Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

10 Ways We will miss Steve Jobs

I am not an Apple fanboy.In fact I dont use a Mac (because Linux works well for me at much cheaper rates)

I am going to miss Steve Jobs like I miss …… still.

1) The Original Pirate – I liked Steve Jobs ever since I saw Pirates of Silicon Valley, I wanted to be like the Jobs who created jobs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_of_Silicon_Valley

Artists steal. Yeah baby!

2) Music -Itunes Improbably the man who came up with the idea of music @ 99 cents helped more artists earn money in the era of Napster. Music piracy is not dead, but at 99 cents you CAN afford the songs

3) Aesthetics- and Design- as competitive barriers. It was all about the interface. People care about interfaces. Shoody software wont sell.

4) Portable Music- yes I once wrote a poem on my first Ipod. http://www.decisionstats.com/ode-to-an-ipod/ No , it doesnot rank as the top ten poems on Ipod in SERP

Walkman ‘s evolution was the Ipod – and it was everywhere.

5) Big Phones can be cool too- I loved my IPhone and so did everyone. But thats because making cool phones before that was all about making the tiniest thinnest phone. Using Videochat on Iphone and webs surfing were way much cooler than anything before or since.

6) Apps for Money for Geeks. Yes the Apps marketplace was more enriching to the geek universe than all open source put together.

7) Turtleneck Steve- You know when Steve Jobs was about to make a presentation because one week before and one week later the whole tech media behaved like either a fanboy or we are too cool to be an Apple fanboy but we will report it still. The man who wrote no code sold more technology than everyone else using just a turtleneck and presentations.

8) Pixar toons- Yes Pixar toons made sure cartoons were pieces of art and not just funny stuff anymore. This one makes me choke up

9) Kicking Microsoft butt- Who else but Steve can borrow money from MS and then beat it in every product it wanted to.

10) Not being evil. Steve Jobs made more money for more geeks than anyone. and he made it look good! The original DONT BE EVIL guy who never needed to say it aloud

Take a bow Steve Jobs (or touch the first Apple product that comes to your hand after reading this!)

The article was first written on Aug 25,2011 on Steve Jobs resignation news.It has been updated to note his departing from this planet as of yesterday.

 

 

 

 

Oracle adds R to Big Data Appliance -Use #Rstats

From the press release, Oracle gets on R and me too- NoSQL

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/512001

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is a new engineered system that includes an open source distribution of Apache™ Hadoop™, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, and an open source distribution of R.

From

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/03/oracle_big_data_appliance/

the Big Data Appliance also includes the R programming language, a popular open source statistical-analysis tool. This R engine will integrate with 11g R2, so presumably if you want to do statistical analysis on unstructured data stored in and chewed by Hadoop, you will have to move it to Oracle after the chewing has subsided.

This approach to R-Hadoop integration is different from that announced last week between Revolution Analytics, the so-called Red Hat for stats that is extending and commercializing the R language and its engine, and Cloudera, which sells a commercial Hadoop setup called CDH3 and which was one of the early companies to offer support for Hadoop. Both Revolution Analytics and Cloudera now have Oracle as their competitor, which was no doubt no surprise to either.

In any event, the way they do it, the R engine is put on each node in the Hadoop cluster, and those R engines just see the Hadoop data as a native format that they can do analysis on individually. As statisticians do analyses on data sets, the summary data from all the nodes in the Hadoop cluster is sent back to their R workstations; they have no idea that they are using MapReduce on unstructured data.

Oracle did not supply configuration and pricing information for the Big Data Appliance, and also did not say when it would be for sale or shipping to customers

From

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/feature-oracle-nosql-database-505146.html

A Horizontally Scaled, Key-Value Database for the Enterprise
Oracle NoSQL Database is a commercial grade, general-purpose NoSQL database using a key/value paradigm. It allows you to manage massive quantities of data, cope with changing data formats, and submit simple queries. Complex queries are supported using Hadoop or Oracle Database operating upon Oracle NoSQL Database data.

Oracle NoSQL Database delivers scalable throughput with bounded latency, easy administration, and a simple programming model. It scales horizontally to hundreds of nodes with high availability and transparent load balancing. Customers might choose Oracle NoSQL Database to support Web applications, acquire sensor data, scale authentication services, or support online serves and social media.

and

from

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/09/30/oracle-adopting-open-source-r-to-connect-legacy-systems/

Oracle says it will integrate R with its Oracle Database. Other signs from Oracle show the deeper interest in using the statistical framework for integration with Hadoop to potentially speed statistical analysis. This has particular value with analyzing vast amounts of unstructured data, which has overwhelmed organizations, especially over the past year.

and

from

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/features-oracle-r-enterprise-498732.html

Oracle R Enterprise

Integrates the Open-Source Statistical Environment R with Oracle Database 11g
Oracle R Enterprise allows analysts and statisticians to run existing R applications and use the R client directly against data stored in Oracle Database 11g—vastly increasing scalability, performance and security. The combination of Oracle Database 11g and R delivers an enterprise-ready, deeply integrated environment for advanced analytics. Users can also use analytical sandboxes, where they can analyze data and develop R scripts for deployment while results stay managed inside Oracle Database.

Building a Regression Model in R – Use #Rstats

One of the most commonly used uses of Statistical Software is building models, and that too logistic regression models for propensity in marketing of goods and services.

 

If building a model is what you do-here is a brief easy essay on  how to build a model in R.

1) Packages to be used-

For smaller datasets

use these

  1. CAR Package http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/car/index.html
  2. GVLMA Package http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/gvlma/index.html
  3. ROCR Package http://rocr.bioinf.mpi-sb.mpg.de/
  4. Relaimpo Package
  5. DAAG package
  6. MASS package
  7. Bootstrap package
  8. Leaps package

Also see

http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/rms/index.html or RMS package

rms works with almost any regression model, but it was especially written to work with binary or ordinal logistic regression, Cox regression, accelerated failure time models, ordinary linear models, the Buckley-James model, generalized least squares for serially or spatially correlated observations, generalized linear models, and quantile regression.

For bigger datasets also see Biglm http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/biglm/index.html and RevoScaleR packages.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/products/enterprise-big-data.php

2) Syntax

  1. outp=lm(y~x1+x2+xn,data=dataset) Model Eq
  2. summary(outp) Model Summary
  3. par(mfrow=c(2,2)) + plot(outp) Model Graphs
  4. vif(outp) MultiCollinearity
  5. gvlma(outp) Heteroscedasticity using GVLMA package
  6. outlierTest (outp) for Outliers
  7. predicted(outp) Scoring dataset with scores
  8. anova(outp)
  9. > predict(lm.result,data.frame(conc = newconc), level = 0.9, interval = “confidence”)

 

For a Reference Card -Cheat Sheet see

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Ricci-refcard-regression.pdf

3) Also read-

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Econometrics.html

http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Robust.html

 

Poets and Hackers

My latest book , a collaboration with many fine artists is now up. Its called Poets and Hackers

Enjoy!

Poets & Hackers v5http://www.scribd.com/embeds/66419481/content?start_page=1&view_mode=list&access_key=key-23x8ifmmz5noevn8m4vn//

Rcpp Workshop in San Francisco Oct 8th

 Rcpp Workshop in San Francisco  Oct 8th 

Following the successful one-day master class on Rcpp preceding this year’s R/Finance conference, a full-day master class on Rcpp and related topics which will be held on Saturday, October 8, in San Francisco.

Join Dirk Eddelbuettel for six hours of detailed and hands-on instructions and discussions aroundRcpp, inline,  RInside, RcppArmadillo, RcppGSL, RcppEigen and other packages—in an intimate small-group setting.

The full-day format allows combining an introductory morning session with a more advanced afternoon session while leaving room for sufficient breaks. We plan on having about six hours of instructions, a one-hour lunch break and two half-hour coffee breaks (and lunch and refreshments will be provided).

Morning session: “A Hands-on Introduction to R and C++”

The morning session will provide a practical introduction to the Rcpp package (and other related packages).  The focus will be on simple and straightforward applications of Rcpp in order to extend R and/or to significantly accelerate the execution of simple functions.

The tutorial will cover the inline package which permits embedding of self-contained C, C++ or FORTRAN code in R scripts. We will also discuss  RInside, to easily embed the R engine code in C++ applications, as well as standard Rcpp extension packages such as RcppArmadillo and RcppEigen for linear algebra (via highly expressive templated C++ libraries) and RcppGSL.

Afternoon session: “Advanced R and C++ Topics”

The afternoon tutorial will provide a hands-on introduction to more advanced Rcpp features. It will cover topics such as writing packages that use Rcpp, how Rcpp modules and the new R ReferenceClasses interact, and how Rcpp sugar lets us write C++ code that is often as expressive as R code. Another possible topic, time permitting, may be writing glue code to extend Rcpp to other C++ projects.

We also expect to leave some time to discuss problems brought by the class participants.

October 8, 2011 – San Franciso

AMA Executive Conference Center
@ the Marriott Hotel
55 4th Street, 2nd Level
San Francisco, CA 94103
Tel.             415-442-6770

Register Now!

Instructor Bio

Dirk Eddelbuettel Dirk E has been contributing packages to CRAN for nearly a decade. Among these are RQuantLib, digest, littler, random, RPostgreSQL, as well the Rcpp family of packages comprising Rcpp, RInside, RcppClassic, RcppExamples, RcppDE, RcppArmadillo and RcppEigen. He maintains the CRAN Task Views for Finance as well as High-Performance Computing, and is a founding co-organiser of the annual R / Finance conferences in Chicago. He has Ph.D. in Financial Econometrics from EHESS (Paris), and works in Chicago as a Quantitative Strategist.

Jaspersoft releasing new version – 4.2

Jaspersoft is planning to launch its version 4.2 to the world.

http://www.jaspersoft.com/event/upcoming-webinar-introducing-jaspersoft-42?elq=c0e7a97601f84a8399b1abc5cc84bbe5

Upcoming Webinar: Introducing Jaspersoft 4.2

Webinar

Date: September 29, 2011
Time: 10:00 AM PT/1:00 PM ET
Duration: 60 minutes
Language: English

Whether your building business intelligence (BI) solutions for your organization or for your customers, one thing is likely: your users want access to information anytime, anywhere. The challenge is getting the right information, to the right person, on the right device, without breaking your budget.

You can see precisely what we mean at the Jaspersoft 4.2 launch webinar on Thursday, September 29th.

Join us and see how Jaspersoft 4.2 can deliver superior choice for organizations looking to deliver information to end users, wherever they are.  Jaspersoft is focused on providing modern, usable, affordable BI for everyone.
●      Discover the new product capabilities that will improve BI access for your users
●      See Jaspersoft 4.2 live demos
●      Join Japersoft experts and fellow technology professionals in a real-time, interactive discussion.

Register to reserve your seat, today!