A Dare for Analytics Bloggers in 2011

A new challenge for R , SAS and all techie bloggers-

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/challenge-for-2011-want-to-blog-more-often/

As part of the DailyPost, we’re launching two campaigns:

  • Post a Day 2011: Post something to your blog every single day through 2011
  • Post a Week 2011: Post to your blog at least once a week through 2011

Signing up is simple – do the following:

  1. Post on your blog, right now, that you’re participating
  2. (You can grab a sample post from dailypost.wordpress.com)
  3. Use the tag postaday2011 or postaweek2011 in your posts (tips on tagging here)
  4. Go to dailypost.wordpress.com
  5. Subscribe to dailypost.wordpress.com– you’ll get reminders and inspirations every day to help you bring your full potential to your WordPress blog!

 

Do you write a blog or own a website?

Well how about taking up this challenge?

Who Dares-    Wins

Game On!!!

Search, Sports,Social Media,SlideShares, Scribd

An image of a house fly eye surface by using S...
Image via Wikipedia

Some slideshare.net presentations I really liked.

A tutorial on SEO and SEM-

Carole Ann Matignon deals with optimization and scheduling, rules in the…….NFL!

 

 

Carole, We are waiting for the sequel on  analytics on football and the beer game.

Social Media Screw-Ups

Social Media doesnt matter at all- Social Media matters a lot- Still undecided? Take a look

Slideshare is a great VISUAL interface on sharing content. I liked Google Docs embedding as well, but Matt Mullenberg and Matt Cutts seemed to have stopped talking. Mullenberg is going like Zuckenberg, not willing to align with Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin. or maybe they are afraid of Big Brother Brin. Google loves Java and Javascript (even when they are getting sued for it)- while Matt M  hates it- bad for RIA I guess.

Scribd also is a great way to share content- and probably is small enough for. WordPress.com to allow embedding

Thats the reason why I sometimes prefer Scribd for sharing my poetry to Slideshare and Google Docs. Also I like the enhanced analytics and the much easier and evolved interface for reading. Slideshare is much more successful than Scribd because it is open to sharing with everyone- scribd tries to get you to register …;)

(* Also see MIT’s beer game at http://beergame.mit.edu/ which is ahem different from Duke’s beer games).

 

 

Going Deap : Algols in Python

Logo of PyPy
Image via Wikipedia

Here is an important new step in Python- the established statistical programming language (used to be really pushed by SPSS in pre-IBM days and the rPy package integrates R and Python).

Well the news  ( http://www.kdnuggets.com/2010/10/eap-evolutionary-algorithms-in-python.html ) is the release of Distributed Evolutionary Algorithms in Python. If your understanding of modeling means running regression and iterating it- you may need to read some more.  If you have felt frustrated at lack of parallelization in statistical software as well as your own hardware constraints- well go DEAP (and for corporate types the licensing is

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html ).

http://code.google.com/p/deap/

DEAP

DEAP is intended to be an easy to use distributed evolutionary algorithm library in the Python language. Its two main components are modular and can be used separately. The first module is a Distributed Task Manager (DTM), which is intended to run on cluster of computers. The second part is the Evolutionary Algorithms in Python (EAP) framework.

DTM

DTM is a distributed task manager that is able to spread workload over a buch of computers using a TCP or a MPI connection.

DTM include the following features:

 

EAP

Features

EAP includes the following features:

  • Genetic algorithm using any imaginable representation
    • List, Array, Set, Dictionary, Tree, …
  • Genetic programing using prefix trees
    • Loosely typed, Strongly typed
    • Automatically defined functions (new v0.6)
  • Evolution strategies (including CMA-ES)
  • Multi-objective optimisation (NSGA-II, SPEA-II)
  • Parallelization of the evaluations (and maybe more) (requires python2.6 and preferably python2.7) (new v0.6)
  • Genealogy of an evolution (that is compatible with NetworkX) (new v0.6)
  • Hall of Fame of the best individuals that lived in the population (new v0.5)
  • Milestones that take snapshot of a system regularly (new v0.5)

 

Documentation

See the eap user’s guide for EAP 0.6 documentation.

Requirement

The most basic features of EAP requires Python2.5 (we simply do not offer support for 2.4). In order to use multiprocessing you will need Python2.6 and to be able to combine the toolbox and the multiprocessing module Python2.7 is needed for its support to pickle partial functions.

Projects using EAP

If you want your project listed here, simply send us a link and a brief description and we’ll be glad to add it.

and from the wordpress.com blog (funny how people like code.google.com but not blogger.google.com anymore) at http://deapdev.wordpress.com/

EAP is part of the DEAP project, that also includes some facilities for the automatic distribution and parallelization of tasks over a cluster of computers. The D part of DEAP, called DTM, is under intense development and currently available as an alpha version. DTM currently provides two and a half ways to distribute workload on a cluster or LAN of workstations, based on MPI and TCP communication managers.

This public release (version 0.6) is more complete and simpler than ever. It includes Genetic Algorithms using any imaginable representation, Genetic Programming with strongly and loosely typed trees in addition to automatically defined functions, Evolution Strategies (including Covariance Matrix Adaptation), multiobjective optimization techniques (NSGA-II and SPEA2), easy parallelization of algorithms and much more like milestones, genealogy, etc.

We are impatient to hear your feedback and comments on that system at .

Best,

François-Michel De Rainville
Félix-Antoine Fortin
Marc-André Gardner
Christian Gagné
Marc Parizeau

Laboratoire de vision et systèmes numériques
Département de génie électrique et génie informatique
Université Laval
Quebec City (Quebec), Canada

and if you are new to Python -sigh here are some statistical things (read ad-van-cED analytics using Python) by a slideshare from Visual numerics (pre Rogue Wave acquisition)

Also see,

http://code.google.com/p/deap/wiki/SimpleExample

 

 

 

Microsoft Online Games

No, this is not about the X Box kind of games. It is about Microsoft ‘s tactical shift in the online space from going it alone, and building stuff itself, –to partnering, and sometimes investing and exiting business.

In Blogs- It recently announced a migration of MS Live Spaces to WordPress.com – It gives Automattic 30 million more users- no small change consider there were 26 million existing WP users.

Microsoft Messenger, which is the oldest online app in the suite, now provides instant messaging services to about 350 million users, and from now on Windows Live Writer works specifically with the WordPress.com blog service by default. Hopefully Skype, and Google Voice will show MS the way to monitize that business app yet.

Google buying blogger-blogspot seems to have done little, but given Biz Stone room to create another content disruption-Twitter.

With the round of lawsuits by proxy, in Android -Motorola, or for acquisitions – MS is just doing what Marc Anderseen (who’s apparently a better VC than Paul Allen was), Sun and co did to it in the nineties.

Google seems to be regretting putting a spade in the Yahoo acquisition- that would have tied up a big chunk of Idle MS cash- leaving it little room for niche investments (like the 250 mill that helped Facebook ramp up in time).

The real surprise here could be Apple- it has shown little interest in cloud computing- and it seems to be testing the waters with Ping. But Apple sure smells competition- and Android is doing to Iphone what Windows did to the Mac in the early 1990’s.

Google lacks presence in online gaming (despite it’s own Zynga investment)- and needs to start monetizing properties like Android OS (say 10$ for every phone license ??), Google Maps (as an app for GPS) and Google Voice. Indeed it may be time for the big G to start thinking of spinning off atleast some products- earning better returns, while retaining control (dual stock splits) and killing those anti trust lawyer fees forever.

As the Ancient Chinese said, May you live in interesting times. Fun to watch the online games people play.

 

 

The auto-suggest link/tags for WP.com blogs

WordPress.com blogs have a great new option for generating tags, and links and thus improving their search engine optimization for posts.

Just go to Users-Personal Settings- and check the options shown. Thats it every time you write a post it suggests links and tags. Links are helpful for your readers (like Wikipedia links to understand dense technical jargon, or associated websites). Tags help to classify your contents so that all visitors to the web site including spiders ,search engines and your readers can search it better.

The bad thing is I need to go back to all 1025 posts on this site and auto generate tags for the archives ! Oh well. Great collaboration between zementa and Automattic for this new feature.

Better Data Visualization in WordPress.com Stats

WordPress.com Stats is the analytical software which helps bloggers on WP.com hosted blogs. It recently underwent a revamp in design-

Note a simple change from Line to Histogram charts, and added Tabs can add so much value to data.

However WP.com really needs to addin Geo-Coded Stats (Visitors from where) and Some level of Campaign Tracking (similar to Goals in Google Analytics)

Earlier WP Stats

Now WP Stats

Amcharts- Cool Charts Web Editor

Here is a really good website if you want to create charts for your website. It offers both flash as well as Silverlight charts.

http://extra.amcharts.com/editor/line/

This is an example of a Line Chart. Note since I am on wordpress.com I cant use Javascript so have pasted the screenshot-All you can do is paste the data from csv file, and even the swf file is hosted on their servers.