Month: July 2013

Summer Reading :NBER

Some of the things I like to read to stay sharp as I grow old.

NBER

For example this paper says how foreign born PHDs do location choices.

Graduates with stronger academic ability, measured by whether they received university support for a research or a teaching assistantship, had a 6.8 percent higher stay rate. Assistantships were the primary means of support for 52 percent of the sample; 11 percent of the sample was supported by a university fellowship or scholarship, which was associated with a 2.7 percent higher stay rate. Students supported by foreign funding, 4 percent of the sample, had an intent to stay that was 26.7 points lower.

As one would expect, ties to the United States are also important. Foreign-born U.S. citizens have a 19.5 percent higher stay rate; green card holders have a 15.3 percent higher stay rate; and U.S. college graduates have a 3.6 percent higher stay rate.

FOAS becomes hottest thing in open source data science #rstats

Within a short time FOAS has lined up an interesting list of projects for Data Science statups and projects for open access and open source.  FOAS accreditation provides the ultimate halmark of open in word and spirit for data science projects.

See it yourself at http://www.foastat.org/projects.html

Screenshot from 2013-07-30 19:42:26

How Geeks Become Hackers in China

The Path-

 

How?

f1f2

Why?

t1t2

Source-

routine activity theory5 (RAT), social learning theory1 (SLT), and situational action theory27 (SAT).

While RAT helps explain how hacking begins, SAT explains why talented young people take the road toward computer hacking, even when presented with many alternatives, and SLT calls for attention to environments that sustain hacking behavior and subculture. However, none of these theories explains the evolution of certain critical elements in the hacker process: motivation, knowledge and skill, opportunity, moral values and judgment, and the environment.

Based on our case evidence and the literature, we developed a framework for understanding and managing hackers and hacking behavior from an evolutionary perspective. The framework’s most significant contribution is its explication of the enablers and constraints influencing hackers, providing guidance for managing the hacking epidemic by schools, universities, and throughout society. This framework calls for zero tolerance for hacking in schools and early intervention (such as through courses in computer ethics in middle and high schools, supervised competitions in defending computer security, and organizing computer security services for organizations) to strengthen the moral values of students against hacking and channel their interest in computers in a positive direction.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/4/162513-why-computer-talents-become-computer-hackers/fulltext

DataMind – A New Effort to Teach R online for free #rstats

Bringing CodeAcademy gamification(?) to the world of Online Training especially for R- DataMind is an interesting concept.

Will the rest of R community donate teaching courses for free? Watch this space

http://www.datamind.org/#/courses/1

It is created by these excellent gentlemen

Screenshot from 2013-07-18 19:22:36

 

A short science fiction story by The Writer

My attempts at science fiction. Aww shucks!

R for Business Analytics

The Shortest Science Fiction story ever written was not based on science and was not fictional. It was categorized as science-fiction by The Writer, to save himself an explanation or give him – what people call- plausible deniability in case the story became too popular or was taken too seriously by the rest of the humans. Have you ever wondered why sometimes they appear to be gremlins in your computer or on the Internet.

Why your computer sometimes works fast or slow.

. Why some people believe in conspiracy theories and some people believe that Jesus came back to Life after he was born to a Virgin. Some people believe that their government is totally bad . Some believe that government of other countries is totally bad.

People like to approximate their guesses to extremes while taking judgement calls.

Just as intelligence is normally distributed in an average population, so…

View original post 174 more words

New Delhi R User Group and other thoughts

  1. The New Delhi R User group co-founded by me in 2011 now has 111 members , 5 organizers (including the now Canada exiled me) and two sponsors including Revolution Analytics (meetup fees) and Mimir Technologies (location ,office and refreshments) with almost 7-8 successful meetups.
  2. Despite the high fees of Meetup.com (converted in Indian rupees) , New Delhi continues to stick to it, thanks to Revolution’s generous support.
  3. UseRs continue to be of wide diversity including expatriate Americans, Doctors, Researchers, Analysts, IT people
  4. I am hoping more people in India create local R groups in other cities
  5. I hope someone comes up with a non-spam, non expensive option to Meetup.com which is not really an open platform (not really FOAS)
  6. The quality of technology and speed at which New Delhi users continue to pick and spread R amazes me.
  7. Fun Fact- India has largest number of analytics professionals certified in SAS language a fact that has been noticed by SAS clone WPS which is the option of choice for third party training institutes undercutting the SAS Institute itself on pricing while teaching SAS language.
  8. Funny Facts- I have kickstarted R language programs for two institutes in India- but am still searching for a better and cheaper alternative to Coursera (hands off) training, and Online (paid and support) training. Is there any FOAS training in R which offers tutoring as well? I have tried SageBourse- again with mixed results. It worked better for SAS language queries. I am loath to open my own training business as it takes time away from my writing.