Month: July 2011

The Amazing Google MapMaker

Literally helping make the world a better place by making it- see real time edits of people

http://www.google.com/mapmaker/pulse

Map Maker’s review process allows users to easily edit content, while ensuring that data quality remains intact.

The first time a Map Maker user makes edits to a map, the edits may require review and approval before the edits will be published. Once a Map Maker user has made a few approved edits, most of the subsequent edits will go live automatically. However, some types of edits or edits in specific regions will always require review, regardless of how experienced the mapper is. In addition, some edits may require multiple reviews before the edits appear on Google Maps.

 

Why do edits need to be reviewed?

 

There are several reasons why edits are sent for review:

  • To provide feedback to new editors, and to help them understand the mapping process.
  • To provide feedback on more complex edits.
  • To ensure that sensitive edits meet the Reviewing Guidelines.

 

Learn how you can review edits in Map Maker.

 

 

 

Review some edits and get your edits reviewed faster!

When you review the edits made by your co-mappers, your edits are prioritized in the reviewing queue so that they appear above other edits. This enables other mappers to review them and your edits get published on Maps faster! from-
http://www.google.com/support/mapmaker/bin/static.py?page=guide.cs&guide=1094316

 

The Top Statisticians in the World

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tukey

 

John Tukey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Tukey

John Wilder Tukey
Born June 16, 1915
New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA
Died July 26, 2000 (aged 85)
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Residence United States
Nationality American
Fields Mathematician
Institutions Bell Labs
Princeton University
Alma mater Brown University
Princeton University
Doctoral advisor Solomon Lefschetz
Doctoral students Frederick Mosteller
Kai Lai Chung
Known for FFT algorithm
Box plot
Coining the term ‘bit’
Notable awards Samuel S. Wilks Award (1965)
National Medal of Science (USA) in Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Sciences (1973)
Shewhart Medal (1976)
IEEE Medal of Honor (1982)
Deming Medal (1982)
James Madison Medal (1984)
Foreign Member of the Royal Society(1991)

John Wilder Tukey ForMemRS[1] (June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American statistician.

Contents

[hide]

[edit]Biography

Tukey was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1915, and obtained a B.A. in 1936 and M.Sc.in 1937, in chemistry, from Brown University, before moving to Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in mathematics.[2]

During World War II, Tukey worked at the Fire Control Research Office and collaborated withSamuel Wilks and William Cochran. After the war, he returned to Princeton, dividing his time between the university and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Among many contributions to civil society, Tukey served on a committee of the American Statistical Association that produced a report challenging the conclusions of the Kinsey Report,Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1982 “For his contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm.”

Tukey retired in 1985. He died in New Brunswick, New Jersey on July 26, 2000.

[edit]Scientific contributions

His statistical interests were many and varied. He is particularly remembered for his development with James Cooley of the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm. In 1970, he contributed significantly to what is today known as the jackknife estimation—also termed Quenouille-Tukey jackknife. He introduced the box plot in his 1977 book,”Exploratory Data Analysis“.

Tukey’s range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, Tukey’s test of additivity and Tukey’s lemma all bear his name. He is also the creator of several little-known methods such as the trimean andmedian-median line, an easier alternative to linear regression.

In 1974, he developed, with Jerome H. Friedman, the concept of the projection pursuit.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was an English statistician,evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher’s exact test and Fisher’s equation. Anders Hald called him “a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science”[1] while Richard Dawkins named him “the greatest biologist since Darwin“.[2]

 

contacts.xls

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset

William Sealy Gosset (June 13, 1876–October 16, 1937) is famous as a statistician, best known by his pen name Student and for his work on Student’s t-distribution.

Born in Canterbury, England to Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset, Gosset attendedWinchester College before reading chemistry and mathematics at New College, Oxford. On graduating in 1899, he joined the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son.

Guinness was a progressive agro-chemical business and Gosset would apply his statistical knowledge both in the brewery and on the farm—to the selection of the best yielding varieties ofbarley. Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, trial and error and by spending two terms in 1906–7 in the biometric laboratory of Karl Pearson. Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship and Pearson helped Gosset with the mathematics of his papers. Pearson helped with the 1908 papers but he had little appreciation of their importance. The papers addressed the brewer’s concern with small samples, while the biometrician typically had hundreds of observations and saw no urgency in developing small-sample methods.

Another researcher at Guinness had previously published a paper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the contained information. However, after pleading with the brewery and explaining that his mathematical and philosophical conclusions were of no possible practical use to competing brewers, he was allowed to publish them, but under a pseudonym (“Student”), to avoid difficulties with the rest of the staff.[1] Thus his most famous achievement is now referred to as Student’s t-distribution, which might otherwise have been Gosset’s t-distribution.

Best of Google Plus – Week 1 Top1/0

Stuff I like from Google Plus meme- animated GIFS  are just one of them-

  2. LIST OF GOOGLERS ON GOOGLE+

OK, this was fun to put together — love how active the Googlers are on this platform! Please feel free to add anyone I missed and share this. Circle the ones that most interest you based on what they do, or circle them all as I did 🙂

Co-Founders
+Sergey Brin
+Larry Page

VPs/Senior VPs
+Vic Gundotra (Engineering)
+Bradley Horowitz (Product Management)
+Jeff Huber (Commerce & Local)
+Marissa Mayer (Local, Maps & Location Services)

Community Managers
+Brian Rose
+Toby Stein
+Natalie Villalobos

Product Managers
+Anish Acharya (Google+ Mobile)
+Shimrit Ben-Yair
+Frances Haugen (Google+ Profiles)
+Caroline McCarthy (Marketing)
+Jonathan McPhie
+Joe Rideout
+Punit Soni (Google+ Mobile)

Engineering Directors/Managers
+Chee Chew
+Dave Besbris
+Chris Millikin

Software Engineers
+Eric W. Barndollar (Google+)
+Andrew Bunner (Google+)
+David Byttow
+Eric Cattell (Social Graph Tech Lead)
+John Costigan (Google Profiles)
+Matt Cutts (Webspam)
+Pavan Desikan (Google+/Gmail)
+Kelly Ellis
+Trey Harris (Site Reliability)
+Griff Hazen
+Andy Hertzfeld
+Matt Keoshkerian
+Todd Knight
+Jean-Christophe Lilot
+Lan Liu
+Vincent Mo (Google+ Photos)
+Dobromir Montauk (Google+ Infrastructure)
+Stephen Ng (Gmail)
+Owen Prater
+Joseph Smarr (Technical)
+Martin Strauss
+Na Tang
+Yonatan Zunger (Social)

Consumer Operations Manager
+Michael Hermeston (Google+ Support)

Developer Advocates
+Chris Chabot (Developer Relations)
+Timothy Jordan

Designers
+Brett Lider (Product/User Experience)
+Jonathan Terleski (Google+)
+Charles Warren (User Experience Lead, Google Social)

Program Managers
+Julian Harris (Technical)
+Adam Lasnik (Google Map Maker)

Tech Lead Manager
+Natalie Glance (Google Shopping)
Test Engineer
+Erick Fejta (Tester for Google Storage)

Account Executive
+Dave Miller (Local & Education)

President, Enterprise
+Dave Girouard (Cloud Apps)
3. Jokes-
I have a friend on Facebook that seemed suicidal, said he was standing on a ledge….so I poked him

4.Google Squash

5.Social Media Explained

6. Google Plus slaps Facebook AND Troopers Googling for Droids

7. Why did Google Wave Fail

8. When Google+ is available to the public..

9. Evolution

10. Safe Tweeting

Special Mentions-

 

 

 

 

LibreOffice Conference

A bit belatedly I return to my second favorite Office Productivity Software (the first being Cloud- Google Docs).

July 9, 2011

LibreOffice Conference Registration Is Open

Filed under: Conference, Meetings — Florian Effenberger @ 20:26

The registration for the LibreOffice Conference, taking place in Paris from October 12th to 15th, is now open. Everyone interested in joining the first annual meeting of the LibreOffice community is invited to register online at

http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/

to help the organizers in planning.

The LibreOffice Conference will be the event for those interested in the development of free office productivity software, open standards, and the OpenDocument format generally, and is an exciting opportunity to meet community members, developers and hackers. It is sponsored by Cap Digital, Région Île de France, IRILL, Canonical, Google, La Mouette, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, AF 83, Ars Aperta and Lanedo.

The Call for Papers is also open until July 22nd, and paper submissions will be reviewed by a community committee.

We look forward meeting you in the heart of France, celebrating the first year of LibreOffice, and discussing the plans for the next months.

The Steering Committee of The Document Foundation

http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/

 

Official LibreOffice Conference

Conference Registration

Please enter your personal data to register for Paris, Oct 12 – 15, 2011.

 

List of All Libre Office Announcements-

http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/

 

Review of Google Plus

After resisting for two weeks I have decided to write a Google Plus review. This includes both the changed designed parameters, the invite growth features and all of the main sub-items and activities you can do in the G+  Stream, Share, Hang Out, Pictures, Circles.

Since I have 2500 people in my circles and I am in 91 circles

To keep it simple – I have noted the following 6 main sub-points.

1) Content Dissemination-

 

  • Sharing Blog Articles
  • Micro-Blogging
  • Sharing Pictures

2) Online Professional Networking  and 3) Online Personal Socializing

4) Spam Control / Malware /Phishing/Porn Protection

5) Time Cost versus Networking Benefit

————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

1) Content Dissemination-

  • Sharing Blog Articles

 

Sharing is as simple as Facebook but the design makes it simpler.

Note G+ uses lower number of colors, bigger fonts, slightly bigger icons to reduce the appearance of clutter.

Contrast this

with this-

 

Interesting to see that G+ has four types of media to share- besides writing the status/micro-blog (unfettered by 140 characters). Note these show icons only with hover text to tell you what the icon stands for.

Photo,Video,URL,Location (which seems to be Twitter like in every share)

Facebook has 5 types of Sharing and note the slightly different order as well the fact that both icon and text make it slightly more cluttered- Status (which is redundant clearly ),Photo,Link,Video,Question

G+ thus lacks polls /questions features. It is much easier to share content on Facebook automatically as of now- but for G+ you need to share the URL privately though. There exist G+ meme-s already thanks to re-sharing in G+ plus which seems to be inspired by Tumblr (?).

In addition Google has made your Google Profile the number one SERP for searching your name, so there seem clear tied in benefits of SEO with content disseminated here.

G+ has sharing in circles whereas Facebook has only Everyone, Friends, Friends of Friends ,Customize.  This makes G+ interface slightly better in tweaking the spread of content to targeted audience esp by Bloggers.

  • For sharing Photos– G+ goes in for a whole new separate tab (one out of four) whereas Facebook treats photo sharing less prominently.
  • Google has lesser white space between photos, (The Facebook way used to be just snap photo by iPhone and send by email to auto-post), and the privacy in sharing photos is much better in G+ as the dropdowns in Facebook are not as granular and neither as nifty in icon design.
  •  
  • Also I like the hover and photo grows bigger feature and the auto import from Picassa (but I would like to auto-import into G+ from Flickr just as I can do in Facebook)
  • Google Plus also has a much more detailed version for sharing videos than photos as compared to Facebook  -upload Photo options  versus
  • G+ has much more focus on auto-sharing from mobiles

 

 

 

2) Online Professional Networking  and 3) Online Personal Socializing Organizing Contacts in Google Plus and seperate privacy controls make it easier to customize sharing without getting too complex. You can make as many circles and drag and drop very easily instead of manually clicking a dropdown box. Effectively speaking Facebook has just 4 kinds of circles and it does not distinguish between various types of friends which is great from philosophical point of view but not so goodn enforcing separateness between professional and personal networks. Note Facebook privacy settings are overwhelming despite the groovy data viz

4) Spam Control / Malware /Phishing/Porn Protection 

Spam Control in Facebook versus in Google Plus- note the different options in Google Plus (including the ability to NOT reshare). I am not aware of more enhanced protection than the ones available for Gmail already. Spam is what really killed off a lot many social networks and the ability to control or reduce spam will be a critical design choice

5) Time Cost versus Networking Benefit

Linkedin has the lowest cost in time spent and networking done. If G+ adds a resume section for jobs, recruiters, and adds in Zynga games, the benefit from G+ will expand. As of now G+ is a minimal social network with minimalism as design ethos.

(Zynga would do well to partner with G+)

 

Introducing Radoop

Thats Right- This is Radoop and it is

Hadoop meats Rapid Miner=Radoop

 

 

http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf

http://prezi.com/dxx7m50le5hr/radoop-presentation-at-rcomm-2011/

 

Radoop presentation at RCOMM 2011 on Prezi

What about Hive and Mahout?

Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop, i.e. it uses the distributed file system of Hadoop and the efficient access technologies. Hive was initially developed by Facebook and is now used and developed by many other companies for their distributed data warehouse.

Mahout is a machine learning library already offering many scalable machine learning libraries implemented as well on top of Hadoop and its map & reduce paradigm. Hence, Mahout is one of the first distributed data analytics framework making use of the power of Hadoop.

You will see below that both frameworks will be tightly integrated with RapidMiner.

What can RapidMiner bring into the game?

Hadoop is great for large scale analytics, but it lacks an easy-to-use graphical interface. RapidMiner is an excellent tool for data analytics, but unless the analyst is not performing some nasty tricks, the data size is limited by the memory available. So we have the algorithms, the support for analytical process design, the user interface, and of course the community with a demand for large-scale analytics.

RapidMiner + Hadoop = Radoop

Radoop combines the strengths of RapidMiner and Hadoop. The result is a RapidMiner extension for editing and running ETL, data analytics and machine learning processes over Hadoop. The developers have closely integrated the highly optimized data analytics capabilities of Hive and Mahout, and the user-friendly interface of RapidMiner to form a powerful and easy-to-use data analytics solution for Hadoop.

Source-https://rapid-i.com/component/option,com_myblog/show,Big-data-analytics-made-easy-Radoop.html/Itemid,172/

 

and http://blog.radoop.eu/

Interesting? Sign up here- http://radoop.eu/z1sxe

Cloud Computing with #Rstats and CloudNumbers.com

Some of you know that I am due to finish “R for Business Analytics” for Springer by Dec 2011 and “R for Cloud Computing” by Dec 2012. Accordingly while I am busy crunching out ” R for Business Analytics” which is a corporate business analyst\s view on using #Rstats, I am gathering material for the cloud computing book too.

I have been waiting for someone like CloudNumbers.com for some time now, and I like their initial pricing structure.  As scale picks up, this should only get better. As a business Intelligence analyst, I wonder if they can help set up a dedicated or private cloud too for someone who wants a data mart solution to be done.The best thing I like about this- they have a referral scheme so if someone you know wants to test it out, well it gives you some freebies too in the form of an invitation code.

 

 

 

 

  • I read the instructions

  • I reviewed the pricing plan and click back to the dashboard 

 

  • I clicked on start new session

  • I click next
  • Choosing R from a very convenient interface design
  • Choosing all the applications I may need
  • This is a really nice feature in enabling to choose packages for R
  • Finally I can choose ONLY 7.5 gb RAM in the free version

I name the session in case I want to start multiple sessions

After waiting 15 minutes, my instance is up and I type R to get the following

Note I can also see the desktop- which is a great improvement over EC2 interface for R Cloud computing on Linux. Also it shuts down on its own if I leave it running (as of now after 180 minutes) so i click shut down session

 

You can click this link to try and get your own cloud in the sky for free -10 hours are free for you

https://my.cloudnumbers.com/register/65E97A