Month: May 2011

Love Bytes- a modern Indian play

Review= Love Bytes

I was here in Taj Vivanta,Mumbai India, as a guest and I caught up with a lovely new age play called Love Bytes.

Directed and written by Divya Palat http://www.divyapalat.com  , this play explores the emotional turbulences of the digiterati, the Facebook status changes, and the complete life cycle of the supply chain of love.

From teenage puppy love, to double income 1 kid, to geeky nerd afraid to talk to the beauteous girl in office,and the live in couple with no pressure to marry – this s when Harry met Sally  plus Its Complicated all mashed together with anthemic rock songs between the acts.

I loved the humor and the satire though the second act did drag on my nerves with the puns on African American rappers,  extinct parsis  species, and mild homophobia in father son relationships. One solo act stood out for the funny words..

Welcome brave new world of Bollywood.

Or maybe I should say Bollyway-wood.

Weather Weapons

water table high.
Image by glassblower via Flickr

possible weapons to modify weather and /or influence psychological reactions in people/mass events.

1) use of lasers to create hot spots on ocean ,sea surfaces for clouds and pressure winds

2) controlled demolitions to alter river trajectory

3) controlled sub terranean demolitions to influence water table levels

4) introduction of aerial oxidants and chemical leaching agents to alter soil productivity, water retention.

5) controlled sub nuclear explosions on glaciers as well as ice deposits.

6) MODIFICATION of ambient light /rain/sleet to influence or encourage dissent in populations usually in combination with some or all of the above.

the name of the game is the art of fighting a war without fighting a war. subtlety does it.

countries doing it are us, supported by pan democracies, china, and russia. may we live in interesting times

http://www.asitis.com/2/41.html

TRANSLATION

Those who are on this path are resolute in purpose, and their aim is one. O beloved child of the Kurus, the intelligence of those who are irresolute is many-branched.

Browsing update- Dear Decisionstats.com Reader

Wordpress default1 mainpage
Image via Wikipedia

In view of the recent root level breach of WordPress, which may include viewing source code for hidden hacks or Trojans, as effective immediately, please Decisionstats.com has no responsibility for any viruses, or Trojans that you may inadvertently download while on this website. I will be responsible for any deliberate malicious honey traps I put up , but any body putting an interesting comment with a link on this website , can and may direct you to phishing.

All disputes will be to subject to the jurisdiction of Tis Hazari Court, Delhi, India as already mentioned.

Heritage offers 3 million chump change for Monkeys

My perspective is life is not fair, and if someone offers me 1 mill a year so they make 1 bill a year, I would still take it, especially if it leads to better human beings and better humanity on this planet. Health care isnt toothpaste.

Unless there are even more fine print changes involved- there exist several players in the pharma sector who do build and deploy models internally for denying claims or prospecting medical doctors with freebies, but they might just get caught with the new open data movement

————————————————————————————————–

A note from KDNuggets-

Heritage Health Prizereleased a second set of data on May 4. They also recently modified their ruleswhich now demand complete exclusivity and seem to disallow use of other tools (emphasis mine – Gregory PS)

21. LICENSE
By registering for the Competition, each Entrant (a) grants to Sponsor and its designees a worldwide, exclusive (except with respect to Entrant) , sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), transferable, fully paid-up, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to use, not use, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), create derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display, digitally perform, make, have made, sell, offer for sale and import the entry and the algorithm used to produce the entry, as well as any other algorithm, data or other information whatsoever developed or produced at any time using the data provided to Entrant in this Competition (collectively, the “Licensed Materials”), in any media now known or hereafter developed, for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without further approval by or payment to Entrant (the “License”) and
(b) represents that he/she/it has the unrestricted right to grant the License. 
Entrant understands and agrees that the License is exclusive except with respect to Entrant: Entrant may use the Licensed Materials solely for his/her/its own patient management and other internal business purposes but may not grant or otherwise transfer to any third party any rights to or interests in the Licensed Materials whatsoever.

This has lead to a call to boycott the competition by Tristan, who also notes that academics cannot publish their results without prior written approval of the Sponsor.

Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, emailed the HHP participants on May 4

HPN have asked me to pass on the following message: “The Heritage Provider Network is sponsoring the Heritage Health Prize to spur innovation and creative thinking in healthcare. HPN, however, is a medical group and must retain an exclusive license to the algorithms created using its data so as to ensure that the algorithms are used responsibly, and are only used to provide better health care to patients and not for improper purposes.
Put simply, while the competition hopes to spur innovation, this is not a competition regarding movie ratings or chess results. We hope that the clarifications we have made to the Rules and the FAQ adequately address your concerns and look forward to your participation in the competition.”

What do you think? Will the exclusive license prevent you from participating?

Related articles

Forecasting World Events Team

a large and diverse panel of forecasters, including substantial representation from government, academia, “think tanks,” and industry. Here are a few other details concerning your fellow participants:
  • At this time, over 600 people are being invited to participate. Please note that we expect that new participants will be joining the panel on a rolling basis for years to come.
  • Around 85% of these 600+ participants have at least a Bachelor’s degree, and over 60% of them have advanced degrees.
  • In terms of background training, participants represent a range of academic fields. Around 40% report a Social-Behavioral Science background, but there is also significant representation from those with backgrounds in Business (15%), the Humanities (13%), Engineering (12%), and the Natural Sciences (10%), among others.
  • The average participant age is 43 years-old, with a standard deviation of 15 years.
  • The panel’s gender composition is 75% men / 25% women, and this closely mirrors the gender ratio for all FWE registrants.
  • In addition to participation from individuals overseas, we are pleased to have eligible participants representing 44 of the 50 United States.
We are currently scheduled to begin the core forecasting study in late summer, a few months later than we initially anticipated. In the meantime, we will be readying our web-based forecasting environment and assembling our initial set of forecasting questions. As our formal launch date approaches, we will be contacting you with a link to the forecasting website and any other information you’ll need to get started. Between now and then we may reach out to you with other related announcements.
Finally, registration remains open, and we encourage you to “spread the word” by sharing our registration homepage link with your friends and colleagues.
Thanks once again for your interest in Forecasting World Events. We look forward to you joining us this summer.
Sincerely,
The Forecasting World Events Team
E-mail is not a secure form of communication.

The confidentiality of this message cannot be guaranteed.

ps- above message was from this new contest. Enter at your initiative. Buyer Beware!.

Heritage prize= 3mill now open

I am still angry with THE netflix for 1 mill I lost out. No sweat! this time the money is 3 times as much, it is legit, and yes baby you can change the world, make it a better place and get rich.! see details below-http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/c/hhp/Data

HERITAGE HEALTH PRIZE DATA FILES

You must accept this competition’s rules before you’ll be able to download data files.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The information provided below is intended only to provide general guidance to participants in the Heritage Health Prize Competition and is subject to the Competition Official Rules. Any capitalized term not defined below is defined in the Competition Official Rules. Please consult the Competition Official Rules for complete details.

Heritage Provider Network is providing Competition Entrants with deidentified member data collected during a forty-eight month period that is allocated among three data sets (the “Data Sets”). Competition Entrants will use the Data Sets to develop and test their algorithms for accurately predicting the number of days that the members will spend in a hospital (inpatient or emergency room visit) during the 12-month period following the Data Set cut-off date.

HHP_release2.zip contains the latest files, so you can ignore HHP_release1.zip. SampleEntry.CSV shows you how an entry should look.

Data Sets will be released to Entrants after registration on the Website according to the following schedule:

April 4, 2011 Claims Table – Y1 and DaysInHospital Table – Y2

May 4, 2011

 All other Data Sets except Labs Table and Rx Table

From https://www.kaggle.com/

The $3 million Heritage Health Prize opens to entries

It’s been one month since the launch of the Heritage Health Prize. The prize has attracted some great publicity, receiving coverage from the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Slate andForbes.

By now, people have had a good chance to poke around the first portion of the data. Now the fun starts! HPN have released two more years’-worth of data, set the accuracy threshold and are opening up the competition to entries. The data are available from the Heritage Health Prize page. Good luck to all participants!

The Deloitte/FIDE Chess Ratings Competition results

The Deloitte/FIDE Chess Ratings Competition attracted one of the strongest fields ever seen in a Kaggle Competition. The competition attracted 189 teams, ranging from chess ratings  experts to Netflix Prize winners. As Jeff Sonas wrote on the Kaggle blog last week, the  competition has far exceeded his expectations. A big congratulations the provisional winner, Tim Salimans, an econometrician at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. We look forward to reading about the approaches used by top performers on the Kaggle blog. We also look forward to the results of the FIDE prize, which could see the introduction of a new chess ratings system.

ICDAR 2011 Competition Results

The ICDAR 2011 competition also finished recently. The competiiton required participants to develop an algorithm that correctly matched handwriting samples. The winners were Lewis Griffin and Andrew Newell from the University College London who achieved Kaggle’s first ever perfect score by managing to match every sample correctly! Andrew and Lewis have posted a description of their winning method on the Kaggle blog.

Revolution R Enterprise

Since R is the most popular language used by Kaggle members, the Revolution Analytics team is making Revolution R Enterprise (the pre-eminent commercial version of R) available free of charge to Kaggle members. Revolution R Enterprise has several advantages over standard R, including the ability to seemlessly handle larger datasets. To get your free copy, visit http://info.revolutionanalytics.com/Kaggle.html.
Kaggle-in-Class

As many of you know, Kaggle offers a free platform, Kaggle-in-Class, for instructors who want to host competitions for their students. For those interested in hearing more about the use of Kaggle-in-Class as a teaching tool, Susan Holmes and Nelson Ray from Stanford University share their experience in a webinar organized by the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education.

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