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DARPA's New Plans: Crowdsource Intel, Edit DNA
Wired News (02/02/10) Drummond, Katie

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) future plans call for crowdsourcing military
intelligence, creating an immune system for Defense Department networks, and
conducting research that could lead to editing soldiers' DNA. DARPA wants to
improve how the m… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on February 7, 2010 at 12:42pm — No Comments

Two new startup ideas: online reputation protection, social network competitive intelligence

#1 Online reputation protection Helping companies find bad comments posted by disgruntled employees or competitors, and fight back by diluting the bad content, via automated posting of positive messages in relevant blogs. Also helping individuals recover from postings (from themselves or other people) that might harm their job prospects. #2 Social network competitive intelligence Traditional measurement companies (Alexa, Quantcast, Compete, Comscore) use old-fashioned and incons… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 30, 2010 at 5:11pm — 1 Comment

Predicting Space Weather

By Tara Laskowski Scientific theories have discussed how a butterfly in Asia flapping its wings can lead to a tornado on the other side of the world. So it’s no surprise that Mason researchers in astrophysics are examining a hot eruption on the surface of the sun that causes GPS systems on Earth to go haywire. Eruptions on the surface of the sun, some as long as five times the size of Earth, are highly magnetized and emit radiation, all of which can damage man-made satellites. Recently, resea… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 30, 2010 at 4:48pm — No Comments

The Statistician vs. the Computer Sciencist: stochastic vs. algorithmic models

Most statisticians are now working either on data-driven / distribution-free models, or automatically and efficiently testing / maintaining / updating a large number of models via goodness-of-fit criteria. I think your comment describes a type of statistician that was popular 30 years ago, but not the modern computational statistician. While computational statistics is identical to algorithmic modeling from a result / performance point of view, it has the advantage of providing simple interpret… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 26, 2010 at 11:00pm — No Comments

Is E Miner better than Base SAS?

Is Enterprise Miner 5.3 better tool than base SAS ? I have come across posts that stress about incorrect statistics in some statistical nodes. Any information on same , please share. Continue

Added by Archana Mangtani on March 6, 2009 at 12:29am — 5 Comments

Colourmining a Website Page

Colour can be used to track a website user's eyes as he or she navigates a web page, and this analysis can help a website owner re-design his or her website. If you do a Google search for 'heat maps' and select the 'images' option, many .jpg and .gif images of web pages with a coloured heat map superimposed over it will apppear. Each heat map colour attempts to quantify the length of time (usually in seconds or milliseconds) that a web user's eyes focus in a particular area of a web page. Genera… Continue

Added by Tom Wolfer on January 23, 2010 at 3:30pm — No Comments

Comscore Blackmail: Pay Us $10,000 Or We'll Keep Under-Reporting Your Traffic

From: Henry Blodget | Jan. 22, 2010, 7:09 AM Comscore has finally caved to a decade of complaints from web publishers that its traffic estimates woefully undercount site traffic, thus producing a vast disparity between Comscore numbers and the numbers the sites have in their logs. Now, Comscore is finally going to change the way it counts traffic, thus, hopefully, bringing the numbers more in line with reality. (Comscore extrapolates overall usage from a relatively small panel of web users, w… Continue

Added by Sun on January 23, 2010 at 10:05am — 1 Comment

Mining the Cloud? Are You Allowed?

Posted by James Kobielus on January 13, 2010

I recently came across a trade-press article with the headline “Mining the Cloud.” The cynic in me immediately issued a silent scoff: How is that different from “crawling the Web”? Are we just mapping old wine to shinier new bottles? Or is there something different here?

But, seeing as how I too

… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 21, 2010 at 11:07pm — No Comments

Next Best Models: The Process Agility Equation

Posted by James Kobielus on January 14, 2010

You never know what’s coming at you next, which is why process agility is so important. Your organization must have a ready response for anything. And you must make sure that every process participant can identify, at their level, what that response might be, so they can take appropriate action.

I was speaki

… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 21, 2010 at 11:11pm — No Comments

AnalyticBridge Think Tank: Where Decision Makers Meet Creative Experts

Overview, Getting Started

Our Think Tank is the platform where decision makers meet creative experts to ask business questions. Both decision makers and experts are carefully chosen.

To become a member, you must first join AnalyticBridge, then apply online at no cost. Creative experts are talented, recognized leader

… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 17, 2010 at 1:30pm — No Comments

Misconceptions about statistics

I was reading the article Gambling versus Probability: Predictive Analytics Requires Advanced Skills published by Thomas Rathburn in the B-Eyed network. Here's the section that I found to be filled with wrong information: Traditional statistical analysis is often of limited value. It is not that these tools are somehow flawed. Rather, it is that they are overly simplistic and, in many cases inappropriate for the task of mod… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 14, 2010 at 11:30am — 2 Comments

Can we do without analytics?

When you factor in the costs (employee salaries, consultants, software, etc.) can Analytics truly provide a lift? Or can business successfully operate and compete without analytics, using decisions based on gut feelings, expert opinions and guesses? Should students be discouraged to pursue analytic studies? Is return on analytics higher for large companies than for startups, or does it depend on the choice of solution (SAS EM for large companies, R for small companies)? There's at least one are… Continue

Added by Sun on January 9, 2010 at 10:30pm — 4 Comments

Modern vs. old fashioned web metrics and KPI's

Page views, click-through rates, uniques, visits, conversions are old fashioned metrics. They are still widely used because most billing systems still rely on these metrics. But let's say that you run a niche social network, and revenue is generated from advertising. The old-fashioned way to think: the more users, the more members, the more page views, and the more money you can make. This is true: all these metrics are proxies for revenue, as long as you filter out non human traffic in your st… Continue

Added by Titus on January 9, 2010 at 10:44am — No Comments

The tragedy of anti-data leadership and dataphobia

Posted by James Standen on 1/07/10 • Categorized as Data Quality, Reality Check, data culture There has been a lot of discussion in the last year or so about how important data analysis is becoming. IBM made a major move into data analytics by establishing a new organisation "Business Analytics & Optimization Services" with 4000 people in it. There was the much quoted Hal Varian of Google who predicted that the sexy new job this century will be some sort of data analyst/statistician. But… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 8, 2010 at 12:16am — No Comments

5 Things You Can Learn About Analysis from the Intelligence Community

Abstract Businesses have a large and growing need to analyze data. This is no easy task today with the exploding volumes of data pouring in from everywhere, and the enormous pressure to turn these mountains of data into information that can be acted upon quickly. It is no surprise that organizations spend over $15B annually on Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Mining technologies. But with all of the focus on infrastructure technologies, there is little emphasis on the art of analysis… Continue

Added by Tony Agresta on January 5, 2010 at 8:44pm — No Comments

Detecting Novelty in Twitter Posts

(Original post in Lifeanalytics) A question one could come up with is the following : How can we easily identify and extract novel information from the web? Although we could apply this "novelty detection" into many areas i would like to discuss for now the idea of semi-automatically identifying novelty among posts on Twitter. Let's take for example the IPhone. Thousands o… Continue

Added by Themos Kalafatis on January 5, 2010 at 3:30am — No Comments

Advanced Analytics Predictions For 2010

By James Kobielus, Information Management Blogs, December 15, 2009 As we bid adieu to one decade and move into the next, it’s important to catch our collective breath and to take a quick look ahead. Here are some quick thoughts on the trends that will shape advanced analytics in the year to come. These trends will set the stage for thoroughgoing transformation of business intelligence (BI), data warehousing (DW), predictive analytics (PA), data mining (DM), business activity monitoring (BAM), c… Continue

Added by Vincent Granville on January 1, 2010 at 5:00pm — 1 Comment

#28: Here's a thought...

An occasional series in which a review of recent posts on SmartData Collective reveals the following nuggets: To make the most of analytics... In-database/in-warehouse analytics will become more and more important and the analytical processing of streaming data likewise. However, the way data is stored in warehouses will have to change, too, not just the way analytics are done. Too many warehouses and marts today store summary data, rollups or data where the crucial time dimension is obs… Continue

Added by Brian Roger on December 29, 2009 at 11:17pm — No Comments

Is Believing in Behavioral Targeting Like Believing in Santa?

By Augustine Fou, ClickZ, Dec 17, 2009. Sponsored by Responsys. Coincidentally, or not, this week an investor, an entrepreneur, a vendor, and a writer each enthused about behavioral targeting. They seemed to all believe this was the future of advertising. But while I do believe in the demonstrated benefits of behavioral targeting, I couldn't help but wonder whether believing in it was like believing in Santa -- something you do when you're a kid, but grow out of, hopefully, at some point. Past… Continue

Added by Sun on December 25, 2009 at 7:58pm — No Comments

Analytics 3.0. What is it? What are the risks and opportunities?

What is it? Software accessible online, via your web browser, instead of available as a package installed on your desktop or on your company's network. Also, software accessible online that can run automatically in the background via API calls. This is SaaS for analytics. For instance, one could install a copy of SAS on her web server, and everybody with an Internet connection could access it in batch mode (API) or via a user interface if a GUI is created. SAS code could be executed fro… Continue

Added by Sun on December 25, 2009 at 1:00pm — 2 Comments