Before you rev up those keyboards, and shoot off a snarky comment- consider this statement- there are many ways to run (and ruin economies). But they still have not found a replacement for money. Yes Happiness is important. Search Engine is good.
So unless they start a new branch of economics with lots more motivational theory and psychology and lot less quant especially for open source projects, money ,revenue, sales is the only true measure of success in enterprise software. Particularly if you have competitors who are making more money selling the same class of software.
Marry Big Data Analytics to High Performance Computing, and you get the buzzword of this season- High Performance Analytics.
It basically consists of Parallelized code to run in parallel on custom hardware, in -database analytics for speed, and cloud computing /high performance computing environments. On an operational level, it consists of software (as in analytics) partnering with software (as in databases, Map reduce, Hadoop) plus some hardware (HP or IBM mostly). It is considered a high margin , highly profitable, business with small number of deals compared to say desktop licenses.
As per HPC Wire- which is a great tool/newsletter to keep updated on HPC , SAS Institute has been busy on this front partnering with EMC Greenplum and TeraData (who also acquired SAS Partner AsterData to gain a much needed foot in the MR/SQL space) Continue reading “High Performance Analytics”
Heritage Health Prize, a $3 million competition to predict who will go to hospital and for how long.
So as not to overwhelm anyone, we will be releasing the data in three waves. Today’s launch allows people to register and download the first instalment, which includes enough data for people to start trying out models. It includes claims data from Y1, information on members and the details of hospitalizations recorded in Y2.
The next instalment will be released on May 4 and will involve the release a more comprehensive dataset, including claims for later years as well as the test dataset against which entries will be judged. It is at this point that we will open up the competition to entries, reveal the performance threshold and begin posting the leaderboard.
Finally, the last release happens on June 4 and will include some ancillary data of prescriptions and lab tests.
Kaggle members don’t sign up again. To register, simply login and accept the rules before downloading the data.
Finally the Twitter hashtag for the competition is #drflix. Help spread the word.
This is NOT an April fool joke or a publicity stunt. It is also not meant to provoke discussion for the sake of provocation.
For a time, as I have studied both US and India , in what makes Government work or fail, academia work or fail, or businesses to work or fail- a common thread is the quality of people involved. Someone who is a wasteful businessman, will be a wasteful politician. Someone who is a flamboyant businessman with flair more than substance will continue that in public life.
Accordingly I have created a Facebook cause-
If Donald Trump can run for President, I can think of no one who has done more for the American South. Unlike the tech heavy, Stanford dominated boom in California, the Mid West and South have been declining centers of influence. Cities like Austin Texas or Raleigh, North California are the exception rather than norm there. A friend who went to Duke once told me, the worst thing is to be borne a rural white male who is poor in America. There are no groups lobbying for education or internet hi fi blazing speeds for you. Socially you are expected to walk and thrive alone.
The Southern Baptist Church has managed to infiltrate and influence young minds there- the average conservative American seemed better off and happier in his moderated social behaviour. But the Church exacts a 10 % tithe, and it is efficient in stretching every dollar and every cent of church donations. Government works with the best intentions, but spending someone else’s money (your tax money money by a bureaucrat) is always more inefficient than the actual owner spending it alone. Taxes are higher than the 10 % tithe and seem to accomplish much less social change. You would rather go to work or go to war?
Accordingly I find that on the West Coast there are very few tech savvy leaders with a track record of both fiscal pragmatism, educational reform and job creation. Certainly the industry lobbyist is smarter at evading taxes than the average Joe, and campaign financing is still dependent on deep pockets despite the innovations of internet retail fund raising.
Would you like your Senator to be as considerate of creating jobs as entrepreneurs are. Jim Goodnight here is a metaphor for all entrepreneurs who dont believe in reckless hire-fire,outsourcing and long term views on people.
Click here to spread this cause- perhaps it will make existing politicians more efficient just by the threat of new competition.
Some of the most important technology programs that keep Washington accountable are in danger of being eliminated. Data.gov, USASpending.gov, the IT Dashboard and other federal data transparency and government accountability programs are facing a massive budget cut, despite only being a tiny fraction of the national budget. Help save the data and make sure that Congress doesn’t leave the American people in the dark.
I wonder why the federal government/ non profit agencies can help create a SPARQL database, and in days of cloud computing, why a tech major cannot donate storage space to it, after all despite US corporate tax rate being high, US technological companies do end up paying a lower rate thanks to tax breaks/routing overseas revenue.
In the new age data is power, and the US has led in its mission to use technology to further its own values even especially in Middle East. The datasets should be made public and transitioned to the private sector/academia for research and re designing for data augmentation with out straining the massive deficit /borrowing/ fighting 3 wars. Of particular interest would be datasets of campaign finances and donors especially given large number of retail/small donors/internet marketing in elections as it will also help serve as an example of democracy and change. Even countries like China can create a corruption/expense efficiency tracking internal dashboard with restricted rights to help with rural and urban governance.
A highly optimized blog post or web content can get you a lot of attention just like Rebecca Black’s video (provided it passes through the new quality metrics \change*/ in the Search Engine)
But if the underlying content is weak, or based on a shoddy understanding of the content-it can drive lots of horrid comments as well as ensuring that bad word of mouth is spread about the content or you/despite your hard work.
An example of this is copy and paste journalism especially in technology circles, where even a bigger Page Ranked website /blog can get away with scraping or stealing content from a lower page ranked website (or many websites) after adding a cursory “expert comment”. This is also true when someone who is basically a corporate communication specialist (or PR -public relations) person is given a techinical text and encourage to write about it without completely understanding it.
A mild technical defect in the search engine algorithm is that it does not seem to pay attention to when the content was published, so the copying website or blog actually can get by as fresher content even if it is practically has 90% of the same words). The second flaw is over punishment or manual punishment of excessive linking – this can encourage search optimization minded people to hoard links or discourage trackbacks.
A free internet is one which promotes free sharing of content and does not encourage stealing or un-authorized scraping or content copying. Unfortunately current search engine optimization can encourage scraping and content copying without paying too much attention to origin of the words.
In addition the analytical rigor by which search algorithms search your inboxes (as in search all emails for a keyword) or media rich sites (like Youtube) are quite on a different level of quality altogether. The chances of garbage results are much more while searching for media content and/or emails.
DECISION STATS 