A particularly prominent technology blogger ( see http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/michael_arrington_the_kingmaker_who_would_be_king.php )has now formalized his status as an investor (which he did even before) while relinquishing his editorial duties (which were not much given the blog’s acquisition by AOL and its own formidable line of writers, each one of whom is quite influential). Without going into either sermon mode (thou shall not have conflict of interests) or adulatory mode (wow he sold the blog for 30 mill and now he gets another 20 mill for his funds)- I shall try and present the case for ethics and ethical lapses while as a writer.
Tag: Paper
The Top Statisticians in the World
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tukey
John Tukey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| John Tukey | |
|---|---|
John Wilder Tukey
|
|
| Born | June 16, 1915 New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA |
| Died | July 26, 2000 (aged 85) New Brunswick, New Jersey |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Mathematician |
| Institutions | Bell Labs Princeton University |
| Alma mater | Brown University Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Solomon Lefschetz |
| Doctoral students | Frederick Mosteller Kai Lai Chung |
| Known for | FFT algorithm Box plot Coining the term ‘bit’ |
| Notable awards | Samuel S. Wilks Award (1965) National Medal of Science (USA) in Mathematical, Statistical, and Computational Sciences (1973) Shewhart Medal (1976) IEEE Medal of Honor (1982) Deming Medal (1982) James Madison Medal (1984) Foreign Member of the Royal Society(1991) |
John Wilder Tukey ForMemRS[1] (June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American statistician.
Contents[hide] |
[edit]Biography
Tukey was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1915, and obtained a B.A. in 1936 and M.Sc.in 1937, in chemistry, from Brown University, before moving to Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in mathematics.[2]
During World War II, Tukey worked at the Fire Control Research Office and collaborated withSamuel Wilks and William Cochran. After the war, he returned to Princeton, dividing his time between the university and AT&T Bell Laboratories.
Among many contributions to civil society, Tukey served on a committee of the American Statistical Association that produced a report challenging the conclusions of the Kinsey Report,Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1982 “For his contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithm.”
Tukey retired in 1985. He died in New Brunswick, New Jersey on July 26, 2000.
[edit]Scientific contributions
His statistical interests were many and varied. He is particularly remembered for his development with James Cooley of the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm. In 1970, he contributed significantly to what is today known as the jackknife estimation—also termed Quenouille-Tukey jackknife. He introduced the box plot in his 1977 book,”Exploratory Data Analysis“.
Tukey’s range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, Tukey’s test of additivity and Tukey’s lemma all bear his name. He is also the creator of several little-known methods such as the trimean andmedian-median line, an easier alternative to linear regression.
In 1974, he developed, with Jerome H. Friedman, the concept of the projection pursuit.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was an English statistician,evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher’s exact test and Fisher’s equation. Anders Hald called him “a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science”[1] while Richard Dawkins named him “the greatest biologist since Darwin“.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sealy_Gosset
William Sealy Gosset (June 13, 1876–October 16, 1937) is famous as a statistician, best known by his pen name Student and for his work on Student’s t-distribution.
Born in Canterbury, England to Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset, Gosset attendedWinchester College before reading chemistry and mathematics at New College, Oxford. On graduating in 1899, he joined the Dublin brewery of Arthur Guinness & Son.
Guinness was a progressive agro-chemical business and Gosset would apply his statistical knowledge both in the brewery and on the farm—to the selection of the best yielding varieties ofbarley. Gosset acquired that knowledge by study, trial and error and by spending two terms in 1906–7 in the biometric laboratory of Karl Pearson. Gosset and Pearson had a good relationship and Pearson helped Gosset with the mathematics of his papers. Pearson helped with the 1908 papers but he had little appreciation of their importance. The papers addressed the brewer’s concern with small samples, while the biometrician typically had hundreds of observations and saw no urgency in developing small-sample methods.
Another researcher at Guinness had previously published a paper containing trade secrets of the Guinness brewery. To prevent further disclosure of confidential information, Guinness prohibited its employees from publishing any papers regardless of the contained information. However, after pleading with the brewery and explaining that his mathematical and philosophical conclusions were of no possible practical use to competing brewers, he was allowed to publish them, but under a pseudonym (“Student”), to avoid difficulties with the rest of the staff.[1] Thus his most famous achievement is now referred to as Student’s t-distribution, which might otherwise have been Gosset’s t-distribution.
LibreOffice Conference
A bit belatedly I return to my second favorite Office Productivity Software (the first being Cloud- Google Docs).
July 9, 2011
LibreOffice Conference Registration Is Open
Filed under: Conference, Meetings — Florian Effenberger @ 20:26
The registration for the LibreOffice Conference, taking place in Paris from October 12th to 15th, is now open. Everyone interested in joining the first annual meeting of the LibreOffice community is invited to register online at
http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/
to help the organizers in planning.
The LibreOffice Conference will be the event for those interested in the development of free office productivity software, open standards, and the OpenDocument format generally, and is an exciting opportunity to meet community members, developers and hackers. It is sponsored by Cap Digital, Région Île de France, IRILL, Canonical, Google, La Mouette, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, AF 83, Ars Aperta and Lanedo.
The Call for Papers is also open until July 22nd, and paper submissions will be reviewed by a community committee.
We look forward meeting you in the heart of France, celebrating the first year of LibreOffice, and discussing the plans for the next months.
The Steering Committee of The Document Foundation
http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/
Official LibreOffice Conference
Conference Registration
Please enter your personal data to register for Paris, Oct 12 – 15, 2011.
List of All Libre Office Announcements-
http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/
Analytics 2011 Conference
From http://www.sas.com/events/analytics/us/
The Analytics 2011 Conference Series combines the power of SAS’s M2010 Data Mining Conference and F2010 Business Forecasting Conference into one conference covering the latest trends and techniques in the field of analytics. Analytics 2011 Conference Series brings the brightest minds in the field of analytics together with hundreds of analytics practitioners. Join us as these leading conferences change names and locations. At Analytics 2011, you’ll learn through a series of case studies, technical presentations and hands-on training. If you are in the field of analytics, this is one conference you can’t afford to miss.
Conference Details
October 24-25, 2011
Grande Lakes Resort
Orlando, FL
Analytics 2011 topic areas include:
- Data Mining
- Forecasting
- Text Analytics
- Fraud Detection
- Data Visualization Continue reading “Analytics 2011 Conference”
Why open source companies dont dance?
I have been pondering on this seemingly logical paradox for some time now-
1) Why are open source solutions considered technically better but not customer friendly.
2) Why do startups and app creators in social media or mobile get much more press coverage than
profitable startups in enterprise software.
3) How does tech journalism differ in covering open source projects in enterprise versus retail software.
4) What are the hidden rules of the game of enterprise software.
Some observations-
1) Open source companies often focus much more on technical community management and crowd sourcing code. Traditional software companies focus much more on managing the marketing community of customers and influencers. Accordingly the balance of power is skewed in favor of techies and R and D in open source companies, and in favor of marketing and analyst relations in traditional software companies.
Traditional companies also spend much more on hiring top notch press release/public relationship agencies, while open source companies are both financially and sometimes ideologically opposed to older methods of marketing software. The reverse of this is you are much more likely to see Videos and Tutorials by an open source company than a traditional company. You can compare the websites of Cloudera, DataStax, Hadapt ,Appistry and Mapr and contrast that with Teradata or Oracle (which has a much bigger and much more different marketing strategy.
Social media for marketing is also more efficiently utilized by smaller companies (open source) while bigger companies continue to pay influential analysts for expensive white papers that help present the brand.
Lack of budgets is a major factor that limits access to influential marketing for open source companies particularly in enterprise software.
2 and 3) Retail software is priced at 2-100$ and sells by volume. Accordingly technology coverage of these software is based on volume.
Enterprise software is much more expensively priced and has much more discreet volume or sales points. Accordingly the technology coverage of enterprise software is more discreet, in terms of a white paper coming every quarter, a webinar every month and a press release every week. Retail software is covered non stop , but these journalists typically do not charge for “briefings”.
Journalists covering retail software generally earn money by ads or hosting conferences. So they have an interest in covering new stuff or interesting disruptive stuff. Journalists or analysts covering enterprise software generally earn money by white papers, webinars, attending than hosting conferences, writing books. They thus have a much stronger economic incentive to cover existing landscape and technologies than smaller startups.
4) What are the hidden rules of the game of enterprise software.
- It is mostly a white man’s world. this can be proved by statistical demographic analysis
- There is incestuous intermingling between influencers, marketers, and PR people. This can be proved by simple social network analysis of who talks to who and how much. A simple time series between sponsorship and analysts coverage also will prove this (I am working on quantifying this ).
- There are much larger switching costs to enterprise software than retail software. This leads to legacy shoddy software getting much chances than would have been allowed in an efficient marketplace.
- Enterprise software is a less efficient marketplace than retail software in all definitions of the term “efficient markets”
- Cloud computing, and SaaS and Open source threatens to disrupt the jobs and careers of a large number of people. In the long term, they will create many more jobs, but in the short term, people used to comfortable living of enterprise software (making,selling,or writing) will actively and passively resist these changes to the paradigms in the current software status quo.
- Open source companies dont dance and dont play ball. They prefer to hire 4 more college grads than commission 2 more white papers.
and the following with slight changes from a comment I made on a fellow blog-
- While the paradigm on how to create new software has evolved from primarily silo-driven R and D departments to a broader collaborative effort, the biggest drawback is software marketing has not evolved.
- If you want your own version of the open source community editions to be more popular, some standardization is necessary for the corporate decision makers, and we need better marketing paradigms.
- While code creation is crowdsourced, solution implementation cannot be crowdsourced. Customers want solutions to a problem not code.
- Just as open source as a production and licensing paradigm threatens to disrupt enterprise software, it will lead to newer ways to marketing software given the hostility of existing status quo.
Who writes white papers?
There are four main types of commercial white papers:
- Business benefits: Makes a business case for a certain technology or methodology.
- Technical: Describes how a certain technology works.
- Hybrid: Combines business benefits with technical details in a single document.
- Policy: Makes a case for a certain political solution to a societal or economic challenge.
Name the best white paper you ever read? (comment that in the field)..
What categoy of white papers is the best?
Do you think white papers are too expensive or they give adequate ROI?
To be continued- including
- demographic and social network analysis of analysts and white paper sponsors to measure interaction effects.
- white papers segmented by type of software company
- proc freq analysis of the words frequency data viz in white papers written by same analysts for different companies on same topics.
- Race and ethnic analysis of influencers and analysts in Business Analysts and Business Intelligence. – Null hypothesis – it is not a white mans world, women, Hispanics and other minorities are adequately represented.
Why I am doing this?
I am writing a white paper on WHO writes a white paper?
Sponsorships are invited- but academics and startups in analytics may be preferred.
Related articles
- White papers with or without forced registration? (leadsexplorer.com)
- What is a “white paper”? (kfwhite.wordpress.com)
- Awash in White Papers (nelsontouchconsulting.wordpress.com)
What is a White Paper?
As per Jimmy Wales and his merry band at Wiki (pedia not leaky-ah)- The emphasis is mine
What is the best white paper you have read in the past 15 years.
Categories are-
- Business benefits: Makes a business case for a certain technology or methodology.
- Technical: Describes how a certain technology works.
- Hybrid: Combines business benefits with technical details in a single document.
- Policy: Makes a case for a certain political solution to a societal or economic challenge.
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A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that helps solve a problem. White papers are used to educate readers and help people make decisions, and are often requested and used in politics, policy, business, and technical fields. In commercial use, the term has also come to refer to documents used by businesses as a marketing or sales tool. Policy makers frequently request white papers from universities or academic personnel to inform policy developments with expert opinions or relevant research.
Government white papers
In the Commonwealth of Nations, “white paper” is an informal name for a parliamentary paper enunciating government policy; in the United Kingdom these are mostly issued as “Command papers“. White papers are issued by the government and lay out policy, or proposed action, on a topic of current concern. Although a white paper may on occasion be a consultation as to the details of new legislation, it does signify a clear intention on the part of a government to pass new law. White Papers are a “…. tool of participatory democracy … not [an] unalterable policy commitment.[1] “White Papers have tried to perform the dual role of presenting firm government policies while at the same time inviting opinions upon them.” [2]
In Canada, a white paper “is considered to be a policy document, approved by Cabinet, tabled in the House of Commons and made available to the general public.”[3] A Canadian author notes that the “provision of policy information through the use of white and green papers can help to create an awareness of policy issues among parliamentarians and the public and to encourage an exchange of information and analysis. They can also serve as educational techniques”.[4]
“White Papers are used as a means of presenting government policy preferences prior to the introduction of legislation”; as such, the “publication of a White Paper serves to test the climate of public opinion regarding a controversial policy issue and enables the government to gauge its probable impact”.[5]
By contrast, green papers, which are issued much more frequently, are more open ended. These green papers, also known as consultation documents, may merely propose a strategy to be implemented in the details of other legislation or they may set out proposals on which the government wishes to obtain public views and opinion.
White papers published by the European Commission are documents containing proposals for European Union action in a specific area. They sometimes follow a green paper released to launch a public consultation process.
For examples see the following:
- Russia No 1. A Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia, April 1919, often referred to as “The White Paper” a collection of telegraphic messages by British officers in Russia, concerning the Bolshevik revolution.
- Churchill White Paper, 1922, planning a national home in Palestine for Jews. The white paper which unfortunately couldnt see the consequences- ergo high gas prices due to oil shocks,dead people in all manners of idiotic terror plots, global headache. Mr Churchill also had to deny requests for emergency food leading to 3 million Bengali deaths in 1940-45 Winston Churchill the Prime Minister of that time responded with a telegram to Wavell asking, if food was so scarce, “why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.
You know whom to blame for all of this. Its Winston Churchill, not Barack Obama
- White Paper of 1939, calling for the creation of a unified Palestinian state and a limited Jewish immigration and ability to purchase land. Which contradicted the white paper above –
- White Paper on Full Employment, 1945, Commonwealth of Australia to recognize state’s obligation to give jobs to people.
- 1957 Defence White Paper, a reassessment of UK defence needs.
- White Paper on Defence, 1964, led to the unification/creation of the modern Canadian Forces.
- 1966 Defence White Paper, cancelled the CVA-01 class aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy
- In Place of Strife, 1969 (later abandoned), to reduce trade union power.
- 1969 White Paper, 1969 (later abandoned), to abolish the Indian Act in Canada and recognize First Nations as the same as other minorities in Canada, rather than distinct groups.
- The White Paper, 1966, United States National Research Council document that led to the development of emergency medical services in the United States
Commercial white papers
Since the early 1990s, the term white paper has also come to refer to documents used by businesses and so-called think tanks as marketing or sales tools. White papers of this sort argue that the benefits of a particular technology, product or policy are superior for solving a specific problem.
These types of white papers are almost always marketing communications documents designed to promote a specific company’s or group’s solutions or products. As a marketing tool, these papers will highlight information favorable to the company authorizing or sponsoring the paper. Such white papers are often used to generate sales leads, establish thought leadership, make a business case, or to educate customers or voters.
There are four main types of commercial white papers:
- Business benefits: Makes a business case for a certain technology or methodology.
- Technical: Describes how a certain technology works.
- Hybrid: Combines business benefits with technical details in a single document.
- Policy: Makes a case for a certain political solution to a societal or economic challenge.
Resources
- Stelzner, Michael (2007). Writing White Papers: How to capture readers and keep them engaged. Poway, California: WhitePaperSource Publishing. pp. 214. ISBN 9780977716937.
- Bly, Robert W. (2006). The White Paper Marketing Handbook. Florence, Kentucky: South-Western Educational Publishing. pp. 256. ISBN 9780324300826.
- Kantor, Jonathan (2009). Crafting White Paper 2.0: Designing Information for Today’s Time and Attention Challenged Business Reader. Denver,Colorado: Lulu Publishing. pp. 167.ISBN 9780557163243.
DECISION STATS 