Category: Analytics

The Great Connector ,Stan Relihan

Note from Ajay-

Stan Relihan is the 40th most connected person list on LinkedIn out of 25 million people.His podcast: http://connections.thepodcastnetwork.com gets more than 12,000 downloads a month and he has leveraged social networking to maximum advantage for building great assets as well as increasing his own business value. Here he shares some insights  on using social networking networks.

1) What’s the latest trend you see in community sites over the next year and next three to five years.

I see more and more emphasis on the need to focus on Business outcomes -not just idle chit-chat or frivolous questions. Social Networking sites will also need to truly embrace the Web 2.0 ethos – where what the users want is ultimately more important that what the site owner / operators think it should be.  This means more responsiveness to requests for new features and more transparency & intercommunication from management with their users. In the end, just like with Search Engines & Operating Systems, many will cease to exist – and only a few dominant players will continue.

Continue reading “The Great Connector ,Stan Relihan”

Analytics through the Browser : Strata

image

Here is an interesting concept of a data browser called Strata by a company called Kirix ( http://www.kirix.com/ ). It promises to connect your online , offfline data and help you perform analytics on it. It has a 30 days trial version . I am currently evaluating and will keep you posted.

This is one more example of analytics moving online ,from packaged software .

That Dude , Gandhi

At the end of 1947, as India’s Congress leaders sought to put the ghosts of colonialism and the torments of Partition with Pakistan behind them, a debate rose on economic policy. The first Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru ,argued for and was successful in implementing a state led economic policy which focused on industrialization.

The alternatives were Free market capitalism , which was not in favor since it was less than 15 years to the ravages of the Depression and Gandhi’s philosophy of village led growth, including small co-operatives . India officially discarded the Nehruvian philosophy of socialism in the 1990’s with a step wise approach to free market reforms. Yet in today’s suddenly environmental conscious world of high oil prices,and debris of free market capitalism , it seems Gandhi’s economic policies of environmentally sustainable de centralized growth are as relevant as his political philosophy of non violence (an eye for an eye leads to a world of the blind).

If a 100 million Indian and Chinese cars bloomed tomorrow ,as some of the world’s industrialists would want, the smoke would cover the rest of the world.

That Dude, Gandhi was right. But he always was, wasn’t he.

Put your WordPress in the Sky

Heres something I am trying right now with WordPress and Clouds.(Provider –www.rightscale.com)

I will then try making R accessible from a web interface.

Segmenting Models : When and Why

Creating segmented models in SAS is quite easy, with a by group processing . It is less easy in other softwares , but that is understandable given that

the first generic rule of segmentation is

1) each segment has statistically similar characteristics .

2) different segments have statistically different characteristics .

This means that just using Proc freq to
check response rate versus
independent variable is not a good way
to check the level of difference.
Proc univariate with plot option and
a by group processing
is actually a better way to test out
because it is a combination of means ,
median analysis 
(measures of central value) but also
box plot ,normal distributions and standard deviations
(measures of dispersion).

Proc freq with cross tab is incredibly powerful to decide whether to create a model in the first place. But fine tuning of decisions on segments is better done with proc univariate. The SAS equivalent for clustering of course remains Proc Fastclus and family which will be dealt in a separate post.

(Note :lovely image that explains the above from Dr Ariel Shamir’s home page (he is a research expert on Visual Succinct Representation of Information   ————-from Israel, land of the brave and intelligent).

A Picture is truly worth a thousand words (or posts !).)

Legal Copyrights- Some history

Here is an interesting blog post on why software giants like google ,microsoft will be rich foroever. And ironically Microsoft has given away the maximum number of free programs, dlls, extensions,patches. When I mean free I mean really free, they did not sell your identity to advertisers .

”

Back in 1998, representatives of the Walt Disney Company came to Washington looking for help. Disney’s copyright on Mickey Mouse, who made his screen debut in the 1928 cartoon short “Steamboat Willie,” was due to expire in 2003, and Disney’s rights to Pluto, Goofy and Donald Duck were to expire a few years later.

Rather than allow Mickey and friends to enter the public domain, Disney and its friends – a group of Hollywood studios, music labels, and PACs representing content owners – told Congress that they wanted an extension bill passed.

Prompted perhaps by the Disney group’s lavish donations of campaign cash – more than $6.3 million in 1997-98, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics – Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

The CTEA extended the term of protection by 20 years for works copyrighted after January 1, 1923. Works copyrighted by individuals since 1978 got “life plus 70” rather than the existing “life plus 50”. Works made by or for corporations (referred to as “works made for hire”) got 95 years. Works copyrighted before 1978 were shielded for 95 years, regardless of how they were produced.“