Month: November 2009

Praying for GoldMan Sachs

A video to people who took taxpayer’s money and make money out of air.

The lyrics and music are profound and come close to the truth , strange, given that it was written in 199o.

Collobrating in Conferences with Google Wave

If you have ever followed hash tags on Twitter for conferences and media events the next generation in online discussions

is clearly Google Wave. Here is a screenshot of a lot of people collaborating, discussing and in general having a conversation while events are going on at the DeFrag Con ( http://defragcon.com/2009/DEFRAG09-Home.htm )

The Google Wave collaboration method sure beats the Twitter hash tag method by a big..wave.

Screenshot

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Who will forecast for the forecasters?

An interesting blog post appeared here at http://www.information-management.com/blogs/business_intelligence_bi_statistics-10016491-1.html basically laying down the competitive landscape for analytical companies.

“-One safe bet is that IBM, with newly-acquired SPSS and Cognos, is gearing up to take on SAS in the high-end enterprise analytics market that features very large data and operational analytics with significant capacity challenges. In this segment, IBM can leverage its hardware, database and consulting strengths to become a formidable SAS competitor.

and

A number of start-up companies promoting competitive SAS language tools at a fraction of SAS prices may begin chipping away at many SAS annuity customers. As I wrote in last week’s blog, WPS from World Programming Systems is an outstanding SAS compiler that can replace expensive SAS licenses in many cases – especially those primarily used for data step programs. Similarly, another competitor, Carolina, from Dulles Research, LLC, converts Base SAS program code to Java, which can then be deployed in a Java run-time environment. Large SAS customer Discover Card is currently evaluating Carolina as a replacement for some its SAS applications.

CITATION-Steve Miller’s blog can also be found at miller.openbi.com.”

I think all companies have hired smart enough people and many of their efforts would cancel each other out in a true game theory manner.

I also find it extremely hypocritical for commercial vendors not to incentive R algorithm developers and treat the 2000 plus packages as essentially free ware.

If used for academics and research, R package creators expect and demand no money. But if used commercially – shouldnt the leading analytical vendors like SAS, SPSS, and even the newly cash infused REVolution create some kind of royalty sharing agreement.

If iTunes can help sell songs for 99 cents per download and really help the Music industry come to the next generation- how much would commercial vendors agree to share their solutions which ARE DEPENDENT on popular R packages like Plier or even Dr Frank’s Hmisc.

Unless you think Britney Spears has a better right to intellectual property than venerable professors and academics.

Even a monthly 10000 USD prize for the best R package created ( that can be used by that specific company’s use for commercial packages) can help speed up the R software movement- just like NetFlix prize.

More importantly – it can free up valuable resources for companies to concentrate on customer solutions like data quality, systems integration and computational environment shift to clouds which even todayis sadly lacking in the whole analytical ecosystem.

One interesting paradigm I find is that who ever masters the new computational requirements of unstructured large amounts of data ( not just row and column numeric data) but text sentiment analysis like data, and can integrate this for a complete customer solution in an easy to understand data visualization enabled system- that specific package,platform  or company would be leading the next decade

( Q -if the 90s were the Nineties will the next decade be the teen years)

Data Mining 2009 Interviews- Terry Whitlock, BlueCross BlueShield of TN

Terry Whitlock, Health Care Expert

Terry Whitlock is an employee of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. He has more than 15 years of analytical experience in managed care. He has utilized SAS for nearly 13 of his 15 years over a wide variety of research in the field of managed care. Over his career he has been published in Managed Care Interface and presented research at Best of Blues as well as Academy Health Research

simply download the Interview file at https://decisionstats.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/20091027-112844.m4a

Digitization to help education: Blackboard

At University of Tennessee, we use a digital solution called BlackBoard. This helps streamline communiction as well as enables us to cut down down on paper usage, besides capturing a lot of data for analysis and course improvement.

Basically it helps capture data for the following-

1) How often and ehen precisely did instructors announce change in syllabus, announcements, homework

2) Grades are posted online and students can see their grade with average and s.d of whole class ( FERPA – A federal law restricts making comparisons between students or telling them another person grades)

3) Lectures are recorded by Video ( and can be seen but not downloaded). Thus good lectures and courses can possibly be offered as digital courses or donated to suitable causes.

4) Instructors can see from analytics ( web) when and how often students referred to the course specific site. This helps them in understanding needs for students who may be lagging behind.

5) It has the facillity for polls to give constant feedback to instuctor during the course.

6) All slides and course material is shared securely without being accessible to outside web thus ensuring intellectual property protection for the course contents ( a policy I disagree with mildly- and sites like StudyBlue now offer students incentives to post the same content back for sharing)

7) Much better version control than lots of email floating with attachments or lots of printouts of slides per lecture. Digitization saves costs AND is good for student.

Eg A high school in Harlem or say in rural East Tennessee lacks good maths teachers. Using Digitization, Online Video and inexpensive solutions- students in far off schools can possibly share video lectures from the best private maths tutors ( at exclusive California or Dc schools). Technology can thus help bridge the technical instructor divide without  rampant labour cost destroying offshoring- and it is heartening to see some companies like SAS Education go for On Demand educational solutions ( though more SAS focussed and not basic maths or stats focussed) Even SAP has a great University partnering program.

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