Some possible electronic disruptions that threaten to disrupt the electoral cycle in United States of America currently underway is-
1) Limited Denial of Service Attacks (like for 5-8 minutes) on fund raising websites, trying to fly under the radar of network administrators to deny the targeted fundraising website for a small percentage of funds . Money remains critical to the world’s most expensive political market. Even a 5% dropdown in online fund-raising capacity can cripple a candidate.
2) Limited Man of the Middle Attacks on ground volunteers to disrupt ,intercept and manipulate communication flows. Basically cyber attacks at vulnerable ground volunteers in critical counties /battleground /swing states (like Florida)
3) Electro-Magnetic Disruptions of Electronic Voting Machines in critical counties /swing states (like Florida) to either disrupt, manipulate or create an impression that some manipulation has been done.
4) Use search engine flooding (for search engine de-optimization of rival candidates keywords), and social media flooding for disrupting the listening capabilities of sentiment analysis.
5) Selected leaks (including using digital means to create authetntic, fake or edited collateral) timed to embarrass rivals or influence voters , this can be geo-coded and mass deployed.
6) using Internet communications to selectively spam or influence independent or opinionated voters through emails, short messaging service , chat channels, social media.
7) Disrupt the Hillary for President 2016 campaign by Anonymous-Wikileak sympathetic hacktivists.
The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.
The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser, and is self-contained. The Tor IM Browser Bundleadditionally allows instant messaging and chat over Tor. If you would prefer to use your existing web browser, install Tor permanently, or if you don’t use Windows, see the other ways to download Tor.
Freedom House has produced a video on how to find and use the Tor Browser Bundle. If you don’t see a video below, view it at Youtube . Know of a better video or one translated into your language? Let us know!
and if you now want to see or check your own website for a Denial of Service attack , download this
This is the software for which 32 Turkish teenagers got arrested for bringing down their govt websites. Do NOT USE it for ILLEGAL purposes,
because 1) it is hosted on a western website that due to Patriot Act would tracking downloads as well as most likely be inserting some logging code into your computer (especially if you are still on Windows)
2) Turkey being a NATO member got rather immediate notice of this – which makes it very likely that this tool is compromised in the Western Hemisphere. You can probably use this in Eastern Hemisphere country excluding Israel, Turkey, China, India ,Korea or Japan because these countries do have sophisticated hackers working for the government as well.
3) This is just a beginners tool to understand how flooding a website with requests work.
Note the Failed Tab tells you how good or bad this method is.
Note – it wont work on my blogs hosted on wordpress.com- but then those blogs had a root level breach some time back. It did work on both my blogspot and my tumblr blogs, and it completely shattered my son’s self hosted wordpress blog (see below)
Carole-Ann’s 2011 Predictions for Decision Management
For Ajay Ohri on DecisionStats.com
What were the top 5 events in 2010 in your field?
Maturity: the Decision Management space was made up of technology vendors, big and small, that typically focused on one or two aspects of this discipline. Over the past few years, we have seen a lot of consolidation in the industry – first with Business Intelligence (BI) then Business Process Management (BPM) and lately in Business Rules Management (BRM) and Advanced Analytics. As a result the giant Platform vendors have helped create visibility for this discipline. Lots of tiny clues finally bubbled up in 2010 to attest of the increasing activity around Decision Management. For example, more products than ever were named Decision Manager; companies advertised for Decision Managers as a job title in their job section; most people understand what I do when I am introduced in a social setting!
Boredom: unfortunately, as the industry matures, inevitably innovation slows down… At the main BRMS shows we heard here and there complaints that the technology was stalling. We heard it from vendors like Red Hat (Drools) and we heard it from bored end-users hoping for some excitement at Business Rules Forum’s vendor panel. They sadly did not get it
Scrum: I am not thinking about the methodology there! If you have ever seen a rugby game, you can probably understand why this is the term that comes to mind when I look at the messy & confusing technology landscape. Feet blindly try to kick the ball out while superhuman forces are moving randomly the whole pack – or so it felt when I played! Business Users in search of Business Solutions are facing more and more technology choices that feel like comparing apples to oranges. There is value in all of them and each one addresses a specific aspect of Decision Management but I regret that the industry did not simplify the picture in 2010. On the contrary! Many buzzwords were created or at least made popular last year, creating even more confusion on a muddy field. A few examples: Social CRM, Collaborative Decision Making, Adaptive Case Management, etc. Don’t take me wrong, I *do* like the technologies. I sympathize with the decision maker that is trying to pick the right solution though.
Information: Analytics have been used for years of course but the volume of data surrounding us has been growing to unparalleled levels. We can blame or thank (depending on our perspective) Social Media for that. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have made it possible and easy to publish relevant (as well as fluffy) information in real-time. As we all started to get the hang of it and potentially over-publish, technology evolved to enable the storage, correlation and analysis of humongous volumes of data that we could not dream of before. 25 billion tweets were posted in 2010. Every month, over 30 billion pieces of data are shared on Facebook alone. This is not just about vanity and marketing though. This data can be leveraged for the greater good. Carlos pointed to some fascinating facts about catastrophic event response team getting organized thanks to crowd-sourced information. We are also seeing, in the Decision management world, more and more applicability for those very technology that have been developed for the needs of Big Data – I’ll name for example Hadoop that Carlos (yet again) discussed in his talks at Rules Fest end of 2009 and 2010.
Self-Organization: it may be a side effect of the Social Media movement but I must admit that I was impressed by the success of self-organizing initiatives. Granted, this last trend has nothing to do with Decision Management per se but I think it is a great evolution worth noting. Let me point to a couple of examples. I usually attend traditional conferences and tradeshows in which the content can be good but is sometimes terrible. I was pleasantly surprised by the professionalism and attendance at *un-conferences* such as P-Camp (P stands for Product – an event for Product Managers). When you think about it, it is already difficult to get a show together when people are dedicated to the tasks. How crazy is it to have volunteers set one up with no budget and no agenda? Well, people simply show up to do their part and everyone has fun voting on-site for what seems the most appealing content at the time. Crowdsourcing applied to shows: it works! Similar experience with meetups or tweetups. I also enjoyed attending some impromptu Twitter jam sessions on a given topic. Social Media is certainly helping people reach out and get together in person or virtually and that is wonderful!
Image via Wikipedia
What are the top three trends you see in 2011?
Performance: I might be cheating here. I was very bullish about predicting much progress for 2010 in the area of Performance Management in your Decision Management initiatives. I believe that progress was made but Carlos did not give me full credit for the right prediction… Okay, I am a little optimistic on timeline… I admit it… If it did not fully happen in 2010, can I predict it again in 2011? I think that companies want to better track their business performance in order to correct the trajectory of course but also to improve their projections. I see that it is turning into reality already here and there. I expect it to become a trend in 2011!
Insight: Big Data being available all around us with new technologies and algorithms will continue to propagate in 2011 leading to more widely spread Analytics capabilities. The buzz at Analytics shows on Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a sign that there is interest in those kinds of things. There is tremendous information that can be leveraged for smart decision-making. I think there will be more of that in 2011 as initiatives launches in 2010 will mature into material results.
Image by Intersection Consulting via Flickr
Collaboration: Social Media for the Enterprise is a discipline in the making. Social Media was initially seen for the most part as a Marketing channel. Over the years, companies have started experimenting with external communities and ideation capabilities with moderate success. The few strategic initiatives started in 2010 by “old fashion” companies seem to be an indication that we are past the early adopters. This discipline may very well materialize in 2011 as a core capability, well, or at least a new trend. I believe that capabilities such Chatter, offered by Salesforce, will transform (slowly) how people interact in the workplace and leverage the volumes of social data captured in LinkedIn and other Social Media sites. Collaboration is of course a topic of interest for me personally. I even signed up for Kare Anderson’s collaboration collaboration site – yes, twice the word “collaboration”: it is really about collaborating on collaboration techniques. Even though collaboration does not require Social Media, this medium offers perspectives not available until now.
Brief Bio-
Carole-Ann is a renowned guru in the Decision Management space. She created the vision for Decision Management that is widely adopted now in the industry. Her claim to fame is the strategy and direction of Blaze Advisor, the then-leading BRMS product, while she also managed all the Decision Management tools at FICO (business rules, predictive analytics and optimization). She has a vision for Decision Management both as a technology and a discipline that can revolutionize the way corporations do business, and will never get tired of painting that vision for her audience. She speaks often at Industry conferences and has conducted university classes in France and Washington DC.
Leveraging her Masters degree in Applied Mathematics / Computer Science from a “Grande Ecole” in France, she started her career building advanced systems using all kinds of technologies — expert systems, rules, optimization, dashboarding and cubes, web search, and beta version of database replication – as well as conducting strategic consulting gigs around change management.
She started her career building advanced systems using all kinds of technologies — expert systems, rules, optimization, dashboarding and cubes, web search, and beta version of database replication. At Cleversys (acquired by Kurt Salmon & Associates), she also conducted strategic consulting gigs mostly around change management.
While playing with advanced software components, she found a passion for technology and joined ILOG (acquired by IBM). She developed a growing interest in Optimization as well as Business Rules. At ILOG, she coined the term BRMS while brainstorming with her Sales counterpart. She led the Presales organization for Telecom in the Americas up until 2000 when she joined Blaze Software (acquired by Brokat Technologies, HNC Software and finally FICO).
Her 360-degree experience allowed her to gain appreciation for all aspects of a software company, giving her a unique perspective on the business. Her technical background kept her very much in touch with technology as she advanced.
She also became addicted to Twitter in the process. She is active on all kinds of social media, always looking for new digital experience!
Outside of work, Carole-Ann loves spending time with her two boys. They grow fruits in their Northern California home and cook all together in the French tradition.
For that reason, we’ve settled on the more manageable question, “which packages are most often installed by normal R users?”
This last question could potentially be answered in a variety of ways. Our current approach uses a convenience sample of installation data that we’ve collected from volunteers in the R community, who kindly agreed to send us a list of the packages they have on their systems. We’ve anonymized this data and compiled a set of metadata-based predictors that allow us to predict the installation probabilities quite well. We’re releasing all of our current work, including the data we have and all of the code we’ve used so far for our exploratory analyses. The contest itself will go live on Kaggle on Sunday and will end four months from Sunday on February 10, 2011. The rules, prizes and official data sets are all described below.
Rules and Prizes
To win the contest, you need to predict the probability that a user U has a package P installed on their system for every pair, (U, P). We’ll assess your performance using ROC methods, which will be evaluated against a held out test data set. The winning team will receive 3 UseR! books of their choosing. In order to win the contest, you’ll have to provide your analysis code to us by creating a fork of our GitHub repository. You’ll also be required to provide a written description of your approach. We’re asking for so much openness from the winning team because we want this contest to serve as a stepping stone for the R community. We’re also hoping that enterprising data hackers will extend the lessons learned through this contest to other programming languages.
His argument of love is not very original though it was first made by these four guys
I am going to argue that “some” R developers should be paid, while the main focus should be volunteers code. These R developers should be paid as per usage of their packages.
Let me expand.
Imagine the following conversation between Ross Ihaka, Norman Nie and Peter Dalgaard.
Norman- Hey Guys, Can you give me some code- I got this new startup.
Ross Ihaka and Peter Dalgaard- Sure dude. Here is 100,000 lines of code, 2000 packages and 2 decades of effort.
Norman- Thanks guys.
Ross Ihaka- Hey, What you gonna do with this code.
Norman- I will better it. Sell it. Finally beat Jim Goodnight and his **** Proc GLM and **** Proc Reg.
Ross- Okay, but what will you give us? Will you give us some code back of what you improve?
Norman – Uh, let me explain this open core …
Peter D- Well how about some royalty?
Norman- Sure, we will throw parties at all conferences, snacks you know at user groups.
Ross – Hmm. That does not sound fair. (walks away in a huff muttering)-He takes our code, sells it and wont share the code
Peter D- Doesnt sound fair. I am back to reading Hamlet, the great Dane, and writing the next edition of my book. I am glad I wrote a book- Ross didnt even write that.
Norman-Uh Oh. (picks his phone)- Hey David Smith, We need to write some blog articles pronto – these open source guys ,man…
———–I think that sums what has been going on in the dynamics of R recently. If Ross Ihaka and R Gentleman had adopted an open core strategy- meaning you can create packages to R but not share the original where would we all be?
At this point if he is reading this, David Smith , long suffering veteran of open source flameouts is rolling his eyes while Tal G is wondering if he will publish this on R Bloggers and if so when or something.
Lets bring in another R veteran- Hadley Wickham who wrote a book on R and also created ggplot. Thats the best quality, most often used graphics package.
In terms of economic utilty to end user- the ggplot package may be as useful if not more as the foreach package developed by Revolution Computing/Analytics.
However lets come to open core licensing ( read it here http://alampitt.typepad.com/lampitt_or_leave_it/2008/08/open-core-licen.html ) which is where the debate is- Revolution takes code- enhances it (in my opinion) substantially with new formats XDF for better efficieny, web services API, and soon coming next year a GUI (thanks in advance , Dr Nie and guys)
and sells this advanced R code to businesses happy to pay ( they are currently paying much more to DR Goodnight and HIS guys)
Why would any sane customer buy it from Revolution- if he could download exactly the same thing from http://r-project.org
Hence the business need for Revolution Analytics to have an enhanced R- as they are using a product based software model not software as a service model.
If Revolution gives away source code of these new enhanced codes to R core team- how will R core team protect the above mentioned intelectual property- given they have 2 decades experience of giving away free code , and back and forth on just code.
Now Revolution also has a marketing budget- and thats how they sponsor some R Core events, conferences, after conference snacks.
How would people decide if they are being too generous or too stingy in their contribution (compared to the formidable generosity of SAS Institute to its employees, stakeholders and even third party analysts).
Would it not be better- IF Revolution can shift that aspect of relationship to its Research and Development budget than it’s marketing budget- come with some sort of incentive for “SOME” developers – even researchers need grants and assistantships, scholarships, make a transparent royalty formula say 17.5 % of the NEW R sales goes to R PACKAGE Developers pool, which in turn examines usage rate of packages and need/merit before allocation- that would require Revolution to evolve from a startup to a more sophisticated corporate and R Core can use this the same way as John M Chambers software award/scholarship
Dont pay all developers- it would be an insult to many of them – say Prof Harrell creator of HMisc to accept – but can Revolution expand its dev base (and prospect for future employees) by even sponsoring some R Scholarships.
And I am sure that if Revolution opens up some more code to the community- they would the rest of the world and it’s help useful. If it cant trust people like R Gentleman with some source code – well he is a board member.
——————————————————————————————–
Now to sum up some technical discussions on NeW R
1) An accepted way of benchmarking efficiencies.
2) Code review and incorporation of efficiencies.
3) Multi threading- Multi core usage are trends to be incorporated.
4) GUIs like R Commander E Plugins for other packages, and Rattle for Data Mining to have focussed (or Deducer). This may involve hiring User Interface Designers (like from Apple 😉 who will work for love AND money ( Even the Beatles charge royalty for that song)
5) More support to cloud computing initiatives like Biocep and Elastic R – or Amazon AMI for using cloud computers- note efficiency arguements dont matter if you just use a Chrome Browser and pay 2 cents a hour for an Amazon Instance. Probably R core needs more direct involvement of Google (Cloud OS makers) and Amazon as well as even Salesforce.com (for creating Force.com Apps). Note even more corporates here need to be involved as cloud computing doesnot have any free and open source infrastructure (YET)
“If something goes wrong with Microsoft, I can phone Microsoft up and have it fixed. With Open Source, I have to rely on the community.”
And the community, as much as we may love it, is unpredictable. It might care about your problem and want to fix it, then again, it may not. Anyone who has ever witnessed something online go “viral”, good or bad, will know what I’m talking about.
Q Whats a movie review doing on a data mining blog? A Because blogs are read by people who ALSO like movies.
Over the Thanksgiving Holiday- I didnt get much Turkey and spent more time reading Tukey, and the only offer I got on Black Friday in Knoxville, East Tennessee was to take a discount for a tanning studio at Kingston Pike, near my house. So you can imagine my trepidition when I decided to go for a movie on Saturday- hoping for better luck.
There are amusing things in Blind Side, especially if you are a brown guy wearing a bright orange U Tenn T Shirt as I was doing. The beautiful game of the movie, as in all sports movie is however overshadowed by Sandro Bullock’s performance as a rich white woman who takes a black teenager under her wing. Despite the innuendo in a Memphis, Tennessee- which is quite realistic. And horrifying for a non American like me to watch. It kind of reminded me when I was the only guy cheering in Austin Texas at the end of the movie “W” -2008.
For non Tennessee football fans, watch as how the game unites all- as how a common God and morality finds rescue for a kid among horrors. And how number 74 discovers his destiny as the guy who protects the quarter back.
This could be the Hollywood version of SlumDog Millionaire of 2009. Nicely crafted. and yet an intelligent movie. For people who don’t like Twilight 🙂 If you have ever felt unsafe while traveling in a poor black neighbourhood watch this movie. If you live in a black poor neighbourhood- then watch it with your homies.
if you ever watched a game of football and marveled at the magnificent heart break of college football. Watch the movie.
As someone said- Football is like the Mafia in the Godfather movie.
I am going to Las Vegas as a guest of SAS Institute for the Data Mining 2009 Conference. ( Note FCC regulations on bloggers come in effective December but my current policies are in ADVERTISE page unchanged since some months now)
With the big heavyweight of analytics, SAS Institute showcases events in both the SAS Global Forum and the Data Mining 2009
conference has a virtual who’s- who of partners there. This includes my friends at Aster Data and Shawn Rogers, Beye Network
in addition to Anne Milley, Senior Product Director. Anne is a frequent speaker for SAS Institute and has shrug off the beginning of the year NY Times spat with R /Open Source. True to their word they did go ahead and launch the SAS/IML with the interface to R – mindful of GPL as well as open source sentiments.
. While SPSS does have a data mining product there is considerable discussion on that help list today on what direction IBM will allow the data mining product to evolve.
Charlie Berger, from Oracle Data Mining , also announced at Oracle World that he is going to launch a GUI based data mining product for free ( or probably Software as a Service Model)- Thanks to Karl Rexer from Rexer Analytics for this tip.
While this is my first trip to Las Vegas ( a change from cold TN weather), I hope to read new stuff on data mining including sessions on blog and text mining and statistical usage of the same. Data Mining continues to be an enduring passion for me even though I need to get maybe a Divine Miracle for my Phd to get funded on that topic.
Also I may have some tweets at #M2009 for you and some video interviews/ photos. Ok- Watch this space.
ps _ We lost to Alabama #2 in the country by two points because 2 punts were blocked by hand which were as close as it gets.
Next week I hope to watch the South Carolina match in Orange Country.
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DECISION STATS 