0000	Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations	3,308,260	$34.26	$35.82	$74,500	0.3 %
15-1011	Computer and Information Scientists, Research	26,610	$47.10	$48.51	$100,900	1.1 %
15-1021	Computer Programmers	394,230	$33.47	$35.32	$73,470	0.6 %
15-1031	Computer Software Engineers, Applications	494,160	$41.07	$42.26	$87,900	0.4 %
15-1032	Computer Software Engineers, Systems Software	381,830	$44.44	$45.44	$94,520	0.5 %
15-1041	Computer Support Specialists	545,520	$20.89	$22.29	$46,370	0.3 %
15-1051	Computer Systems Analysts	489,890	$36.30	$37.90	$78,830	0.4 %
15-1061	Database Administrators	115,770	$33.53	$35.05	$72,900	0.8 %
15-1071	Network and Computer Systems Administrators	327,850	$31.88	$33.45	$69,570	0.3 %
15-1081	Network Systems and Data Communications Analysts	230,410	$34.18	$35.50	$73,830	0.4 %
15-1099	Computer Specialists, All Other	191,780	$36.13	$36.54	$76,000	0.5 %
15-2011	Actuaries	18,220	$40.77	$46.14	$95,980	1.4 %
15-2021	Mathematicians	2,770	$45.75	$45.65	$94,960	1.7 %
15-2031	Operations Research Analysts	60,860	$33.17	$35.68	$74,220	0.8 %
15-2041	Statisticians	20,680	$34.91	$35.96	$74,790	1.5 %
15-2091	Mathematical Technicians	1,100	$18.46	$20.24	$42,100	2.7 %
15-2099	Mathematical Science Occupations, All Other	6,600	$26.44	$31.55	$65,630	4.3 %

UNEMPLOYED IN THE USA (above)

BY STATE (below)

16 million people out of work. Give or take a million.

How can America pay 5.6 million people UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

Keep another 10 million unemployed,

another 10 million only partially employed.

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and still claim aggregate cost savings from offshoring jobs.

M2009 Interview Peter Pawlowski AsterData

Here is an interview with Peter Pawlowski, who is the MTS for Data Mining at Aster Data. I ran into Peter at his booth at AsterData during M2009, and followed up with an email interview. Also included is a presentation by him of which he was a co-author.

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Ajay- Describe your career in Science leading up till today.

Peter- Went to Stanford, where I got a BS & MS in Computer Science. I did some work on automated bug-finding tools while at Stanford.

( Note- that sums up the career of almost 60 % of CS scientists)

Ajay- How is life working at Aster Data- what are the challenges and the great stuff

Peter- Working at Aster is great fun, due to the sheer breadth and variety of the technical challenges. We have problems to solve in the optimization, languages, networking, databases, operating systems, etc. It’s been great to think about problems end-to-end & consider the impact of a change on all aspects of the system. I worked on SQL/MR in particular, which had lots of interesting challenges: how do you define the API? how do you integrate with SQL? how do you make it run fast? how do you make it scale?

Ajay- Do you think Universities offer adequate preparation for in demand skills like Mapreduce, Hadoop and Business Intelligence

Peter- Probably not BI–I learned everything I know about BI while at Aster. In terms of M/R, it’d be useful to have more hands-on experience with distributed system which at school. We read the MapReduce paper but didn’t get a chance to actually play with M/R. I think that sort of exposure would be useful. We recently made our software available to some students taking a data mining class at Stanford, and they came up with some fascinating use cases for our system, esp. around the Netflix challenge dataset.

Ajay- Describe some of the recent engineering products that you have worked with at Aster

Peter- SQL/MR is the main aspects of nCluster that i’ve worked with–interesting challenged described in #2.

Ajay- All BI companies claim to crunch data the fastest at the lowest price at highest quality as per their marketing brochure- How would you validate your product’s performance scientifically and transparently.

Peter- I’ve found that the hardest part of judging performance is to come up with a realistic workload. There are public benchmarks out there, but they may or may not reflect the kinds of workloads that our customers want to run. Our goal is to make our customers’ experience as good as possible, so we focus on speeding up the sorts of workloads they ask about.

And here is a presentation at Slideshare.net on more of what Peter works on.

SAS and JMP : Visual Data Discovery

While R packagers have a lot to be proud of in the graphics packages of R, the truth of the matter is that the lack of GUI even for Graphical Analysis hinders the ease of usage in adopting R’s powerful graphics for statistical analysis. As a contrast , SAS and JMP have been combined together in the SAS Visual Data Discovery Environment

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I really liked the GUI of JMP ( which is very rich in stats testing) and with the powerful data handling capabilities on the desktop of SAS, this is clearly an outstanding effort to create terrific graphics ( see below)

Note the combination of the two- Great Graphics WITH a GUI. in R the GUI that comes closest to matching JMP is R Commander, but it’s graphical capabilities are kept basic as it is not meant for replacement of the beloved Kommand prompt

( maybe an expanded plugin for graphics or hexabin would help)

It would be interesting to see an on demand Ec2 cloud hosted version of visual data discovery by SAS (with JMP as the front end) even for a limited pilot of six months and targeted at the SMB segment. Or a Salesforce.com application that integrates Salesforce.com data with the tests and standard procedures in SAS and JMP.

Note of Discontent- The JMP Website is terrible. It has a different font from the SAS Website ( they could atleast use the same CSS ) and overall is the worst part of the otherwise excellently elegant JMP. Hope they upgrade their website soon ( they havent done it this year atleast).

Scrennshot Citation-

http://www.sas.com/technologies/analytics/statistics/datadiscovery/index.html

S A S GOOD LIFE UNDER SIEGE – NYT

There was a time when when the word NYT invoked that’s where we read about news and politics. In 2009, the most happening news on statistical software came from NYT ( KD Nuggets and the Journal of Statistical Software are not too happy about that either).

The latest article calls SAS as a software giant under siege-and it’s Good Life under threat.

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This inspired me to an old movie poster I saw once- It’s also called Under Siege.

Given the fact that the under siege SAS earned 2.4 Billion Dollars last year alone

and the market capitalisation o New York Times is 1.25 Billion Dollars.

Why doesn’t DR Goodnight buy the New York Times itself for 600 million dollars and have enough change left over for………. err a Happy Thanksgiving.

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LIES

TRUE LIES

AND STATISTICS

Analytics and BI for small biz

I saw a story on Warren B and Goldman S creating a 500$ million pool for small business owners.

The program will contribute $200 million to community colleges, universities and other institutions to provide small- business owners with practical business education.
Goldman Sachs repaid the $10 billion it was given last year under the taxpayer-funded Troubled Asset Relief Program, plus dividends. The firm continues to benefit from federal guarantees on about $21 billion of long-term debt.
Buffett, known as the “Oracle of Omaha” for his investing prowess, is the second-richest American. Berkshire, which invests in companies ranging from retailers to insurers, paid $5 billion in September 2008 to acquire preferred stock in Goldman Sachs that pays a 10 percent dividend. Berkshire, based in Omaha, Nebraska, also gained five-year warrants to buy $5 billion of common stock at $115 per share.
( NOTE Curent Price of GS shares is 172$ – thats a 50% profit on 5 Billion~ 2.5 Billion for Mr Buffett but he is probably waiting for long term capital gains ax rates to kick in before encashing his patriotic “Buy American. I am” warrants (see NYT op ed by him http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/17/opinion/17buffett.html )
A better analysis of the above Bloomberg story was given on Bloomberg itself at http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=asjp51YPDwJU
A small thought- could smaller businesses gain from efficiencies of programs like SPSS, SAS and R. Or would they be better off with customized GUI’s linked to their POS data.

Anyways a need for analytics for small businesses in inventory management, and sales planning could help. Joe the Plumber could do with some ETS and Regression Models as well.

However apart for Salesforce.com applications this field seems to be totally vacant for analytics. What are IBM SPSS, SAS, or even other stats packages doing for small businesses. or even developing Salesforce.com applications for their own equivalent software

The market could be an interesting one to atleast do a test in. Unless you don’t believe in test and control.

See below the IBM Cognos by IBM itself and the third party app by Pervasive for SAP Integration-

Citation-

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016YGYEA2

and

http://sites.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N300000016am1EAA