For Microsoft Windows installations, to upgrade your Rattle installation you may need to remove any old installs of the Gtk+ libraries using the Uninstall application from the Microsoft Windows Control Panel). Then install the new Gtk2 library:
The output from rattle.info() will include an “install.packages” command that will identify Rattle related packages that have updates available. You can cut-and-paste that command to the R prompt to have those packages updated in your installation.
A good video created by my favorite social media people from a company in North Carolina.
STEM is cool (Science Technology Engineering Maths?)
No, Science is not kool aid- it is just COOL. and better paying than watching Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga videos. Get those lazy teenagers out of Glee clubs and back into Science clubs.
The video itself-
Disclaimer- I have no direct or indirect financial relationship with the creators of this video. I think it is cool people express creativity in positive ways to help their favorite software,company, and even the world. Blah Blah Blah 🙂
Now Jim Davis is a big guy, and he is rushing from the launch of SAS Institute’s Social Media Analytics in Japan- to some arguably difficult flying conditions in time to be home in America for Thanksgiving. That and and I have not been much of a good Blog Boy recently, more swayed by love of open source, than love of software per se. I love equally, given I am bad at both equally.
Anyways, Jim’s contention ( http://twitter.com/Davis_Jim ) was customers should go in business analytics only if there is Positive Return on Investment. I am quoting him here-
What is important is that there be a positive ROI on each and every BA project. Otherwise don’t do it.
That’s not the marketing I was taught in my business school- basically it was sell, sell, sell.
However I see most BI sales vendors also go through -let me meet my sales quota for this quarter- and quantifying customer ROI is simple maths than predictive analytics but there seems to be some information assymetry in it.
Here is a paper from North Western University on ROI in IT projects-.
but overall it would be in the interest of customers and Business Analytics Vendors to publish aggregated ROI.
The opponents to this transparency in ROI would be market leaders in market share, who have trapped their customers by high migration costs (due to complexity) or contractually.
A recent study listed Oracle having a large percentage of unhappy customers who would still renew!, SAP had problems when it raised prices for licensing arbitrarily (that CEO is now CEO of HP and dodging legal notices from Oracle).
Indeed Jim Davis’s famous unsettling call for focusing on Business Analytics,as Business Intelligence is dead- that call has been implemented more aggressively by IBM in analytical acquisitions than even SAS itself which has been conservative about inorganic growth. Quantifying ROI, should theoretically aid open source software the most (since they are cheapest in up front licensing) or newer technologies like MapReduce /Hadoop (since they are quite so fast)- but I think that market has a way of factoring in these things- and customers are not as foolish neither as unaware of costs versus benefits of migration.
The contrary to this is Business Analytics and Business Intelligence are imperfect markets with duo-poly or big players thriving in absence of customer regulation.
You get more protection as a customer of $20 bag of potato chips, than as a customer of a $200,000 software. Regulators are wary to step in to ensure ROI fairness (since most bright techies are qither working for private sector, have their own startup or invested in startups)- who in Govt understands Analytics and Intelligence strong enough to ensure vendor lock-ins are not done, and market flexibility is done. It is also a lower choice for embattled regulators to ensure ROI on enterprise software unlike the aggressiveness they have showed in retail or online software.
Who will Analyze the Analysts and who can quantify the value of quants (or penalize them for shoddy quantitative analytics)- is an interesting phenomenon we expect to see more of.
DECISION STATS 