grad school – DECISION STATS

How Jesus saved my Butt

Prologue– In April 2009 I was as happy as I could be. or should have been. I was working from my house on my own sleep -wake schedule, had a bouncy 1 yr old son, an adoring girlfriend turned wife, a nice in-the-money 3 Bedroom Suburban apartment, and my startup /website was doing great, pulling in almost 4000 USD per month which was really huge given that I was parked in Delhi, India. and I had just been selected for a fully paid up grad school in the United States. Yes sir, life could not have been much better.

But the reality was I was extremely unhappy- or as unhappy as a person could be without being crazy about it. I was addicted to the always-on rush of the internet, working without a break on my writing and my job/contracts. I was ignoring my wife ‘s demands for more time as childish, and the rest of my family as interfering. Even my son seemed an time-crawl at times, so he spent more time with his nanny than me. I was hooked- and the drug was electronic, unblinking and always on. When I was not working, I was playing games on Facebook, tweeting like a teenager, or playing paid strategy games.I had been having mild arguments for the past several weeks with my wife, but I dismissed those concerns as feminine posturing. I mean, I knew her for eight years now- four before marriage and four after that. Any demands from her for more time or even to help out with the work at home meant time away from my computer or my business or even my sleep. After the high of fourteen go-go hours at work I needed some pills at the end of each day to sleep.
The wife could wait. The job, the money and the networking could not.

And then she walked out on me. With the kid. And the nanny. And With my credit card.

I was furious. How could this happen to me? In vain I raged against her, created scenes at her house to get my son back. She gave my credit card back. But it would take much more time than I realized to get my life back.

At work- I slowly began burning out. My pill fueled sleep was not refreshing and gave rise to hesitant and erratic behavior. Once again I blamed my client and co workers. They were the stupid ones- me- I was the creative genius. I lost their respect and then their friendship- eventually losing my monthly income. I now had a big mortgage on my house and no income to support it. And no family to fill the big house too.

Too proud to admit whose fault it was, I packed my bags to start life afresh in school in America.
My parents were supportive, especially my father. I had often been distant with him as he too had a demanding job as a police officer. I rationalized my work alcoholism on the ground that I was doing it for my family and making good money, unlike my father who had just spent thirty years on a middle level pay and much more work. My father had endured those complaints silently and just as silently he helped me through basic therapy to help me reach a medical condition fit enough to travel.

In America-

I resolved to start life anew in the United States. At first it went well. I swam in the housing pool and walked along the beautiful green campus.My immigrant energy was good enough for me to start impressing my classmates and my teachers. I used the opportunities available in the US to travel to conferences in New York and Las Vegas. And I partied like a bachelor in both these places. I had nothing else left to lose and so I thought. Beer bars were my salvation and I was redeemed there-at least for the evening. But then a familiar pattern from the past emerged- I could not focus long enough on my studies. My medication (this time prescribed by a doctor) increased but I steadily drank as well. I tried distracting myself with sports- especially with the university football team which played every Saturday. Caught up in the weekly ritual, I hoped it would give a good outlet to the hurt I felt inside. It was one such Saturday that I came across my Baptist friends.

I was hitch-hiking my way to the football stadium and steadily grew flustered as there was a steady stream of cars hurrying to their tailgates without sparing a thought for me. After walking in vain for almost half an hour under the burning sun, I threw my hands up, looked up at the sky, and silently implored heaven to give me a break.

Enter Jesus

And then a minor miracle happened. I got a ride from 4 guys in a car. For a colored guy to get a ride is a minor miracle in East Tennessee. It turned out Brendan,Brian , Brett and James were members of the local Crown College– a private Baptist college and they did not mind crowding in the back seat so I could have a comfortable ride. When Brendan mentioned that he and James were thinking of being Pastors after graduation, I asked them if we could study the Bible together-we promised to meet next Saturday and that was it.

The Bible studies were quite different from my childhood readings of the Bible while studying at a Catholic school in India. My relationship with God was that of a teenager with his Dad- I prayed only when I needed help or money or both.

These Bible studies were more like group discussions based on what we were doing, or where we wanted to be, all revolving around the particular quote or passage which was being studied. Contrary to my exceptions, studying the Bible was as natural for me as studying the Gita- and the study was much more rational and logical than I thought it would be.

After a couple of months of these I felt confident enough to go to their local Baptist Church. In the meantime I had expanded my weekly Bible studies to two- every Saturday with the awesome foursome Crownies and every Wednesday at Moe’s – a burrito eating place with Austin , a University student I had met while rock climbing in the campus gymnasium.

The Change

After a couple of months doing Bible Study I felt confident to go to Church, with Austin and my friends. While I alternated between the Baptist and the Prebysterian church I eventually settled for the Redeemer church as that was closest to me. In the meantime, Austin got engaged ,graduated and became busy holding two jobs. It was at a Christmas party that I first met Michael who had just started working with Bridges, a campus ministry.

Doing Michael ‘s Bible study was an evolution for me spiritually as I could now not only just read the Bible but start learning to apply it’s teachings in my daily life. While the Bible is clearly a religious book for Jews and Christians, the application of the works in your daily life is very common sense. People reading the Bible are happier than people not reading it, and happiness is what we strive for in our mortal life.

My relationships with people in my personal life improved, as I started learning the value of tolerance and forgiveness. I started drinking much much less, my health and disposition became much better. For the first time in 32 years of my life I could even say I was blessed to be with friends rather than be a habitual loner.

And God worked his miracles in my professional and personal life as well. While still at a struggle for money, I was having a steady income as my website business- and I started preparing to reconcile back to my son , my wife and my parents in India.Happy Beginning.

I am now in India, have a delightful 3 year old son, a caring wife, a small startup. This morning I got up and started designing the logo of my new firm. I talk better with my parents than I have in many decades.

I still follow Jesus but I dont go to church. Jesus was all about love, but churches can sometimes talk about hating gays, terrorists, foreigners etc.

I realized that believing in God has nothing to do with following or unfollowing a particular religion.

Are life’s struggles over? Am I never going to be in trouble or trying times again. I dont think so- if at all being more spiritually aware means a greater understanding of right and wrong and a bigger task to walk the straight and narrow path. I call this my Happy Beginning- and I wish you the same. Whatever religion you may have faith in, forgiveness and belief in a higher more forgiving , more merciful God can only help you achieve calm and happiness.

You can go to a pub /not believe in anything or choose to go to a church (or a temple /synagogue/ mosque).

Chances are people who believe in the latter are going to be happier. And if you add this with a merciful and forgiving attitude towards others (like God has for you) – there is no limit to where you Happy Beginning can take you.

I did get divorced and lost custody of my son. I also wrote books, became more successful in my life. Above all , learning to accept Gid without caring too much for the baggage that preachers impose in the name of organized religion, helps calm me down.

Black LGBT community finds a new way to worship (thegrio.com)
Sedition of Christian Right (nowpublic.com)
The Dangerous World of Biblical Counseling: Part 1 (new.exchristian.net)
The long awaited adventures of India – Chennai (Madras), India (travelpod.com)
Great Websites to Use for Searching Bible Verses (brighthub.com)

John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award – 2011

Write code, win cash, and the glory. Deep bow to Father John M Chambers, inventor of S ,for endowing this award for statistical software creation by grads and undergrads.

An effort to be matched by companies like SAS, SPSS which after all came from grad school work. Now back to the competition, I gotta get my homies from U Tenn in a team ( I was a grad student last year though taking this year off due to medico- financial reasons)

John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award – 2011
Statistical Computing Section
American Statistical Association

The Statistical Computing Section of the American Statistical
Association announces the competition for the John M. Chambers
Statistical Software Award. In 1998 the Association for Computing
Machinery presented its Software System Award to John Chambers for the
design and development of S. Dr. Chambers generously donated his award
to the Statistical Computing Section to endow an annual prize for
statistical software written by an undergraduate or graduate student.
The prize carries with it a cash award of $1000, plus a substantial
allowance for travel to the annual Joint Statistical Meetings where
the award will be presented.

Teams of up to 3 people can participate in the competition, with the
cash award being split among team members. The travel allowance will
be given to just one individual in the team, who will be presented the
award at JSM. To be eligible, the team must have designed and
implemented a piece of statistical software. The individual within
the team indicated to receive the travel allowance must have begun the
development while a student, and must either currently be a student,
or have completed all requirements for her/his last degree after
January 1, 2009. To apply for the award, teams must provide the
following materials:

Current CV’s of all team members.

A letter from a faculty mentor at the academic institution of the
individual indicated to receive the travel award. The letter
should confirm that the individual had substantial participation in
the development of the software, certify her/his student status
when the software began to be developed (and either the current
student status or the date of degree completion), and briefly
discuss the importance of the software to statistical practice.

A brief, one to two page description of the software, summarizing
what it does, how it does it, and why it is an important
contribution. If the team member competing for the travel
allowance has continued developing the software after finishing
her/his studies, the description should indicate what was developed
when the individual was a student and what has been added since.

An installable software package with its source code for use by the
award committee. It should be accompanied by enough information to allow
the judges to effectively use and evaluate the software (including
its design considerations.) This information can be provided in a
variety of ways, including but not limited to a user manual (paper
or electronic), a paper, a URL, and online help to the system.

All materials must be in English. We prefer that electronic text be
submitted in Postscript or PDF. The entries will be judged on a
variety of dimensions, including the importance and relevance for
statistical practice of the tasks performed by the software, ease of
use, clarity of description, elegance and availability for use by the
statistical community. Preference will be given to those entries that
are grounded in software design rather than calculation. The decision
of the award committee is final.

All application materials must be received by 5:00pm EST, Monday,
February 21, 2011 at the address below. The winner will be announced
in May and the award will be given at the 2011 Joint Statistical
Meetings.

Information on the competition can also be accessed on the website of
the Statistical Computing Section (www.statcomputing.org or see the
ASA website, www.amstat.org for a pointer), including the names and
contributions of previous winners. Inquiries and application
materials should be emailed or mailed to:

Chambers Software Award
c/o Fei Chen
Avaya Labs
233 Mt Airy Rd.
Basking Ridge, NJ 07920
feic@avaya.com

SAS Sentiment Analysis wins Award

From Business Wire, the new Sentiment Analysis product by SAS Institute (created by acquisition Teragram ) wins an award. As per wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text mining. Generally speaking, it aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic. The attitude may be their judgment or evaluation (see appraisal theory), their affective state (that is to say, the emotional state of the author when writing) or the intended emotional communication (that is to say, the emotional effect the author wishes to have on the reader).

It was developed by Teragram. Here is another Sentiment Analysis tool from Stanford Grad school at http://twittersentiment.appspot.com/search?query=sas

See-

Sentiment analysis for sas

–

Image Citation-

http://threeminds.organic.com/2009/09/five_reasons_sentiment_analysi.html

Read an article on sentiment analysis here at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/technology/internet/24emotion.html

And the complete press release at http://goo.gl/iVzf`

–SAS Sentiment Analysis delivers insights on customer, competitor and organizational opinions to a degree never before possible via manual review of electronic text. As a result, SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, has earned the prestigious Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award fromTechnology Marketing Corporation (TMC).

“SAS has automated the time-consuming process of reading individual documents and manually extracting relevant information”

“SAS Sentiment Analysis has shown benefits for its customers and it provides ROI for the companies that use it,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “Congratulations to the entire team at SAS, a company distinguished by its dedication to software quality and superiority to address marketplace needs.”

Derive positive and negative opinions, evaluations and emotions

SAS Sentiment Analysis’ high-performance crawler locates and extracts sentiment from digital content sources, including mainstream websites, social media outlets, internal servers and incoming news feeds. SAS’ unique hybrid approach combines powerful statistical techniques with linguistics rules to improve accuracy to the detailed feature level. It summarizes the sentiment expressed in all available text collections – identifying trends and creating graphical reports that describe the expressed feelings of consumers, partners, employees and competitors in real time. Output from SAS Sentiment Analysis can be stored in document repositories, surfaced in corporate portals and used as input to additional SAS Text Analytics software or search engines to help decision makers evaluate trends, predict future outcomes, minimize risks and capitalize on opportunities.

“SAS has automated the time-consuming process of reading individual documents and manually extracting relevant information,” said Fiona McNeill, Global Analytics Product Marketing Manager at SAS. “Our integrated analytics framework helps organizations maximize the value of information to improve their effectiveness.”

SAS Sentiment Analysis is included in the SAS Text Analytics suite, which helps organizations discover insights from electronic text materials, associate them for delivery to the right person or place, and provide intelligence to select the best course of action. Whether answering complex search-and-retrieval questions, ensuring appropriate content is presented to internal or external constituencies, or predicting which activity or channel will produce the best effect on existing sentiments, SAS Text Analytics provides exceptional real-time processing speeds for large volumes of text.

SAS Text Analytics solutions are part of the SAS Business Analytics Framework, backed by the industry’s most comprehensive range of consulting, training and support services, ensuring customers maximum return from their IT investments.

Recognizing vision

The Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award recognizes vision, leadership and thoroughness. The most innovative products and services brought to the market from March 2008 through March 2009 were chosen as winners of this Product of the Year Award and are published on the INTERNET TELEPHONY and Customer Interaction Solutions websites.