Month: November 2009

The Best of Times: A Disruptive Innovation

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Ever felt bad for a website like Yahoo.com or Nytimes.com whom you really liked using but dont know what to do to help it.

Click the ads. Like Fans of a Baseball team clap more, fans of a website should click more ( this site does not use Cost Per Click as I feel Cost per Conversion is a more HONEST statistical measure so try this at somewhere)

Surely the fans of a website like NYTimes.com deserve some say – just as much the Private Equity Funds and Wall Street Honchos and internal investors.

and while you are doing it- confuse Google. AND Bing.

Together.

This is the reverse of the adblock plugin-

click all the ads that you can see .Twice.

 

 

Not so AWkward after all: R GUI RKWard

I saw two packages bundled with Ubuntu ( one was R Cmdr) which I have talked about before ( for some reason Rattle continues to give some problem with Ubuntu)

The other R GUI is RKWard.

This one is clearly inspired by SPSS GUI design and though not so nifty and lite as R Cmdr can be used for higher end stuff

The website is here-

http://rkward.sourceforge.net/

Some screenshots created by me- I swear I only used the mouse while doing this- no keyboard hence a true GUI.

RKward2RKWard

RkWard3

  • New features / improvements in latest version

– Add Stata data file import plugin (by Michael Ash) –

For much better screenshots see-

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Screenshots

Screenshot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It still could do with more community testing and support and some of the Desktop performance was not that great ( code generated was clunky and reminded me of other GUIs that sit too heavy on command line unlike RCmdr)

Truly impressive is the multiple flexibility offered in details ( like for Plots or for Graphical Analysis)-

and with the help of a Citrix Server on the INTERNET, can POTENTIALLY be offered on Amazon EC2 environment for as low as 2.5 $ per hour for heavy data processing AND stats analysis (with no hardware OR software legacy costs)

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R , Ubuntu, RCmdr Updates

Some nice updates for R followers-

1) Rather than have an Icon for R – There is a seperate icon for RCmdr in Ubuntu Karmic Koala – Thus the default screen on opening is R Cmdr.

2) REvolution Computing has managed a coup with their bundling of their libraries with the R Distribution in Ubuntu Karmic Koala( see screenshot). We however still are waiting for who gets the credit for that ( Daneese Cooper or the long suffering Mr Smith)

Screenshot

 

3)Karmic Koala offers 2 GB free space  for storing data in the cloud for every user and 50 GB at 10$ a month. This helps with your storage costs. Data is protected thanks to an oauth login id and machine specific tie-in.

4) RCmdr has a great new plugin for DOE (Design off Experiments) students. DOE is a powerful and under utilized technique especially in Web Analytics. This is promising given that Dr John Fox ( whom we interviewed on this website) has going on ahead and seems clearly to have established RCmdr as the introductory GUI for beginners to R.

(see screenshot 2 below)

5) The Karmic Koala is very easy to install and very intuitive to use- Don’t want to give up your Windows ( well just install a dual boot which takes less than 1 hour on a fast internet connection or 15 minutes if you have a DVD)

 

Screenshot-1

6) What are other Statistics softwares doing? If they are not too keen on helping Microsoft get more sales ( especially student OS licenses) why don’t they offer the Ubuntu version free for students ( and besides once and for all put to rest the open source credential controversy)

 

Google Wave

Finally I got a Google Wave. It is nice. So nice I would rather write a Wave than write email.

Now if only the rest of my Gang was on it too- and if I could only create a Blog post on WordPress.com using a Wave.

See here-

Screenshot

Decisionstats Interview at Big Data Summit, AsterData

 

For a change, I got interviewed at Big Data Summit, sponsored by Aster Data. With a special thanks to Tasso , Steve Wooledge and his team, and the lovely Michelle from http://www.zagcommunications.com

Note this is just the raw unedited footage so it can be pretty repetitive, so if you want the final interview it should take some time. Anyways I managed to not make a complete mess of it. Have a look.

YouSendIt- Sending large files securely

Here is a useful site for sending large files on the Internet if you lack a personal FTP server and it comes with a password protected option as well. Plus it is free for 100 MB..

Screenshot-1