In a world of experts-some questions to ask about China’s foreign policy , trade and military convergence
1) How can an increasingly rich 1.2 billion people accept a restricted internet, one child policies, and severe political restrictions/
2) How long can the Chinese respect for elders and ancestors be translated to a respect for the communist government? How do you measure the level of satisfaction?
3) Can ambitious Chinese Mandarins be motivated by career motives to act tougher than the country’s national interest demands?
4) Rare earth demand and supply curves? Clean energy investments versus climate change commitments graph?
5)Military- Metrics like Chinese Air Force flying hours per pilot, or submarine activity per annum?
As the Chinese supposedly said- May you live in interesting times
The term quantitative refers to a type of information based in quantities or else quantifiable data (objective properties) —as opposed to qualitative information which deals with apparent qualities (subjective properties)
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a tactic of rhetoric and fallacy used in sales, marketing, public relations,[1][2]politics and propaganda. FUD is generally a strategic attempt to influence public perception by disseminating negative and dubious/false information designed to undermine the credibility of their beliefs.
I had recently asked some friends from my Twitter lists for their take on 2011, atleast 3 of them responded back with the answer, 1 said they were still on it, and 1 claimed a recent office event.
Anyways- I take note of the view of forecasting from
The most primitive method of forecasting is guessing. The result may be rated acceptable if the person making the guess is an expert in the matter.
Ajay- people will forecast in end 2010 and 2011. many of them will get forecasts wrong, some very wrong, but by Dec 2011 most of them would be writing forecasts on 2012. almost no one will get called on by irate users-readers- (hey you got 4 out of 7 wrong last years forecast!) just wont happen. people thrive on hope. so does marketing. in 2011- and before
and some forecasts from Tom Davenport’s The International Institute for Analytics (IIA) at
Regulatory and privacy constraints will continue to hamper growth of marketing analytics.
(I wonder how privacy and analytics can co exist in peace forever- one view is that model building can use anonymized data suppose your IP address was anonymized using a standard secret Coco-Cola formula- then whatever model does get built would not be of concern to you individually as your privacy is protected by the anonymization formula)
Anyway- back to the question I asked-
What are the top 5 events in your industry (events as in things that occured not conferences) and what are the top 3 trends in 2011.
I define my industry as being online technology writing- research (with a heavy skew on stat computing)
My top 5 events for 2010 were-
1) Consolidation- Big 5 software providers in BI and Analytics bought more, sued more, and consolidated more. The valuations rose. and rose. leading to even more smaller players entering. Thus consolidation proved an oxy moron as total number of influential AND disruptive players grew.
2) Cloudy Computing- Computing shifted from the desktop but to the mobile and more to the tablet than to the cloud. Ipad front end with Amazon Ec2 backend- yup it happened.
3) Open Source grew louder- yes it got more clients. and more revenue. did it get more market share. depends on if you define market share by revenues or by users.
Both Open Source and Closed Source had a good year- the pie grew faster and bigger so no one minded as long their slices grew bigger.
4) We didnt see that coming –
Technology continued to surprise with events (thats what we love! the surprises)
Revolution Analytics broke through R’s Big Data Barrier, Tableau Software created a big Buzz, Wikileaks and Chinese FireWalls gave technology an entire new dimension (though not universally popular one).
people fought wars on emails and servers and social media- unfortunately the ones fighting real wars in 2009 continued to fight them in 2010 too
5) Money-
SAP,SAS,IBM,Oracle,Google,Microsoft made more money than ever before. Only Facebook got a movie named on itself. Venture Capitalists pumped in money in promising startups- really as if in a hurry to park money before tax cuts expired in some countries.
2011 Top Three Forecasts
1) Surprises- Expect to get surprised atleast 10 % of the time in business events. As internet grows the communication cycle shortens, the hype cycle amplifies buzz-
more unstructured data is created (esp for marketing analytics) leading to enhanced volatility
2) Growth- Yes we predict technology will grow faster than the automobile industry. Game changers may happen in the form of Chrome OS- really its Linux guys-and customer adaptability to new USER INTERFACES. Design will matter much more in technology on your phone, on your desktop and on your internet. Packaging sells.
False Top Trend 3) I will write a book on business analytics in 2011. yes it is true and I am working with A publisher. No it is not really going to be a top 3 event for anyone except me,publisher and lucky guys who read it.
3) Creating technology and technically enabling creativity will converge at an accelerated rate. use of widgets, guis, snippets, ide will ensure creative left brains can code easier. and right brains can design faster and better due to a global supply chain of techie and artsy professionals.
I had tried recreating this .gif using #catools in a windows environment, but the resolution was not quite good. it seems package catools is dependent on Operating System,
Anyway, there are two approaches to creating this code- one is given at
library(caTools) # external package providing write.gif function
jet.colors = colorRampPalette(c("#00007F", "blue", "#007FFF", "cyan", "#7FFF7F",
"yellow", "#FF7F00", "red", "#7F0000"))
m = 600 # define size
C = complex( real=rep(seq(-1.8,0.6, length.out=m), each=m ),
imag=rep(seq(-1.2,1.2, length.out=m), m ) )
C = matrix(C,m,m) # reshape as square matrix of complex numbers
Z = 0 # initialize Z to zero
X = array(0, c(m,m,20)) # initialize output 3D array
for (k in 1:20) { # loop with 20 iterations
Z = Z^2+C # the central difference equation
X[,,k] = exp(-abs(Z)) # capture results
}
write.gif(X, "Mandelbrot.gif", col=jet.colors, delay=100)
The other approach is from http://rtricks.blogspot.com/
and also suggests who the original author of this fascinating
Mandelbrot gif was
- apparently it was created in 2005 and is
5 years old
### Reproduced from http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/10/13198.html### Written by Jarek Tuszynski, PhD.
library(fields)# for tim.colorslibrary(caTools)# for write.gif
m = 400# grid sizeC = complex(real=rep(seq(-1.8,0.6, length.out=m), each=m ),
imag=rep(seq(-1.2,1.2, length.out=m), m ))C = matrix(C,m,m)
Z = 0
X = array(0,c(m,m,20))for(k in1:20){
Z = Z^2+C
X[,,k] = exp(-abs(Z))}image(X[,,k],col=tim.colors(256))# show final image in
write.gif(X,"Mandelbrot.gif",col=tim.colors(256), delay=100)
and finally- this time I used Linux /Ubuntu 10
and got the colors correct- just happy to find who created the original image
Tal G, creator of the rbloggers.com website, has created a new blog aggregator for SAS language users at http://sas-x.com/
With almost 26 blogs joining there (I suspect many more should join , it seems like a good website to use for analytics users and students. My favorite SAS Blog is http://statcompute.spaces.live.com/ – its pure code- little anything else.
Ubuntu has a slight glitch plus workaround for installing the RCurl package on which the Google Prediction API is dependent- you need to first install this Ubuntu package for RCurl to install libcurl4-gnutls-dev
Once you install that using Synaptic,
Simply start R
2) Install Packages rjson and Rcurl using install.packages and choosing CRAN
6) Uploading data to Google Storage using the GUI (rather than gs util)
Just go to https://sandbox.google.com/storage/
and thats the Google Storage manager
Notes on Training Data-
Use a csv file
The first column is the score column (like 1,0 or prediction score)
There are no headers- so delete headers from data file and move the dependent variable to the first column (Note I used data from the kaggle contest for R package recommendation at
Once you type in the basic syntax, the first time it will ask for your Google Credentials (email and password)
It then starts showing you time elapsed for training.
Now you can disconnect and go off (actually I got disconnected by accident before coming back in a say 5 minutes so this is the part where I think this is what happened is why it happened, dont blame me, test it for yourself) –
and when you come back (hopefully before token expires) you can see status of your request (see below)
> library(rjson)
> library(RCurl)
Loading required package: bitops
> library(googlepredictionapi)
> my.model <- PredictionApiTrain(data="gs://numtraindata/training_data")
The request for training has sent, now trying to check if training is completed
Training on numtraindata/training_data: time:2.09 seconds
Training on numtraindata/training_data: time:7.00 seconds
7)
Note I changed the format from the URL where my data is located- simply go to your Google Storage Manager and right click on the file name for link address ( https://sandbox.google.com/storage/numtraindata/training_data.csv)
to gs://numtraindata/training_data (that kind of helps in any syntax error)
## Load googlepredictionapi and dependent libraries
library(rjson)
library(RCurl)
library(googlepredictionapi)
## Make a training call to the Prediction API against data in the Google Storage.
## Replace MYBUCKET and MYDATA with your data.
my.model <- PredictionApiTrain(data="gs://MYBUCKET/MYDATA")
## Alternatively, make a training call against training data stored locally as a CSV file.
## Replace MYPATH and MYFILE with your data.
my.model <- PredictionApiTrain(data="MYPATH/MYFILE.csv")
At the time of writing my data was still getting trained, so I will keep you posted on what happens.
shows that while US added 600 billion of debt during the past one year, the Chinese actually reduced their exposure by 50 billion Dollars.
so who has been financing the debt for the US for the past one year- It is Japan- eager to keep its currency down and United Kingdom which has pumped in an extra 300 billion of T Bills.
See the whole table at official link above or at goo.gl/qMugp
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China still remembers the Opium Wars in which the then ruling Anglo Saxon superpower used naval superiority to enforce trade and eventual political dependency. Is China unsure of the United States brotherly nice intentions? They certainly seem to be putting their money that way.
Britain forced the Chinese government into signing theTreaty of Nanking and the Treaty of Tianjin, also known as the Unequal Treaties, which included provisions for the opening of additional ports to unrestricted foreign trade, for fixed tariffs; for the recognition of both countries as equal in correspondence; and for the cession of Hong Kong to Britain. The British also gained extraterritorial rights. Several countries followed Britain and sought similar agreements with China. Many Chinese found these agreements humiliating and these sentiments contributed to the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), and the downfall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, putting an end to dynastic China.
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The Koreans can always be depended on provide the first shot in any conflict- and though Anglo-US-Chinese conflict would be expensive- I guess as long as the cost of outstanding debt with China is less than cost of a brief -techno-war , we would see interesting games in this neighborhood. Note China restricts major trade with United States particularly in software, internet services (like Web Advertising, Facebook, Twitter ) and represents a lucrative market for big pharma (especially in psychiatric drugs) and big tech once it reforms its intellectual property rights. Software would be the opium of the 21st Century- if Chinese resist the Treasury Bills as their poppy flowers. The widespread Western media coverage of school kids murders by pyschopaths is also a trade tactic to encourage flow of more US made medicine in the Chinese market.
It would also help create an economic revival in the United States to exaggerate the Chinese threat (remember Sputnik) and build up its own cyber spending. Any military or cyber humiliation for the ruling party in China can help create a political vacuum for more malleable and agreeable alternatives to emerge.
DECISION STATS 