Even more variety in Cloud Computing Instances from AWS

If you ever complain that R is slow because it stores it in RAM , well here is a whole lot of RAM for you.

 

From-

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/12/amazon-ec2-new-i2-instance-type-available-now.html

The Specs
Here are the instance sizes and the associated specs:

Instance Name vCPU Count RAM
 Instance Storage (SSD) Price/Hour
i2.xlarge 4 30.5 GiB 1 x 800 GB $0.85
i2.2xlarge 8 61 GiB 2 x 800 GB $1.71
i2.4xlarge 16 122 GiB 4 x 800 GB $3.41
i2.8xlarge 32 244 GiB 8 x 800 GB $6.82

 

This leaves these guys way behind

https://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine/

High Memory

Machines for tasks that require more memory relative to virtual cores

Instance type Virtual Cores Memory Price (US$)/Hour
(US hosted)		 Price (US$)/Hour
(Europe hosted)
n1-highmem-2 2 13GB $0.244 $0.275
n1-highmem-4 4 26GB $0.488 $0.549
n1-highmem-8 8 52GB $0.975 $1.098
n1-highmem-16 16 104GB $1.951 $2.196

Top 7 Business Strategy Models

UPDATED POST- Some Models I use for Business Strategy- to analyze the huge reams of qualitative and uncertain data that business generates. I have added a bonus the Business canvas Model (number 2)

  1. Porters 5 forces Model-To analyze industries
  2. Business Canvas
  3. BCG Matrix- To analyze Product Portfolios
  4. Porters Diamond Model- To analyze locations
  5. McKinsey 7 S Model-To analyze teams
  6. Gernier Theory- To analyze growth of organization
  7. Herzberg Hygiene Theory- To analyze soft aspects of individuals
  8. Marketing Mix Model- To analyze marketing mix.

Continue reading “Top 7 Business Strategy Models”

More to CyberWar than just defacing websites

We are trying to hypothesize realistic scenarios based on existing or near by technologies between the two extreme and popular notions of cyber warfare- that promoted by Die Hard 4 and those who think it is only about bringing down databases.

A Cyberwar is like any war – it will have stages

Reconnaissance and Spying- Not just port sniffing or spear phishing, it will identify the primary and secondary targets in the first and second wave of attacks. It will include both civilian and military strategic targets as well as tactical ones.

For example- communication systems of military infantry and other ground forces are comparatively hardened , but completely disabling the military hospital infrastructure of a country is likely to have more psychological and impact effects. This could range from industrial machines to critical hardware all linked up nicely

The communication system of emergency services is more easily disrupted digitally and can cause more damage than military communication. A simple attack on phone systems for emergency calls (i.e 9-1-1 or 3-1-1 for West or 100 , 101, 102 for India)

This could also include databases on individuals to be targeted including their civilian family members. If you hack the Senator’s daughter Facebook account, trust me it is easier and just as much distracting than hacking the Senator’s website. A list of possible databases to be hacked have been written about here and here

Add oil producing grids, dams, electricity grids and water supplies for civilians to this list and you can see how even messing with the digital diagnostics of the infrastructure can impact the efficiency of enemy response.

So the next time you wear that Pirate Bay T Shirt and participate in the masked rally, know that you are not just protesting war you are unwillingly and unwittingly participating in one.

Readings Lots of CSV Files in #Rstats

Assign Names to Objects Based on Names of Files in a Directory using R for a large number of input csv files

getwd()

setwd(“C:/Users/KUs/Desktop/delhi crimes”)

a=dir()

for(i in 1:length(a)){

assign(paste(a[i]),(read.csv(a[i],header=T,sep=“,”)))

}

ls()

Geeks for Privacy: Play Color Cipher and Visual Cryptography

Maybe the guys in Anonymous or Wikileaks can now use visual cryptography while using Snapchat to fool the NSA or CIA

Personally I think a browser with inbuilt backdoors to Tor Relays and data transfer by Bit Torrrents could be worthy a project too.

Quit the bullshit, Google- you are as evil as The Russian Communist Empire

I was just reading up on my weekly to-read list and came across this interesting method. It is called Play Color Cipher-

Each Character ( Capital, Small letters, Numbers (0-9), Symbols on the keyboard ) in the plain text is substituted with a color block from the available 18 Decillions of colors in the world [11][12][13] and at the receiving end the cipher text block (in color) is decrypted in to plain text block. It overcomes the problems like “Meet in the middle attack, Birthday attack and Brute force attacks [1]”.
It also reduces the size of the plain text when it is encrypted in to cipher text by 4 times, with out any loss of content. Cipher text occupies very less buffer space; hence transmitting through channel is very fast. With this the transportation cost through channel comes down.

ColorCipherBlocks

Reference-

http://www.ijcaonline.org/journal/number28/pxc387832.pdf

Visual Cryptography is indeed an interesting topic-

Visual cryptography, an emerging cryptography technology, uses the characteristics of human vision to decrypt encrypted
images. It needs neither cryptography knowledge nor complex computation. For security concerns, it also ensures that hackers
cannot perceive any clues about a secret image from individual cover images. Since Naor and Shamir proposed the basic
model of visual cryptography, researchers have published many related studies.

Visual_crypto_animation_demo

Visual cryptography (VC) schemes hide the secret image into two or more images which are called
shares. The secret image can be recovered simply by stacking the shares together without any complex
computation involved. The shares are very safe because separately they reveal nothing about the secret image.

Visual Cryptography provides one of the secure ways to transfer images on the Internet. The advantage
of visual cryptography is that it exploits human eyes to decrypt secret images .

ESPECIALLY SEE |THIS AND THIS

http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/~dstinson/VCS-flag.html

and

http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/~dstinson/VCS-pi.html

Even more fun—– visual cryptography using a series of bar codes – leaving the man in middle guessing how many sub images are there and which if at all is the real message

 

vispixel

References-

Color Visual Cryptography Scheme Using Meaningful Shares

http://csis.bits-pilani.ac.in/faculty/murali/netsec-10/seminar/refs/muralikrishna4.pdf

Visual cryptography for color images

http://csis.bits-pilani.ac.in/faculty/murali/netsec-10/seminar/refs/muralikrishna3.pdf

Other Resources

  1. http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/visualcrypto.htm
  2. Visual Crypto – One-time Image Create two secure images from one by Robert Hansen
  3. Visual Crypto Java Applet at the University of Regensburg
  4. Visual Cryptography Kit Software to create image layers
  5. On-line Visual Crypto Applet by Leemon Baird
  6. Extended Visual Cryptography (pdf) by Mizuho Nakajima and Yasushi Yamaguchi
  7. Visual Cryptography Paper by Moni Noar and Adi Shamir
  8. Visual Crypto Talk (pdf) by Frederik Vercauteren ESAT Leuven
  9. http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/~dstinson/visual.html
  10. t the University of Salerno web page on visual cryptogrpahy.
  11. Visual Crypto Page by Doug Stinson
  12. Simple implementation of the visual cryptography scheme based on Moni Naor and Adi Shamir, Visual Cryptography, EUROCRYPT 1994, pp1–12. This technique allows visual information like pictures to be encrypted so that decryption can be done visually.The code outputs two files. Try printing them on two separate transparencies and putting them one on top of the other to see the hidden message. http://algorito.com/algorithm/visual-cryptography

Visual Cryptography 

—

Ajay- I think a combination of sharing and color ciphers would prove more helpful to secure Internet Communication than existing algorithms. It also levels the playing field from computationally rich players to creative coders.

#Rstats continues its march in data mining

From the famous KARL REXER ANNUAL DATA MINING SURVEY

—

HIGHLIGHTS from the 2013 Data Miner Survey:
  • SURVEY & PARTICIPANTS:  68-item survey conducted online in 2013.  Participants: 1,259 analytic professionals from 75 countries.  This is the 6th Data Miner Survey.
  • FOCUS ON CRM:  In the past few years, there has been an increase among data miners in the already substantial area of customer-focused analytics.  Respondents are looking for a better understanding of customers and seeking to improve the customer experience.  This can be seen in their goals, analyses, big data endeavors, and in the focus of their text mining.
  • BIG DATA:  Many in the field are talking about the phenomena of Big Data.  There are clearly some areas in which the volume and sources of data have grown.  However it is unclear how much Big Data has impacted the typical data miner.  While data miners believe that the size of their datasets have increased over the past year, data from previous surveys indicate that the size of datasets have been fairly consistent over time.
  • THE ASCENDANCE OF R:  The proportion of data miners using R is rapidly growing, and since 2010, R has been the most-used data mining tool.  While R is frequently used along with other tools, an increasing number of data miners also select R as their primary tool.
  • CHALLENGES IN THE USE OF ANALYTICS:  Data miners continue to report challenges at each level of the analytic process.  Companies often are not using analytics to their fullest and have continuing issues in the areas of deployment and performance measurement.
  • ENGAGEMENT & JOB SATISFACTION:  The Data Miners in our survey are highly engaged with the analytic community: consuming and producing content, entering competitions and searching for education and growth within their jobs.  All of these activities lead to high job satisfaction, which has been increasing over time.
  • ANALYTIC SOFTWARE:  Data miners are a diverse group who are looking for different things from their data mining tools.  Ease-of-use and cost are two distinguishing dimensions.  Software packages vary in their strengths and features.  STATISTICA, KNIME, SAS JMP and IBM SPSS Modeler all receive high satisfaction ratings.
  • OTHER FINDINGS include the labels analytic professionals use to describe themselves (Data Scientist is #1), the algorithms being used (regression, decision trees, and cluster analysis continue to be the triad of core algorithms), and computing environments (cloud computing is increasing).

Teaching R in India #rstats $323 for 6 week course

I submitted a poster to User2013 that was accepted on Teaching R in India- but I could not attend since I was in Canada visiting family at that time

These were some of the experiences I wanted to talk about- but I think I will elaborate on them later

Anyways- I have been able to design a SECOND R course in Bangalore for Edureka-
What happened to the FIRST course I designed in India. Enough said!

But Edureka were different and they work mostly with open source like teaching Hadoop, Android, Cassandra and R- and they are truly world class in their ways (except video editing and websites and social media blogs )
Edureka has worked much more honestly with both students and instructors. I was also able to convince them of the value of limited open access by giving some slides and videos free .
here is the slides for the first class.

The landing page is at
By pricing a 6 week, 24 hour course using Go2Meeting at just $323 ———-
edr
What we are trying to do is disrupt the market for training in two ways-
1) Give better customization and instructor attention than the MOOCs
2) Avoid  obscenely expensive workshops priced above 900$ per 8 hours etc…. from corporates.
The youtube video has got almost 6338 views and the model works best for developing countries like India for spreading R (though we do have an occasional overseas student ). We are currently updating the quality of the video even more as we collect automated response at end of each 2 hour class.
 All slides  and all videos are made free to download forever to the student.
 Got 323$  to learn R in six weeks? Sign up here  http://www.edureka.in/r-for-analytics