Category: Analytics

Contest : 2 free passes to Predictive Analytics World

I got some good news from the fine people at Predictive Analytics World.

 you qualify for 2 free passes to the PAW NYC event October 16-20, 2011.  I will be sending you a code to use for registration to receive these passes within the next couple of days.

If you cannot attend our PAW NYC event, please feel free to use these two free passes as a promotional tool within your blog.

Now I have been partnering with PAW for a long time, so it is nice to have free passes. I am grateful for their support of this blog. Therein lies my dilemma. I am in India, and a return ticket from NYC to India costs 1100$. Unless something drastic happens , I dont see myself with that kind of travel money.

Ergo.

I am offering two free passes to Predictive Analytics World . http://predictiveanalyticsworld.com/

All you need to do is – ahem- cough-

  1. like the Facebook Page of Decisionstats.  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Decisionstats/217450141605435 OR
  2.  Add me to a Google circle https://plus.google.com/116302364907696741272/posts OR
  3. Follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/0_h_r_1

AND


  1. Read one of my poems at my poetry blog at http://poemsforkush.wordpress.com/ and leave a comment with your email id please . It’s a promotion for my next book “Poets and Hackers” due for release in 2 weeks.
The 2 free passes are for any 2 days of the PAW NYC event.  This free pass may not be used for Text Analytics World conference being held the same week.  Please have your Contest winners use the Free Code:  XXXXXXXX.  This code will be good for two uses in registering. 
Thats ‘it. Two free passes , and go for it if you are around NYC in October. NY is a lovely place and I am wearing my red FDNY T shirt as I am typing this.

What do you get?

One of these –http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/newyork/register.php (details awaited!) to

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/newyork/2011/

Predictive Analytics World Header Image

 

 

CrowdANALYTIX

Here is a contest based community called CrowdANALYTIX.com which is quite nice and offers you free Revolution R for the statistical and analytical contests based there (a bit like Kaggle.com http://www.kaggle.com/). There are only 3 contests right now and that too low volume but I guess that number should increase. Also they seem to have a consulting arm.

Latest Analytics website- welcome! http://www.crowdanalytix.com/contests

Careers in #Rstats

I saw a posting for career with Revolution Analytics. Now I am probably on the wrong side of a H1 visa and the C,R skill-o-meter, but these look great for any aspiring R coder. Includes one free lance opp as well.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/aboutus/careers.php

We have many opportunities opening up—among them:

Job Title Location
Pre-sales Consultants / Technical Sales Palo Alto, CA
Parallel Computing Developer Palo Alto, CA or Seattle, WA
R Programmer (Freelance) Palo Alto, CA
Software Training Course Developer (Freelance) Palo Alto, CA
Build / Release Engineer Seattle, WA
QA Engineer Seattle, WA
Technical Writer Seattle, WA

 

Please send your resume to careers@revolutionanalytics.com

2) Indeed.com

Searching for “R” jobs and not just , R jobs, gives better results in search engines and job sites. It is still a tough keyword to search but it is getting better.

You can use this RSS feed http://www.indeed.co.in/rss?q=%22R%22++analytics+jobs or send by email option to get alerts

3) http://icrunchdata.com/

 

I Crunch Data has a good number of Analytics Jobs, and again using the keyword as R within quotes of “R” you can see lots of jobs here

http://www.icrunchdata.com/ViewJob.aspx?id=334914&keys=%22R%22

There used to be a Google Group on R jobs, but is too low volume compared to the actual number of R jobs out there.

Note the big demand is for analytics, and knowing more than one platform helps you in the job search than knowing just a single language.

 

 

 

So how useful is Data.gov anyway

As per official statistics, not many people download data from it .

Why dont they just donate the data and save taxpayers some money

http://www.data.gov/metric

Summary

Agency/Sub-Agency/Organization Raw Datasets
(high-value)		 Tools
(high-value)		 Geodata Total Latest Entry # of times downloaded
within the last week*
TOTAL
 3,486 (2,163) 1,071 (393) 386,429 390,986 08/24/2011 0

* These numbers represent the number of times a user has clicked on the “XML” or “CSV” (for example) links in the Raw Data Catalogs to download datasets and user downloads of tools in the Tool Catalog available in these categories.

But apparently lots of people like it still

http://www.data.gov/metric/visitorstats/monthlyredirecttrend

More list of public data repositories-

Google http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory

DataMob http://datamob.org/datasets

Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/

DataMarket http://datamarket.com/

Infochimps http://www.infochimps.com/

From SEC, the Edgar  http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html

More lists of lists

http://www.kdnuggets.com/2011/02/free-public-datasets.html

But who  gets more downloads last week than Data.gov !

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Using #Rstats for online data access

There are multiple packages in R to read data straight from online datasets.
These are as follows- Continue reading “Using #Rstats for online data access”

Patent Wars in Mobile Software

My latest article published in India Telecom Brief on the patent wars-

 

Patent Wars in Mobile Software

Why are Apple, Microsoft and Google spending billions to acquire patents? Recently Google, maker of the largest selling mobile operating system, Android decided to acquire Motorola Mobility for 12.5 billion dollars, giving it some 17000 patents with another 7500 patents pending.
Meanwhile some months ago, a consortium led by Microsoft, Apple and Research in Motion (maker of Blackberry) bought 6000 patents by Nortel Networks for 4.5 billion dollars.
These are only the defensive moves in these patent wars. In offensive moves, Microsoft has sued HTC, Barnes and Nobles, Motorola for patent infringement over them using Android operating system claiming some aspects are patented by it. Though Google does not earn any money directly from selling Android, ironically Microsoft is earning money from Android vendors including up to 5 dollars per handset from HTC.

Read the full article at http://www.indiatelecombrief.com/from-the-editors-desk/51839-patent-wars-in-mobile-software

 

Related–

A brilliant infographic  from George Kokkinidis at Design Language http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1473307539 sums all the absurdity up- where almost everyone is suing everyone. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words.

 

 

 

 

Using Two Operating Systems for RATTLE, #Rstats Data Mining GUI

Using a virtual partition is slightly better than using a dual boot system. That is because you can keep the specialized operating system (usually Linux) within the main operating system (usually Windows), browse and alternate between the two operating system just using a simple command, and can utilize the advantages of both operating system.

Also you can create project specific discs for enhanced security.

In my (limited ) Mac experience, the comparisons of each operating system are-

1) Mac-  Both robust and aesthetically designed OS, the higher price and hardware-lockin for Mac remains a disadvantage. Also many stats and analytical software just wont work on the Mac

2) Windows- It is cheaper than Mac and easier to use than Linux. Also has the most compatibility with applications (usually when not crashing)

3) Linux- The lightest and most customized software in the OS class, free to use, and has many lite versions for newbies. Not compatible with mainstream corporate IT infrastructure as of 2011.

I personally use VMWare Player for creating the virtual disk (as much more convenient than the wubi.exe method)  from http://www.vmware.com/support/product-support/player/  (and downloadable from http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_downloads/vmware_player/3_0)

That enables me to use Ubuntu on the alternative OS- keeping my Windows 7 for some Windows specific applications . For software like Rattle, the R data mining GUI , it helps to use two operating systems, in view of difficulties in GTK+.

Installing Rattle on Windows 7 is a major pain thanks to backward compatibility issues and version issues of GTK, but it installs on Ubuntu like a breeze- and it is very very convenient to switch between the two operating systems

Download Rattle from http://rattle.togaware.com/ and test it on the dual OS arrangement to see yourself.