Download all your tweets

Now that the Government of the United States of America has the legal power to request your information without a warrant  (The Chinese love this!)

Anyways- you can also download your own twitter data. Liberate your data.

Have you looked at your own data? Go there at https://twitter.com/settings/account and review the changes.

t  t2

 

 

SAS Thought Leader declares war on data scientists on Valentine Eve

 

It all started because of the Google Guy, Hal Varian

Feb 25, 2009 – I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians Hal Varian, The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2009.

Then these guys ( Thomas H. Davenport and D.J. Patil)  made us sexy -that too in the Harvard Business Review.

Jill Dyche* is a thought leader. That’s what her job says. that too at SAS  which took over her start-up Baseline Consulting. (* In addition to this, she writes forewords for struggling poets here )

She says here

If the importance of data scientists is growing with the advent of big data, the sooner we understand what exactly it is they do, the better.

That is fair enough. But to add grievous injury to data scientists, She adds

(For fun I wrote a blog post on being a data scientist’s girlfriend.)

Actually the blog post was-Why I Wouldn’t Have Sex with a Data Scientist

But there’s no use. The data scientist is preoccupied. Preoccupied with finding, accessing, analyzing, validating, cleansing, integrating, provisioning, modeling, verifying, and explaining data to his management, colleagues, end-users, and friends.

And this is the year of the statistician ??

This is bare knuckles tactics. The art of Vaseline Insulting? Perish the thought. Geeks and Data Scientists  rule.

Dont we? and we are perfect? right.

We statisticians (and data scientists and big dataists and data miners and business analysts and …)

are bringing sexy back!

Justin+Timberlake+JT+PNG+1(and we need a hug too.)

The dichotomy in being a writer on open source with a non-open access publisher

  • The publisher adds credibility to your work

versus

  • A self fulfilling prophecy where researchers want to publish in exclusive journals and closed -access books, for the sole reason that others did so as well before them and thereby donate their knowledge and money to the publisher

aaronswartz-v2

The dichotomy in being a writer on open source with a non-open access publisher?

  • I write on open source R , 
  • and I have been published (one book )
  • and am on contract to write two more ( R for Cloud Computing) and (R for Web and Social Media Analytics)
  • My publisher does have open access journals.
  • But the book is at $50. Most of India lives at less than 2$ per day. Thats 800 million people in my country alone.

But the publisher is the most reputed in this field. So what are my choices? How do I get more people to have choices to read books.

Take open knowledge , curate it, and turn it behind a $50 paywall. I am sorry, Aaron. People like me are the reason ……

 

Easier Tagging for E Commerce by Google Tag Manager

Ok I guess I am a bit late to this, but I really like the concept of Google Tag Manager https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/ and the fact they have a WordPress plugin ready http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-tag-manager/. What does it do? It integrates all your tags on websites on one dashboard. So much easier Web Analytics for marketing people who dont want to learn Reg Ex , JS etc.

gtm1

IT-friendly – Google Tag Manager has lots features to set your mind
at ease—like user permissions, automated error checking, the Debug
Console, and asynchronous technology. So everything runs efficiently,
with no unpleasant surprises.
• Quick and easy – Users add or change tags whenever they want, to
keep sites running smoothly and quickly. Tags are managed with an
easy-to-use web interface, so there’s no need to write or rewrite site
code following implementation.
• Verified tags & templates – Google Tag Manager makes it easy to
verify that new tags are working properly, so users don’t need to call on
IT to check the tags. Built-in tag templates and automatic error checking
also prevent tags with improper formatting from even being deployed
on your site.
• Swift loading – Google Tag Manager replaces all your measurement
and marketing tags with a single, asynchronously loading tag—so your
tags can fire faster without getting in each other’s way.

 

Springer Book on Seamless R and C++ Integration with Rcpp and Workshop on Rcpp #rstats

The talented Dirk Eddelbuettel has just announced that his new book is coming out this year. I would recommend this book for anyone trying to use R for analytics, Big Data or customized use cases especially if they have a need to speed up the computation times. Rcpp can speed up R by a huge magnitude, and thats because C++ comes closer to the metal.

If you are a business analyst who knows a bit of R, but always were intimidated by C++ programming, well this is the right how to do book for you.

Continue reading “Springer Book on Seamless R and C++ Integration with Rcpp and Workshop on Rcpp #rstats”