OT: How would you fix the economy

The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?”

I think this guy nailed it!

Dear Mr. President:

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America ‘s economy.

Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.

You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.

Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered – Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy Continue reading “OT: How would you fix the economy”

Decisionstats| Miscellaneous Part 5

If you think that adding a seperate category for poetry and humourous articles is too much, well it seems the most popular articles came from this section., The poemon Michael Jackson continues to be all time 1, in terms of number of page views (I had hoped one of the interviews would be number 1), and the breakthrough article on Not using R is even quoted in Australia in a university course on data mining. lol!

1) http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/06/26/tribute-to-michael-jackson/

Poem on MJ. Tribute. May he R.I.P.

2) Top Ten Reasons R language is bad for you. Satire and tongue firmly Continue reading “Decisionstats| Miscellaneous Part 5”

Decisionstats on Social Media| Part 4

Here are some of the social media articles that became popular This one was tough as I have written on many twitter applications, Linkedin Apps etc only to find a new application after a few months. But change is the nature of the game especially if you want to stay online.

1) Spreading content on social media
http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/05/25/spreading-content-using-social-media/

My philosophy is stuff that you do not need to keep secret, should be shared with as wide as audience as possible. For this reason, I prefer that I meet the reading audience half way, on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter rather than play the same old come to my website if you want to read it game. If you love your Continue reading “Decisionstats on Social Media| Part 4”

Best of Decision Stats- Modeling and Text Mining Part3

Here are some of the top articles by way of views, in an  area I love– of modeling and text mining.

1) Karl Rexer – Rexer Analytics

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/06/09/interview-karl-rexer-rexer-analytics/

Karl produces one of the most respected surveys that captures emerging trends in data mining and technology. Karl was also one of the most enthusiastic people I have interviewed- and I am thankful for his help in getting me some more interviews.

2) Gregory Piatesky Shapiro

One of the earliest and easily the best Knowledge Discoverer of all times, Gregory produces http://www.kdnuggets.com and the newsletter is easily the must newsletter to be on. Gregory was doing data mining , while the Google boys were still debating whether to drop out of Stanford or not.
Continue reading “Best of Decision Stats- Modeling and Text Mining Part3”

Making Government Transparent Using R

Here is a terrific interview on O’Reilley Radar at http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html

It actually talks of using open source statistics like R to make Government more transparent- like analyzing waste.

Some interesting extracts- like I didnt know S is being maintained by SAS.( I thought Tibco had S Plus)

Citation-http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html

James Turner: So switching gears, the other thing you’re talking about and a big part of your professional life is the R language. Now I will confess that like Erlang, R is something that is on my radar and I see and I look at it and I say, “Okay. When am I ever going to use it?” I mean Erlang is used some places, but R I guess has a very nichey type of audience, doesn’t it?

Danese Cooper: You know, interestingly enough that’s changing. I think that’s been true. R has been in production or in development, let’s say, for the last 20 years. It is patterned after the S language, which was developed in the ’60s at Bell Labs around the same time that UNIX and C were being developed. And it was S for statistics, right? R is sort of a, “If we had known then what we know now” version of S. They’ve been working on it for 20 years in an academic setting. So it has been very slow to grow. But just in the last couple of years, it’s really gotten to a place where it’s ready for enterprise use. And just this year, the people that maintain S, a company called SAS, S-a-s, in South America, south of this country, have announced that they’re going to have to support R, like it’s that widely used now, particularly in schools.

Danese Cooper works for Revolution COmputing that creates a wonderful and professional version of R called Revolution R – some of the work on parallelization and enabling 64 bit Windows R is great. Danese is also a solid open source credentials person having worked with the Board and also with Apache. O Reilley Media’s work in open source conferences is terrific as well.

That apart, the great stuff is in the rest of this must read interview which is available athttp://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/making-government-transparent.html

The Top Decisionstats Articles -Part 2 Business Intelligence and Data Quality

I am self convinced novice at business intelligence. I understand the broad concepts, understand reporting tools, and definitely forecasting tools. But the whole systems view baffles me enough. Fortunately I have been learning from some of the best writers in this field. Here in order of circulation are the top Business Intelligence articles.

Business Intelligence


1) Jill Dyche

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/06/30/interview-jill-dyche-baseline-consulting/

Jill is a fabulously wise and experienced person with a great writing style. Here answers were some of the most educative I have seen in Bi writing.

2) Peter Thomas

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/07/02/peter-james-thomas-bi/

The best of British BI is epitomized by Peter Thomas, and he is truly a European giant when it comes to the field. His worst weakness is a tendency to disappear when Test cricket is around- but that is

eminently understable. I can relate to the cricket as well.

3) Karen Lopez

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/07/28/interview-karen-lopez/

Karen gives an excellent insight on creating mock ups or data models before actual implementation. She has worked on it for three decades and her wisdom is clearly visible here.

Data Quality

Data quality is such an overlooked and easy to fix issue, that I belive any BI vendor that builds the best, most robust data quality architechture will gain the maximum Pareto like benefits out of results. Curiously competing BI vendors will often compete on price, grahics appeal, etc etc, but the easy Garbage In Garbage Out rule is something they should consider. The Data Quality Interviews gave me an important tutorial in these aspects of data management.

1) Jim Harris

http://www.decisionstats.com/tag/jim-harris/

Jim is an one man army when it comes to evangelizing data quality and his OCDQ blog is widely read and cited.

2) Steve Sarsfield

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/08/13/interview-steve-sarsfield-author-the-data-governance-imperative/

His excellent book is the one must read item that people in cost cutting corporations should buy especially if they are considering to go down the Davenport competing on analytics model.

( To be continued- Part 3 Modeling and Text Mining

Part 4 Social Media

Part 5 Humour and Poetry )

The Top DecisionStats Articles -Part 1 Analytics

I was just looking at my web analytics numbers and we seem to have crossed some milestones.

The site has now gotten more than 50,000 views since being launched in Dec 2007.

Thank you everyone for your help in this. More importantly the quality of comments has been fabulous. Since I am out of ideas for the rest of the week- here is a best of posts collection.
Here are some of the most favorite articles as measured by number of page views. I have personal fovurites as well, but these are just the ranks as per page views and how they measure up.

Top 5 Interviews

1) Interviews with SAS Institute leaders- I have found generally great professionalism from SAS Institute people. This is surprising because comin from an open source background, SAS is often looked as a big brother. I find that more of a perception and less of a reality as the company continues to innovate.

a) with John Sall, founder SAS Institute- This is really the biggest interview I did in terms of the person involved. To my surprise ( I wasnt expecting John to say yes) the interview was really frank, and it came very fast. The answers seem to be written by John himself.

Quote- Quantitative fields can be fairly resistant to recession- John Sall.

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/07/28/interview-john-sall-jmp/

b) Interview with Anne Milley, Director, Product Marketing , SAS Institute- This is a favourite because it came very soon after the NYTimes article on R etc. One of my personal opinions is that the difference between great and good leaders is often the fact that great leaders are humble enough  to learn and then build on their strengths. It ran in two parts- and I was really appreciative of the in-depth answers that Anne wrote.

Quotes-

Analytics continues to be our middle name.

Customers vote with the cheque book.

Continue reading “The Top DecisionStats Articles -Part 1 Analytics”