Month: October 2013

Game Review : Google Ingress

  1. Android Only Game
  2. Uses GIS or Google Maps API/ for geo-caching game
  3. Healthy for you- makes players walk from portals to another. You have to be within 40 m of a portal to recharge,capture of attack it.  Makes you really walk a lot.
  4. Addictive and Immersive with impressive follow up media story.
  5. Can be used as base template for other games , and social experimentation
  6. Uses Points, Badges, Leaderboard of gamification
  7. Encourages direct face to face social interaction
  8. Has in game chat facility
  9. Zero in game currency . So no coiners or cheaters here

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_meuh4lKkH61rax78x.png

Top Ten Ways to Kill The NSA

  1. Everybody write email or ip voice call in Navajo
  2. Pass messages in .gifs on Google Plus  wikipedia. But use visual cryptography
  3. Create social network analysis of NSA guys , and their families. Include Senate Staffers on the appropriate committees. Hunt the hunters to guard the guardians. Start with the Snowden ex-girlfriend
  4. Everyone start using Tor. Overwhelm the NSA’s budget. Kill the Budget  and you kill the NSA
  5. Teach terrorists how to haiku and send messages in Navajo poetry. Use Poem Code
  6. Click on ALL google ads. or DO NOT Click on ALL Facebook ads by all people revealed to have been cooperating with the NSA. Hit the corporations the only place they feel anything- the pocket books and the balance sheets. Use Anti Ad software to dry up these data gathering monsters!
  7. Revive projects like Waste Again. Embed them in Browser Plugins like Mafia Fire.
  8. Maybe An Open Translate Project for  a language like Anti- Double Speak (from 1984). Truthspeak. To automatically encode using a Browser Plugin. Like Google Translate automatically translates Hebrew into English.
  9. Everyone understand the concept of random noise and introduce it in your blogs , your communication. Use snowden for the seed keywords.
  10. Big Deficit huh. Govt shutdown huh. Call your Congressman now to decrease NSA budget by atleast 17.33 % . Use this (usa.gov) unzip

From the First Rule 

and

Zeroth Law-

0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Google Crisis Map and India’s Cyclone -a great application of GIS /Spatial Data

Google Crisis Map is a good example of how technology can be used for the good of making people live, even though it originally was derived from other applications.

http://google.org/crisismap/2013-phailin

Screenshot from 2013-10-12 18:22:55

Mandatory Screenshot

–Screenshot from 2013-10-12 17:23:01Boingo Mobile’s Hotspot locator is a great example of a way of making GIS make money without being evil.

 

 

Google releases new R package for Big Data #rstats

From the Google Open Source Blog–

HistogramTools is a new R package I have released that uses RProtoBuf to read in a compact protocol buffer representation of binned data and includes a number of helpful functions for manipulating, plotting, and measuring the statistical information loss due to the binning. In addition to protocol buffers, it also supports importing aggregate performance data directly from DTrace output.

AND
We rely on several open source tools to make our work easier. The most common tool we use for statistical analysis of the performance, availability, and resource needs of our internal systems is the R programming language.

Nice job!

Screenshot from 2013-10-10 21:28:17
With  Revolution Analytics being supported and funded by Microsoft and Intel and RStudio being founded by an ex-Microsoftie, I think Google does need to step up their R game though. They take and take from the open source community yet barely fund the minimum back to projects like FOAS or R-Core (http://www.r-project.org/foundation/memberlist.html)
Come on Google – share more  stuff with open source R than you do with the NSA!!!
1)  https://decisionstats.com/2009/05/29/interview-david-smith-revolution-computing/

Ajay- What are the major alliances that REvolution has in the industry.

David- We have a number of industry partners. Microsoft and Intel, in particular, provide financial and technical support allowing us to really strengthen and optimize R on Windows, a platform that has been somewhat underserved by the open-source community.

2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Allaire
After the sale of his company, Allaire became frustrated at the difficulty of keeping track of research he was doing using Google. To address this problem, he co-founded Onfolio in 2004 with Adam Berrey, former Allaire co-founder and VP of Marketing at Macromedia.
On March 8, 2006, Onfolio was acquired by Microsoft where many of the features of the original product are being incorporated into the Windows Live Toolbar.On August 13, 2006, Microsoft released the public beta of a new desktop blogging client called Windows Live Writer that was created by Allaire's team at Microsoft.

Things I wish I could Classify — by better and easier Machine Learning

  1. Web Analytics- Which customers are likely to convert and didnt. Which customers are not likely to stay and do. More analytics added to Google Analytics like Web Analytics
  2. Web Analytics Time Series models- web analytics is TS data. More forecasts. Automated Error detection and correction in forecasts
  3. Data Cleaning and Quality- Something like Google Refine (or open refine https://github.com/OpenRefine ) added before every Machine Learning Classification system I see. or software I see.
  4. More API integration- for data from the web, to classification models to the web
  5. Financial Data – Better interfaces and easier analytics. Every Financial Data is basically adding to a classification – Buy Sell Hold.
  6. Sentimental Analysis for the People- Easier to integrate Blog Data (though GA api) and Social Media Data (twitter , google plus, facebook APIs) to give user analytics of his own reputation across multiple social networks.
  7. Dating Website Recommendation Systems

These are a few of my favorite things…that I wish I could classify

And some military spying alogirthms that I wish they de classify because everyone has them- so they can show better ads, or build better internet connected night vision Glasses

classified

Plyrmr- bringing #rstats Plyr to Map Reduce for Hadoop

Just saw this package, it is in testing early release now- Love the thought of Hadley’s Split Apply Combine Package being used for Map Reduce which is conceptually similar in many many ways. I do think though Revolution’s work in R and D needs to be applauded- given by the number of packages they have created- or funded  AND donated( seperate blog post on this?) while RStudio seems more content on building basic blocks for infrastructure , without an adequate Big Data solution for R Studio itself.

Of course usage stats on RevoScaleR , Revolution’s Big Data package are not as transparent or in line with Free as Beer and Free as Speech philosophy that RStudio breathes in.

https://github.com/RevolutionAnalytics/RHadoop/wiki/plyrmr

This R package enables the R user to perform common data manipulation operations, as found in popular packages such as plyr and reshape2, on very large data sets stored on Hadoop. Like rmr, it relies on Hadoop mapreduce to perform its tasks, but it provides a familiar plyr-like interface while hiding many of the mapreduce details. plyrmr provides:

  • Hadoop-capable versions of well known data.frame functions: transform, subset, mutate, summarize, melt, dcast and more from packages base, plyr and reshape2.
  • Simple but powerful ways of applying any function operating on data.frames to Hadoop data sets: do and magic.wand.
  • Simple but powerful ways of aggregating data: group, group.f, gather and ungroup.
  • All of the above can be combined by normal functional composition: delayed evaluation helps mitigating any performance penalty of doing so by minimizing the number of Hadoop jobs launched to evaluate an expression.
  • New data frame functions which are also Hadoop-capable that are more suitable for development than some of the above: select and where.

Google Drive connects Apps in a few clicks includes Markdown,Notepad Apps

I really liked the work done here- this is both great design and great code.

You can simply connect a whole lot of Google Drive Apps in just a click.

Some examples you can now do in Google Drive-

Fusion Tables, Edit Pictures, Design T Shirts, Write Notepad .

Check out the screen shots and see it your self,

1) Go to https://drive.google.com/

2) Click Create – Red Button-Top Left

3) Connect More Apps

Screenshot from 2013-10-04 16:16:32

4) Select Your App

Screenshot from 2013-10-04 16:17:08

 

5) Create  a new App type (like  a new T shirt design or Text Document)

 

Examples here are Notepad, and a Markdown Editor

Screenshot from 2013-10-04 16:25:35

and

Screenshot from 2013-10-04 16:25:30. That’s right

I counted some 150+ apps. Especially liked AutoCad, Markdown, Docusign, Zoho, Notepad  and even the Music Player that can be connected. Also some new templates that I am yet to check – esp for PPTs.

Does give some permissions to be clicked  though! Now if they could only connect Google Plus to Google Drive so we can work collobratively that would be a ++

Screenshot from 2013-10-04 16:28:32