Assumptions on Guns

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While sitting in Delhi, India- I sometimes notice that there is one big new worthy gun related incident in the United States every six months (latest incident Gabrielle giffords incident) and the mythical NRA (which seems just as powerful as equally mythical Jewish American or Cuban American lobby ) . As someone who once trained to fire guns (.22 and SLR -rifles actually), comes from a gun friendly culture (namely Punjabi-North Indian), my dad carried a gun sometimes as a police officer during his 30 plus years of service, I dont really like guns (except when they are in a movie). My 3 yr old son likes guns a lot (for some peculiar genetic reason even though we are careful not to show him any violent TV or movie at all).

So to settle the whole guns are good- guns are bad thing I turned to the one resource -Internet

Here are some findings-

1) A lot of hard statistical data on guns is biased by the perspective of the writer- it reminds me of the old saying Lies, True lies and Statistics.

2) There is not a lot of hard data in terms of a universal research which can be quoted- unlike say lung cancer is caused by cigarettes- no broad research which can be definitive in this regards.

3) American , European and Asian attitudes on guns actually seem a function of historical availability , historic crime rates and cultural propensity for guns.

Switzerland and United States are two extreme outlier examples on gun causing violence causal statistics.

4) Lot of old and outdated data quoted selectively.

It seems you can fudge data about guns in the following ways-

1) Use relative per capita numbers vis a vis aggregate numbers

2) Compare and contrast gun numbers with crime numbers selectively

3) Remove drill down of type of firearm- like hand guns, rifles, automatic, semi automatic

Maybe I am being simplistic-but I found it easier to list credible data sources on guns than to summarize all assumptions on guns. Are guns good or bad- i dont know -it depends? Any research you can quote is welcome.

Data Sources on Guns and Firearms and Crime-

1) http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

Ownership

* As of 2009, the United States has a population of 307 million people.[5]

* Based on production data from firearm manufacturers,[6] there are roughly 300 million firearms owned by civilians in the United States as of 2010. Of these, about 100 million are handguns.[7]

* Based upon surveys, the following are estimates of private firearm ownership in the U.S. as of 2010:

Households With a Gun Adults Owning a Gun Adults Owning a Handgun
Percentage 40-45% 30-34% 17-19%
Number 47-53 million 70-80 million 40-45 million

[8]

* A 2005 nationwide Gallup poll of 1,012 adults found the following levels of firearm ownership:

Category Percentage Owning 

a Firearm

Households 42%
Individuals 30%
Male 47%
Female 13%
White 33%
Nonwhite 18%
Republican 41%
Independent 27%
Democrat 23%

[9]

* In the same poll, gun owners stated they own firearms for the following reasons:

Protection Against Crime 67%
Target Shooting 66%
Hunting 41%

2) NationMaster.com

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-crime-murders-with-firearms

VIEW DATA: Totals Per capita
Definition Source Printable version
Bar Graph Pie Chart Map

Showing latest available data.

Rank Countries Amount
# 1 South Africa: 31,918
# 2 Colombia: 21,898
# 3 Thailand: 20,032
# 4 United States: 9,369
# 5 Philippines: 7,708
# 6 Mexico: 2,606
# 7 Slovakia: 2,356
# 8 El Salvador: 1,441
# 9 Zimbabwe: 598
# 10 Peru: 442
# 11 Germany: 269
# 12 Czech Republic: 181
# 13 Ukraine: 173
# 14 Canada: 144
# 15 Albania: 135
# 16 Costa Rica: 131
# 17 Azerbaijan: 120
# 18 Poland: 111
# 19 Uruguay: 109
# 20 Spain: 97
# 21 Portugal: 90
# 22 Croatia: 76
# 23 Switzerland: 68
# 24 Bulgaria: 63
# 25 Australia: 59
# 26 Sweden: 58
# 27 Bolivia: 52
# 28 Japan: 47
# 29 Slovenia: 39
= 30 Hungary: 38
= 30 Belarus: 38
# 32 Latvia: 28
# 33 Burma: 27
# 34 Macedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic of: 26
# 35 Austria: 25
# 36 Estonia: 21
# 37 Moldova: 20
# 38 Lithuania: 16
= 39 United Kingdom: 14
= 39 Denmark: 14
# 41 Ireland: 12
# 42 New Zealand: 10
# 43 Chile: 9
# 44 Cyprus: 4
# 45 Morocco: 1
= 46 Iceland: 0
= 46 Luxembourg: 0
= 46 Oman: 0
Total: 100,693
Weighted average: 2,097.8

DEFINITION: Total recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm. Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence.

SOURCE: The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2002) (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Centre for International Crime Prevention)

3)

Bureau of Justice Statistics

see

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Homicide/State/RunHomTrendsInOneVar.cfm

or the brand new website (till 2009) on which I CANNOT get gun crime but can get total

http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/

Estimated  murder rate *
Year United States-Total

1960 5.1
1961 4.8
1962 4.6
1963 4.6
1964 4.9
1965 5.1
1966 5.6
1967 6.2
1968 6.9
1969 7.3
1970 7.9
1971 8.6
1972 9.0
1973 9.4
1974 9.8
1975 9.6
1976 8.7
1977 8.8
1978 9.0
1979 9.8
1980 10.2
1981 9.8
1982 9.1
1983 8.3
1984 7.9
1985 8.0
1986 8.6
1987 8.3
1988 8.5
1989 8.7
1990 9.4
1991 9.8
1992 9.3
1993 9.5
1994 9.0
1995 8.2
1996 7.4
1997 6.8
1998 6.3
1999 5.7
2000 5.5
2001 5.6
2002 5.6
2003 5.7
2004 5.5
2005 5.6
2006 5.7
2007 5.6
2008 5.4
2009 5.0
Notes: National or state offense totals are based on data from all reporting agencies and estimates for unreported areas.
* Rates are the number of reported offenses per 100,000 population
  • United States-Total –
    • The 168 murder and nonnegligent homicides that occurred as a result of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 are included in the national estimate.
    • The 2,823 murder and nonnegligent homicides that occurred as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, are not included in the national estimates.

     

  • Sources: 


    FBI, Uniform Crime Reports as prepared by the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data


    4) united nation statistics of 2002  were too old in my opinion.
    wikipedia seems too broad based to qualify as a research article but is easily accessible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
    to actually buy a gun or see guns available for purchase in United States see
    http://www.usautoweapons.com/

    The Year 2010

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    My annual traffic to this blog was almost 99,000 . Add in additional views on networking sites plus the 400 plus RSS readers- so I can say traffic was 1,20,000 for 2010. Nice. Thanks for reading and hope it was worth your time. (this is a long post and will take almost 440 secs to read but the summary is just given)

    My intent is either to inform you, give something useful or atleast something interesting.

    see below-

    Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun
    2010 6,311 4,701 4,922 5,463 6,493 4,271
    Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Total
    5,041 5,403 17,913 16,430 11,723 10,096 98,767

     

     

    Sandro Saita from http://www.dataminingblog.com/ just named me for an award on his blog (but my surname is ohRi , Sandro left me without an R- What would I be without R :)) ).

    Aw! I am touched. Google for “Data Mining Blog” and Sandro is the best that it is in data mining writing.

    DMR People Award 2010
    There are a lot of active people in the field of data mining. You can discuss with them on forums. You can read their blogs. You can also meet them in events such as PAW or KDD. Among the people I follow on a regular basis, I have elected:

    Ajay Ori

    He has been very active in 2010, especially on his blog . Good work Ajay and continue sharing your experience with us!”

    What did I write in 2010- stuff.

    What did you read on this blog- well thats the top posts list.

    2009-12-31 to Today

    Title Views
    Home page More stats 21,150
    Top 10 Graphical User Interfaces in Statistical Software More stats 6,237
    Wealth = function (numeracy, memory recall) More stats 2,014
    Matlab-Mathematica-R and GPU Computing More stats 1,946
    The Top Statistical Softwares (GUI) More stats 1,405
    About DecisionStats More stats 1,352
    Using Facebook Analytics (Updated) More stats 1,313
    Test drive a Chrome notebook. More stats 1,170
    Top ten RRReasons R is bad for you ? More stats 1,157
    Libre Office More stats 1,151
    Interview Hadley Wickham R Project Data Visualization Guru More stats 1,007
    Using Red R- R with a Visual Interface More stats 854
    SAS Institute files first lawsuit against WPS- Episode 1 More stats 790
    Interview Professor John Fox Creator R Commander More stats 764
    R Package Creating More stats 754
    Windows Azure vs Amazon EC2 (and Google Storage) More stats 726
    Norman Nie: R GUI and More More stats 716
    Startups for Geeks More stats 682
    Google Maps – Jet Ski across Pacific Ocean More stats 670
    Not so AWkward after all: R GUI RKWard More stats 579
    Red R 1.8- Pretty GUI More stats 570
    Parallel Programming using R in Windows More stats 569
    R is an epic fail or is it just overhyped More stats 559
    Enterprise Linux rises rapidly:New Report More stats 537
    Rapid Miner- R Extension More stats 518
    Creating a Blog Aggregator for free More stats 504
    So which software is the best analytical software? Sigh- It depends More stats 473
    Revolution R for Linux More stats 465
    John Sall sets JMP 9 free to tango with R More stats 460

    So how do people come here –

    well I guess I owe Tal G for almost 9000 views ( incidentally I withdrew posting my blog from R- Bloggers and Analyticbridge blogs – due to SEO keyword reasons and some spam I was getting see (below))

    http://r-bloggers.com is still the CAT’s whiskers and I read it  a lot.

    I still dont know who linked my blog to a free sex movie site with 400 views but I have a few suspects.

    2009-12-31 to Today

    Referrer Views
    r-bloggers.com 9,131
    Reddit 3,829
    rattle.togaware.com 1,500
    Twitter 1,254
    Google Reader 1,215
    linkedin.com 717
    freesexmovie.irwanaf.com 422
    analyticbridge.com 341
    Google 327
    coolavenues.com 322
    Facebook 317
    kdnuggets.com 298
    dataminingblog.com 278
    en.wordpress.com 185
    google.co.in 151
    xianblog.wordpress.com 130
    inside-r.org 124
    decisionstats.com 119
    ifreestores.com 117
    bits.blogs.nytimes.com 108

    Still reading this post- gosh let me sell you some advertising. It is only $100 a month (yes its a recession)

    Advertisers are treated on First in -Last out (FILO)

    I have been told I am obsessed with SEO , but I dont care much for search engines apart from Google, and yes SEO is an interesting science (they should really re name it GEO or Google Engine Optimization)

    Apparently Hadley Wickham and Donald Farmer are big keywords for me so I should be more respectful I guess.

    Search Terms for 365 days ending 2010-12-31 (Summarized)

    2009-12-31 to Today

    Search Views
    libre office 925
    facebook analytics 798
    test drive a chrome notebook 467
    test drive a chrome notebook. 215
    r gui 203
    data mining 163
    wps sas lawsuit 158
    wordle.net 133
    wps sas 123
    google maps jet ski 123
    test drive chrome notebook 96
    sas wps 89
    sas wps lawsuit 85
    chrome notebook test drive 83
    decision stats 83
    best statistics software 74
    hadley wickham 72
    google maps jetski 72
    libreoffice 70
    doug savage 65
    hive tutorial 58
    funny india 56
    spss certification 52
    donald farmer microsoft 51
    best statistical software 49

    What about outgoing links? Apparently I need to find a way to ask Google to pay me for the free advertising I gave their chrome notebook launch. But since their search engine and browser is free to me, guess we are even steven.

    Clicks for 365 days ending 2010-12-31 (Summarized)

    2009-12-31 to Today

    URL Clicks
    rattle.togaware.com 378
    facebook.com/Decisionstats 355
    rapid-i.com/content/view/182/196 319
    services.google.com/fb/forms/cr48basic 313
    red-r.org 228
    decisionstats.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/the-top-statistical-softwares-gui 199
    teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps 162
    r4stats.com/popularity 148
    r-statistics.com/2010/04/r-and-the-google-summer-of-code-2010-accepted-students-and-projects 138
    socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Misc/Rcmdr 138
    spss.com/certification 116
    learnr.wordpress.com 114
    dudeofdata.com/decisionstats 108
    r-project.org 107
    documentfoundation.org/faq 104
    goo.gl/maps/UISY 100
    inside-r.org/download 96
    en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming 92
    nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/12/07/07readwriteweb-report-google-offering-chrome-notebook-test-11919.html 92
    sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/rkward/index.php?title=Main_Page 92
    analyticdroid.togaware.com 88
    yeroon.net/ggplot2 87

    so in 2010,

    SAS remained top daddy in business analytics,

    R made revolutionary strides in terms of new packages,

    JMP  launched a new version,

    SPSS got integrated with Cognos,

    Oracle sued Google and did build a great Data Mining GUI,

    Libre Office gave you a non Oracle Open office ( or open even more office)

    2011 looks like  a fun year. Have safe partying .

    2011 Forecast-ying

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    I had recently asked some friends from my Twitter lists for their take on 2011, atleast 3 of them responded back with the answer, 1 said they were still on it, and 1 claimed a recent office event.

    Anyways- I take note of the view of forecasting from

    http://www.uiah.fi/projekti/metodi/190.htm

    The most primitive method of forecasting is guessing. The result may be rated acceptable if the person making the guess is an expert in the matter.

    Ajay- people will forecast in end 2010 and 2011. many of them will get forecasts wrong, some very wrong, but by Dec 2011 most of them would be writing forecasts on 2012. almost no one will get called on by irate users-readers- (hey you got 4 out of 7 wrong last years forecast!) just wont happen. people thrive on hope. so does marketing. in 2011- and before

    and some forecasts from Tom Davenport’s The International Institute for Analytics (IIA) at

    http://iianalytics.com/2010/12/2011-predictions-for-the-analytics-industry/

    Regulatory and privacy constraints will continue to hamper growth of marketing analytics.

    (I wonder how privacy and analytics can co exist in peace forever- one view is that model building can use anonymized data suppose your IP address was anonymized using a standard secret Coco-Cola formula- then whatever model does get built would not be of concern to you individually as your privacy is protected by the anonymization formula)

    Anyway- back to the question I asked-

    What are the top 5 events in your industry (events as in things that occured not conferences) and what are the top 3 trends in 2011.

    I define my industry as being online technology writing- research (with a heavy skew on stat computing)

    My top 5 events for 2010 were-

    1) Consolidation- Big 5 software providers in BI and Analytics bought more, sued more, and consolidated more.  The valuations rose. and rose. leading to even more smaller players entering. Thus consolidation proved an oxy moron as total number of influential AND disruptive players grew.

     

    2) Cloudy Computing- Computing shifted from the desktop but to the mobile and more to the tablet than to the cloud. Ipad front end with Amazon Ec2 backend- yup it happened.

    3) Open Source grew louder- yes it got more clients. and more revenue. did it get more market share. depends on if you define market share by revenues or by users.

    Both Open Source and Closed Source had a good year- the pie grew faster and bigger so no one minded as long their slices grew bigger.

    4) We didnt see that coming –

    Technology continued to surprise with events (thats what we love! the surprises)

    Revolution Analytics broke through R’s Big Data Barrier, Tableau Software created a big Buzz,  Wikileaks and Chinese FireWalls gave technology an entire new dimension (though not universally popular one).

    people fought wars on emails and servers and social media- unfortunately the ones fighting real wars in 2009 continued to fight them in 2010 too

    5) Money-

    SAP,SAS,IBM,Oracle,Google,Microsoft made more money than ever before. Only Facebook got a movie named on itself. Venture Capitalists pumped in money in promising startups- really as if in a hurry to park money before tax cuts expired in some countries.

     

    2011 Top Three Forecasts

    1) Surprises- Expect to get surprised atleast 10 % of the time in business events. As internet grows the communication cycle shortens, the hype cycle amplifies buzz-

    more unstructured data  is created (esp for marketing analytics) leading to enhanced volatility

    2) Growth- Yes we predict technology will grow faster than the automobile industry. Game changers may happen in the form of Chrome OS- really its Linux guys-and customer adaptability to new USER INTERFACES. Design will matter much more in technology on your phone, on your desktop and on your internet. Packaging sells.

    False Top Trend 3) I will write a book on business analytics in 2011. yes it is true and I am working with A publisher. No it is not really going to be a top 3 event for anyone except me,publisher and lucky guys who read it.

    3) Creating technology and technically enabling creativity will converge at an accelerated rate. use of widgets, guis, snippets, ide will ensure creative left brains can code easier. and right brains can design faster and better due to a global supply chain of techie and artsy professionals.

     

     

    Brief Interview Timo Elliott

    Here is a brief interview with Timo Elliott.Timo Elliott is a 19-year veteran of SAP Business Objects.

    Ajay- What are the top 5 events in Business Integration and Data Visualization services you saw in 2010 and what are the top three trends you see in these in 2011.


    Timo-

    Top five events in 2010:

    (1) Back to strong market growth. IT spending plummeted last year (BI continued to grow, but more slowly than previous years). This year, organizations reopened their wallets and funded new analytics initiatives — all the signs indicate that BI market growth will be double that of 2009.

    (2) The launch of the iPad. Mobile BI has been around for years, but the iPad opened the floodgates of organizations taking a serious look at mobile analytics — and the easy-to-use, executive-friendly iPad dashboards have considerably raised the profile of analytics projects inside organizations.

    (3) Data warehousing got exciting again. Decades of incremental improvements (column databases, massively parallel processing, appliances, in-memory processing…) all came together with robust commercial offers that challenged existing data storage and calculation methods. And new “NoSQL” approaches, designed for the new problems of massive amounts of less-structured web data, started moving into the mainstream.

    (4) The end of Google Wave, the start of social BI.Google Wave was launched as a rethink of how we could bring together email, instant messaging, and social networks. While Google decided to close down the technology this year, it has left its mark, notably by influencing the future of “social BI”, with several major vendors bringing out commercial products this year.

    (5) The start of the big BI merge. While several small independent BI vendors reported strong growth, the major trend of the year was consolidation and integration: the BI megavendors (SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) increased their market share (sometimes by acquiring smaller vendors, e.g. IBM/SPSS and SAP/Sybase) and integrated analytics with their existing products, blurring the line between BI and other technology areas.

    Top three trends next year:

    (1) Analytics, reinvented. New DW techniques make it possible to do sub-second, interactive analytics directly against row-level operational data. Now BI processes and interfaces need to be rethought and redesigned to make best use of this — notably by blurring the distinctions between the “design” and “consumption” phases of BI.

    (2) Corporate and personal BI come together. The ability to mix corporate and personal data for quick, pragmatic analysis is a common business need. The typical solution to the problem — extracting and combining the data into a local data store (either Excel or a departmental data mart) — pleases users, but introduces duplication and extra costs and makes a mockery of information governance. 2011 will see the rise of systems that let individuals and departments load their data into personal spaces in the corporate environment, allowing pragmatic analytic flexibility without compromising security and governance.

    (3) The next generation of business applications. Where are the business applications designed to support what people really do all day, such as implementing this year’s strategy, launching new products, or acquiring another company? 2011 will see the first prototypes of people-focused, flexible, information-centric, and collaborative applications, bringing together the best of business intelligence, “enterprise 2.0”, and existing operational applications.

    And one that should happen, but probably won’t:

    (4) Intelligence = Information + PEOPLE. Successful analytics isn’t about technology — it’s about people, process, and culture. The biggest trend in 2011 should be organizations spending the majority of their efforts on user adoption rather than technical implementation.                 About- http://timoelliott.com/blog/about

    Timo Elliott is a 19-year veteran of SAP BusinessObjects, and has spent the last twenty years working with customers around the world on information strategy.

    He works closely with SAP research and innovation centers around the world to evangelize new technology prototypes.

    His popular Business Analytics and SAPWeb20 blogs track innovation in analytics and social media, including topics such as augmented corporate reality, collaborative decision-making, and social network analysis.

    His PowerPoint Twitter Tools lets presenters see and react to tweets in real time, embedded directly within their slides.

    A popular and engaging speaker, Elliott presents regularly to IT and business audiences at international conferences, on subjects such as why BI projects fail and what to do about it, and the intersection of BI and enterprise 2.0.

    Prior to Business Objects, Elliott was a computer consultant in Hong Kong and led analytics projects for Shell in New Zealand. He holds a first-class honors degree in Economics with Statistics from Bristol University, England. He blogs on http://timoelliott.com/blog/ (one of the best designed blogs in BI) . You can see more about him personal web site here and photo/sketch blog here. You should follow Timo at http://twitter.com/timoelliott

    Art Credit- Timo Elliott

    Related Articles

    Complex Event Processing- SASE Language

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    Complex Event Processing (CEP- not to be confused by Circular Probability Error) is defined processing many events happening across all the layers of an organization, identifying the most meaningful events within the event cloud, analyzing their impact, and taking subsequent action in real time.

    Software supporting CEP are-

    Oracle http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/soa/service-oriented-architecture-066455.html

    Oracle CEP is a Java application server for the development and deployment of high-performance event driven applications. It can detect patterns in the flow of events and message payloads, often based on filtering, correlation, and aggregation across event sources, and includes industry leading temporal and ordering capabilities. It supports ultra-high throughput (1 million/sec++) and microsecond latency.

    Tibco is also trying to get into this market (it claims to have a 40 % market share in the public CEP market 😉 though probably they have not measured the DoE and DoD as worthy of market share yet

    – see webcast by TIBCO ‘s head here http://www.tibco.com/products/business-optimization/complex-event-processing/default.jsp

    and product info here-http://www.tibco.com/products/business-optimization/complex-event-processing/businessevents/default.jsp

    TIBCO is the undisputed leader in complex event processing (CEP) software with over 40 percent market share, according to a recent IDC Study.

    A good explanation of how social media itself can be used as an analogy for CEP is given in this SAS Global Paper

    http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings10/040-2010.pdf

    You can see a report on Predictive Analytics and Data Mining  in q1 2010 also from SAS’s website  at –http://www.sas.com/news/analysts/forresterwave-predictive-analytics-dm-104388-0210.pdf

    A very good explanation on architecture involved is given by SAS CTO Keith Collins here on SAS’s Knowledge Exchange site,

    http://www.sas.com/knowledge-exchange/risk/four-ways-divide-conquer.html

    What it is: Methods 1 through 3 look at historical data and traditional architectures with information stored in the warehouse. In this environment, it often takes months of data cleansing and preparation to get the data ready to analyze. Now, what if you want to make a decision or determine the effect of an action in real time, as a sale is made, for instance, or at a specific step in the manufacturing process. With streaming data architectures, you can look at data in the present and make immediate decisions. The larger flood of data coming from smart phones, online transactions and smart-grid houses will continue to increase the amount of data that you might want to analyze but not keep. Real-time streaming, complex event processing (CEP) and analytics will all come together here to let you decide on the fly which data is worth keeping and which data to analyze in real time and then discard.

    When you use it: Radio-frequency identification (RFID) offers a good user case for this type of architecture. RFID tags provide a lot of information, but unless the state of the item changes, you don’t need to keep warehousing the data about that object every day. You only keep data when it moves through the door and out of the warehouse.

    The same concept applies to a customer who does the same thing over and over. You don’t need to keep storing data for analysis on a regular pattern, but if they change that pattern, you might want to start paying attention.

    Figure  4: Traditional architecture vs. streaming architecture

    Figure 4: Traditional architecture vs. streaming architecture

     

    In academia  here is something called SASE Language

    • A rich declarative event language
    • Formal semantics of the event language
    • Theorectical underpinnings of CEP
    • An efficient automata-based implementation

    http://sase.cs.umass.edu/

    and

    http://avid.cs.umass.edu/sase/index.php?page=navleft_1col

    Financial Services

    The query below retrieves the total trading volume of Google stocks in the 4 hour period after some bad news occurred.

    PATTERN SEQ(News a, Stock+ b[ ])WHERE   [symbol]    AND	a.type = 'bad'    AND	b[i].symbol = 'GOOG' WITHIN  4 hoursHAVING  b[b.LEN].volume < 80%*b[1].volumeRETURN  sum(b[ ].volume)

    The next query reports a one-hour period in which the price of a stock increased from 10 to 20 and its trading volume stayed relatively stable.

    PATTERN	SEQ(Stock+ a[])WHERE 	 [symbol]   AND	  a[1].price = 10   AND	  a[i].price > a[i-1].price   AND	  a[a.LEN].price = 20            WITHIN  1 hourHAVING	avg(a[].volume) ≥ a[1].volumeRETURN	a[1].symbol, a[].price

    The third query detects a more complex trend: in an hour, the volume of a stock started high, but after a period of price increasing or staying relatively stable, the volume plummeted.

    PATTERN SEQ(Stock+ a[], Stock b)WHERE 	 [symbol]   AND	  a[1].volume > 1000   AND	  a[i].price > avg(a[…i-1].price))   AND	  b.volume < 80% * a[a.LEN].volume           WITHIN  1 hourRETURN	a[1].symbol, a[].(price,volume), b.(price,volume)

    (note from Ajay-

     

    I was not really happy about the depth of resources on CEP available online- there seem to be missing bits and pieces in both open source, academic and corporate information- one reason for this is the obvious military dual use of this technology- like feeds from Satellite, Audio Scans, etc)

    Brief Interview with James G Kobielus

    Here is a brief one question interview with James Kobielus, Senior Analyst, Forrester.

    Ajay-Describe the five most important events in Predictive Analytics you saw in 2010 and the top three trends in 2011 as per you.

    Jim-

    Five most important developments in 2010:

    • Continued emergence of enterprise-grade Hadoop solutions as the core of the future cloud-based platforms for advanced analytics
    • Development of the market for analytic solution appliances that incorporate several key features for advanced analytics: massively parallel EDW appliance, in-database analytics and data management function processing, embedded statistical libraries, prebuilt logical domain models, and integrated modeling and mining tools
    • Integration of advanced analytics into core BI platforms with user-friendly, visual, wizard-driven, tools for quick, exploratory predictive modeling, forecasting, and what-if analysis by nontechnical business users
    • Convergence of predictive analytics, data mining, content analytics, and CEP in integrated tools geared  to real-time social media analytics
    • Emergence of CRM and other line-of-business applications that support continuously optimized “next-best action” business processes through embedding of predictive models, orchestration engines, business rules engines, and CEP agility

    Three top trends I see in the coming year, above and beyond deepening and adoption of the above-bulleted developments:

    • All-in-memory, massively parallel analytic architectures will begin to gain a foothold in complex EDW environments in support of real-time elastic analytics
    • Further crystallization of a market for general-purpose “recommendation engines” that, operating inline to EDWs, CEP environments, and BPM platforms, enable “next-best action” approaches to emerge from today’s application siloes
    • Incorporation of social network analysis functionality into a wider range of front-office business processes to enable fine-tuned behavioral-based customer segmentation to drive CRM optimization

    About –http://www.forrester.com/rb/analyst/james_kobielus

    James G. Kobielus
    Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

    RESEARCH FOCUS

    James serves Business Process & Applications professionals. He is a leading expert on data warehousing, predictive analytics, data mining, and complex event processing. In addition to his core coverage areas, James contributes to Forrester’s research in business intelligence, data integration, data quality, and master data management.

    PREVIOUS WORK EXPERIENCE

    James has a long history in IT research and consulting and has worked for both vendors and research firms. Most recently, he was at Current Analysis, an IT research firm, where he was a principal analyst covering topics ranging from data warehousing to data integration and the Semantic Web. Prior to that position, James was a senior technical systems analyst at Exostar (a hosted supply chain management and eBusiness hub for the aerospace and defense industry). In this capacity, James was responsible for identifying and specifying product/service requirements for federated identity, PKI, and other products. He also worked as an analyst for the Burton Group and was previously employed by LCC International, DynCorp, ADEENA, International Center for Information Technologies, and the North American Telecommunications Association. He is both well versed and experienced in product and market assessments. James is a widely published business/technology author and has spoken at many industry events

    Facebook Gmail Killer Threatens to commit Hara Kari live on AOL Techcrunch if unsucessful

    The Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA (fr...
    Image via Wikipedia

    As per Techcrunchhttp://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/facebook-gmail-titan/

    Project Titan — a web-based email client that we hear is unofficially referred to internally as its “Gmail killer”. Now we’ve heard from sources that this is indeed what’s coming on Monday during Facebook’s special event, alongside personal @facebook.com email addresses for users.

    Now Techcrunch always tells the Truth and the Gospel as per Mike is always right, especially when he is talking of gates of heaven and Angels.

    Again as per the newly rich Mike Arringotn (who qualifies to be an Angel Investor himself except AOL has locked in his err wings)

    Our understanding is that this is more than just a UI refresh for Facebook’s existing messaging service with POP access tacked on. Rather, Facebook is building a full-fledged webmail client, and while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there’s a huge amount of potential here.

    Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well.  It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly.

    Oh, and assuming our sources prove accurate, this explains the timing of the Google/Facebook slap fight over contact information.

    In an exclusive chat with Decisionstats, Senior VP Eduard Patel Bumberg said- This is it. I am going to kill Gmail. This movie I just had  a small part in the mens room while they had the groupies. If we finally kill Gmail, I hope to get a much bigger part in Social Network 3.

    New The new Facebook email gives you lesses spam (primarily) as it leans on its contacts in the Cosa Nostra of Spam- and tell them no spam to .fb books.

    Yes Anyone is someone in spam has had a connection in the spam pie in Facebook, like creating duplicate 50 million accounts just before the movie got launched, inflating the number of daily Farmville players, invites, links .

    Arringutan even covered some of it in an earlier FB game called scamville.

    Saint Mark and Mike would have approved Senior VP Eduard Patel Bumberg decision to either kill Gmail or commit hara kari live on U Stream. It is good for the sequel.