Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

Announcing Jaspersoft 4.5

Message from  Jaspersoft

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Announcing Jaspersoft 4.5:
Powerful Analytics for All Your Data

This new release provides a single, easy-to-use environment designed with the non-technical user in mind — delivering insight to data stored in relational, OLAP, and Big Data environments.New in Jaspersoft 4.5

Broad and Deep Big Data Connectivity
Intuitive drag and drop web UI for performing reporting and analysis against Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra, and many more.

Improved Ad Hoc Reporting and Analysis
Non-technical users can perform their own investigation.

Supercharged Analytic Performance
Enhanced push-down query processing and In-Memory Analysis engine improves response times for aggregation and summary queries.

Join us for an in-depth review and demo, showcasing the new features for self-service BI across any data source.

For more information on Jaspersoft 4.5, or any Jaspersoft solution, contact at sales@jaspersoft.com, or            415-348-2380      .

 

Download Jaspersoft 4.5 Today.

. Download your free 30 day evaluation trial now.

download now button

 

 

Software as a Religion ( SaaR)

The decline of organized religion and debate about such matters in the Western Hemisphere has been co-related to the increase in debates and arguments (again mostly) in the Western Hemisphere on software. Be it the PC vs Mac, the Microsofties vs Open Sourcers, the not so evil Google versus fans of Facebook, considerable activity is now being done by human beings in terms of social interaction on the merit’s and demerit’s of each software bundle. Perhaps for the first time in human history these interactions are being captured digitally on medium (that is hopefully longer lasting than papyrus).

Will this lead to newer branches of psychologists, sociologists (Goodwin’s law is too simplistic but an effort)

Even software as a religion is plausible, all they need is another college drop-put whizkid  to find a way to make it effective.

Religion as a software has of course been around for several millennium.

Also see http://goo.gl/smISa

Analyzing AdSense

I ran a recent experiment on my website- subjugating it to CTR ads (and not just the banner ads). Of course there is hardly a choice I have except for Google Adsense-and let me know if you know any reliable alternatives.

This is what the analytics says

So basically 43 ads out of 147,305 Ads were clicked.

This makes a Google Adsense ad/algorithm/you almost 99.971% of the time to ignore it, ( I am assuming some of the 147,362 ads which were not clicked were a bit annoying)

So I apologize to yall -Adsense aint making no sense, as they would say in old Tennessee

Still $12 per month when directed to charity is good enough…I donated some to Wikipedia.

$19.77 AdSense Revenue
$0.42 AdSense Revenue / 1000 Visits
43 AdSense Ads Clicked
0.00 AdSense Ads Clicked / Visit
0.09% AdSense CTR
$0.42 AdSense eCPM
147,305 AdSense Ads Viewed
2.92 AdSense Unit Impressions / Visit
46,585 AdSense Page Impressions
0.99 AdSense Page Impressions / Visit

Google Webinar on Web Analytics

Google webinar on web analytics-

recommended for anyone with anything to do with the WWW

From

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/11/webinar-reaching-your-goals-with.html

 

Webinar: Reaching Your Goals with Analytics

 

 

Is your website performing as well as it could be? Do you want to get more out of your digital marketing campaigns, including AdWords and other digital media? Do you feel like you have gaps in your current Google Analytics setup?

We’ve heard from many of our users who want to go deeper into their Analytics — with so much data, it can be hard to know where to look first. If you’d like to move beyond standard “pageview” metrics and visitor statistics, then please join us next Thursday:

Webinar: Reaching Your Goals with Analytics
Date: Thursday, December 1
Time: 11am PST / 2pm EST
Sign up here!

During the webinar, we’ll cover:

  • Key questions to ask for richer insights from your data
  • How to define “success” (for websites, visitors, or campaigns)
  • How to set up and use Goals
  • How to set up and use Ecommerce (for websites with a shopping cart)
  • How to link AdWords to your Google Analytics account

Whatever your online business model — shopping, lead-generation, or pure content — these tools will deliver actionable insights into your buying cycle.

This webinar will be led by Joe Larkin, a technical specialist on the Google Analytics team, and it’s designed for intermediate users of Google Analytics. If you’re comfortable with the basics, but you’d like to do more with your data, then we hope you’ll join us next week!

Data Documentation Initiative

Here is a nice initiative in standardizing data documentation for social sciences (which can be quite a relief to legions of analysts)

http://www.ddialliance.org/what

 

 

 

 

Benefits of DDI

The DDI facilitates:

  • Interoperability. Codebooks marked up using the DDI specification can be exchanged and transported seamlessly, and applications can be written to work with these homogeneous documents.
  • Richer content. The DDI was designed to encourage the use of a comprehensive set of elements to describe social science datasets as completely and as thoroughly as possible, thereby providing the potential data analyst with broader knowledge about a given collection.
  • Single document – multiple purposes. A DDI codebook contains all of the information necessary to produce several different types of output, including, for example, a traditional social science codebook, a bibliographic record, or SAS/SPSS/Stata data definition statements. Thus, the document may be repurposed for different needs and applications. Changes made to the core document will be passed along to any output generated.
  • On-line subsetting and analysis. Because the DDI markup extends down to the variable level and provides a standard uniform structure and content for variables, DDI documents are easily imported into on-line analysis systems, rendering datasets more readily usable for a wider audience.
  • Precision in searching. Since each of the elements in a DDI-compliant codebook is tagged in a specific way, field-specific searches across documents and studies are enabled. For example, a library of DDI codebooks could be searched to identify datasets covering protest demonstrations during the 1960s in specific states or countries.
Also see-
  1. http://www.ddialliance.org/Specification/DDI-Codebook/2.1/DTD/Documentation/DDI2-1-tree.html
  2. http://www.ddialliance.org/Specification/DDI-Lifecycle/3.1/

 

Free Machine Learning at Stanford

One of the cornerstones of the technology revolution, Stanford now offers some courses for free via distance learning. One of the more exciting courses is of course- machine learning

 

 

http://jan2012.ml-class.org/

About The Course

This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, datamining, and statistical pattern recognition. Topics include: (i) Supervised learning (parametric/non-parametric algorithms, support vector machines, kernels, neural networks). (ii) Unsupervised learning (clustering, dimensionality reduction, recommender systems, deep learning). (iii) Best practices in machine learning (bias/variance theory; innovation process in machine learning and AI). The course will also draw from numerous case studies and applications, so that you’ll also learn how to apply learning algorithms to building smart robots (perception, control), text understanding (web search, anti-spam), computer vision, medical informatics, audio, database mining, and other areas.

The Instructor

Professor Andrew Ng is Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, the main AI research organization at Stanford, with 20 professors and about 150 students/post docs. At Stanford, he teaches Machine Learning, which with a typical enrollment of 350 Stanford students, is among the most popular classes on campus. His research is primarily on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics, and most universities doing robotics research now do so using a software platform (ROS) from his group.

 

  1. When does the class start?The class will start in January 2012 and will last approximately ten weeks.
  2. What is the format of the class?The class will consist of lecture videos, which are broken into small chunks, usually between eight and twelve minutes each. Some of these may contain integrated quiz questions. There will also be standalone quizzes that are not part of video lectures, and programming assignments.
  3. Will the text of the lectures be available?We hope to transcribe the lectures into text to make them more accessible for those not fluent in English. Stay tuned.
  4. Do I need to watch the lectures live?No. You can watch the lectures at your leisure.
  5. Can online students ask questions and/or contact the professor?Yes, but not directly There is a Q&A forum in which students rank questions and answers, so that the most important questions and the best answers bubble to the top. Teaching staff will monitor these forums, so that important questions not answered by other students can be addressed.
  6. Will other Stanford resources be available to online students?No.
  7. How much programming background is needed for the course?The course includes programming assignments and some programming background will be helpful.
  8. Do I need to buy a textbook for the course?No.
  9. How much does it cost to take the course?Nothing: it’s free!
  10. Will I get university credit for taking this course?No.Interested in learning machine learning-

    Well here is the website to enroll http://jan2012.ml-class.org/

Should you buy Zynga or Wait for the FB IPO

I am going to make a case for whether to buy or not buy  Zynga, and waiting to buy Facebook instead. Of course if Mark Pincus offers you a deep discount, and Mark Zuckenberg totally goes over the top with his P/E multiple, all bets would be re-valuated.

In the interest of your time, and my personal happiness, I am going to use a fairly standard way to measure attractiveness of both these companies- notably the Porter’s Five Forces Model. I will also review the recent experiences of Groupon and LinkedIn valuation to underscore what subtle differences in culture, and reputation of founders can affect the eventual value creation or destruction in an IPO.

(to be continued)