Year: 2009

Harvard DropOut Writes Open Letter- His Startup has 350m users

Note from Mark “zucken”berg

An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg
by Mark Zuckerberg Yesterday at 9:23pm

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Well atleast he can write open code.

The Blind Side – Movie Review

Q Whats a movie review doing on a data mining blog? A Because blogs are read by people who ALSO like movies.

Over the Thanksgiving Holiday- I didnt get much Turkey and spent more time reading Tukey, and the only offer I got on Black Friday in Knoxville, East Tennessee was to take a discount for a tanning studio at Kingston Pike, near my house. So you can imagine my trepidition when I decided to go for a movie on Saturday- hoping for better luck.

There are amusing things in Blind Side, especially if you are a brown guy wearing a bright orange U Tenn T Shirt as I was doing. The beautiful game of the movie, as in all sports movie is however overshadowed by Sandro Bullock’s performance as a rich white woman who takes a black teenager under her wing. Despite the innuendo in a Memphis, Tennessee- which is quite realistic. And horrifying for a non American like me to watch. It kind of reminded me when I was the only guy cheering in Austin Texas at the end of the movie “W” -2008.

For non Tennessee football fans, watch as how the game unites all- as how a common God and morality finds rescue for a kid among horrors. And how number 74 discovers his destiny as the guy who protects the quarter back.

This could be the Hollywood version of SlumDog Millionaire of 2009. Nicely crafted. and yet an intelligent movie. For people who don’t like Twilight 🙂 If you have ever felt unsafe while traveling in a poor black neighbourhood watch this movie. If you live in a black poor neighbourhood- then watch it with your homies.

if you ever watched a game of football and marveled at the magnificent heart break of college football. Watch the movie.

As someone said- Football is like the Mafia in the Godfather movie.

Sooner or later you will get whacked.

Google stuck on Gears

Google has launched support for Droid the mobile operating system but forgot to include support for their own browser- Chromium. Atleast if you can support Windows Explorer and Firefox for Gears, surely you can add support for Gears for Chromium.Maybe with an Ad or two 😉 .Since Al Gore invented the internet and he sits as a consultant for the California boys, maybe he can advise them as well on the anti trust investigations with Apple (cough).

Redlining in Internet Access and notes on Regression Models

This is the definition of Redlining Citation- The AD FREE Wikepedia-

Redlining is the practice of denying, or increasing the cost of, services such as banking, insurance, access to jobs,[2]access to health care,[3] or even supermarkets[4] to residents in certain, often racially determined,[5] areas. The term “redlining” was coined in the late 1960s by community activists in Chicago.[citation needed] It describes the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest; later the term was applied todiscrimination against a particular group of people (usually by race or sex) no matter the geography.

As of today, redlining in financial services is outlawed by the Fair Credit Lending Act which prohibits using variables in regression models which end up red-lining districts. However as far as 2005, redlining was used in Auto Insurance by using suitably disguised zip9 variables ( I carried data for 55 million American Citizens and 88 million Accounts for a major North American Automotive Insurance provider as part of an offshoring contract from Atlanta, GA  in 2005).

It exists today by informal arrangements between internet service providers who carve up territories and districts. Internet access redlining is still not illegal. This is especially true in Austin ( I traveled there as a consultant last year) and Knoxville, Tennessee where I still study as a grad student.

Neither are suitably proprietary insurance and health care claim denial models used for minimizing litigation risk. Litigation risk minimization is the next level of retail logistic regression model just as predictive modeling used by political consultants during elections.

Open Source Webinar with AsterData

Learn how to make money from open source databases, some business intelligence and more business analytics in this webinare at here.

FCC Disclaimer ( even though it is one day before the rules for Bloggers come in effect)-

AsterData is an advertiser on this blog. See the ad on right.

MapReduce was released by Google in 2004 as how to do big data crunching faster.

Google is not an advertiser nor partner on this site. They are busy with mobile phones and advertising (like the TV series Mad Men.)

And yes, Sergey Brin needs to finish his  Phd too.

Ponder This: IBM Research

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ponder This Challenge:

 

What is the minimal number, X, of yes/no questions needed to find the smallest (but more than 1*) divisor of a number between 2 and 166 (inclusive)?

We are asking for the exact answer in two cases:

In the worst case, i.e., what is the smallest number X for which we can guarantee finding it in no more than X questions?

On average, i.e., assuming that the number was chosen in uniform distribution from 2 to 166 and we want to minimize the expected number of questions.

* For example, the smallest divisor of 105 is 3, and of 103 is 103.

Update (11/05): You should find the exact divisor without knowing the number and answering “prime” is not a valid

Citation-

http://domino.research.ibm.com/Comm/wwwr_ponder.nsf/pages/index.html

A maths challenge by the boys in Blue above and also in employement news, the parent company of SPSS is opening a centre of advanced analytics right here in Washington D.C.

WASHINGTON – 10 Nov 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the opening of the sixth in a network of analytics solution centers – this one dedicated to helping federal agencies and other public sector organizations extract actionable insights from their data.

The new IBM Analytics Solution Center in Washington, D.C., will draw on the expertise of more than 400 IBM professionals. These will include IBM researchers, experts in advanced software platforms, and consultants with deep industry knowledge in areas such as transportation, social services, public safety, customs and border management, revenue management, defense, logistics, healthcare and education. IBM also plans to add an additional 100 professionals, through retraining or new hiring, as demand grows.