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Sun's Blog (21)

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

Is Big Data at a tipping point?

by Michael E. Driscoll | January 9, 2009 (5/18/09 update - included an overdue reference to linked data!) Stuart Kauffman, in one of his books about complexity, discusses tipping points in networks — what he calls a phase transitions — by way of buttons. Suppose you’re sitting on a floor strewn with 400 buttons, and you begin tying them together with pieces of string at random. At first, you have just pairs of buttons. Then, you have clusters of threes, which in turn get tied into ever larger… Continue

Added by Sun on December 25, 2009 at 12:26pm — No Comments

The Three Sexy Skills of Data Geeks

Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, was interviewed a few months ago, and said the following in the McKinsey Quarterly: “The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill.” In prepping for tonite’s talk at the Google IO Ignite event, this quote inspired me to muse about how sex appeal and statistics might go toget… Continue

Added by Sun on December 17, 2009 at 1:27am — 1 Comment

Google Analytics 'illegal' say German regulators

GERMANY— Data protection officials in Germany are warning website owners that the use of Google Analytics to track people’s online behaviour is against the law, reports national newspaper Die Zeit. Google’s web analytics tool can be used for free by any website, and according to research agency Xamit it is used by around 13% of German sites. But because web users are not given the chance to opt out of having their activity tracked, the federal data protection commissioner, together with regiona… Continue

Added by Sun on November 26, 2009 at 1:59pm — No Comments

SAIC has predictive analytics system ready for market

Engineering giant Scientific Applications International (SAIC) in McLean, Va, Friday told us it completed work on software that predicts failures in distribution and transmission systems days, weeks or months before they occur. Called Distribution Monitoring System, it is ready for release after nearly a year of research, said project lead Paul Halpin in an exclusive interview. “Making predictions like this is a very, very hard problem and we've done some really smart things to solve it,” said… Continue

Added by Sun on November 10, 2009 at 9:00pm — No Comments

Economists Seek to Fix a Defect in Data That Overstates the Nation's Vigor

by Louis Uchitelle Monday, November 9, 2009 A widening gap between data and reality is distorting the government's picture of the country's economic health, overstating growth and productivity in ways that could affect the political debate on issues like trade, wages and job creation. The shortcomings of the data-gathering system came through loud and clear here Friday and Saturday at a first-of-its-kind gathering of economists from academia and government determined to come up with a more acc… Continue

Added by Sun on November 10, 2009 at 1:27am — No Comments

Click Fraud Not Dead Yet

By Marc Poirier, Search Engine Watch, Sep 18, 2009 I've been concerned with click fraud since the beginning of PPC times. That is probably because I was one of the early victims of click fraud -- once with Overture, and again with the early Google AdWords. This was back in 2002 and 2003. Since then, I haven't witnessed any serious instance of suspicious traffic coming from Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft. Obviously, that doesn't mean there's no problem, far from it. But I honestly thought click fr… Continue

Added by Sun on November 8, 2009 at 4:27pm — 1 Comment

IBM Betting Big on Business Analytics

Source: TheStreet.com ARMONK, N.Y. (TheStreet) -- IBM(IBM Quote) is predicting that business analytics software will be one of 2010's hottest technologies, as companies attempt to squeeze as much value as possible out of their data. "It's a market space that is growing substantially faster than other market areas," Steve Mills, IBM's senior vice president of software, told TheStreet. "Coming out of recession, hopefully, companies want to be more predictive." Business analytics software is use… Continue

Added by Sun on October 28, 2009 at 12:08am — 1 Comment

InterContinental Hotels Group to optimise marketing investments with business analytics

Hotel group InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) has signed a five-year deal with Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) for its Test & Learn Management System. IHG has selected APT’s solution for its marketing programmes, guest service, hotel management, and capital investments. It is going to be used for seven hotel brands, including Holiday Inn, InterContinental, and Crowne Plaza. The solution enables users to identify statistically significant results and build models directly from these… Continue

Added by Sun on October 28, 2009 at 12:06am — No Comments

Business Analytics helps telco provider save millions

One Communications calls SAS to uncover billing errors in complex mobile operator chargeback network [UKPRwire, Wed Oct 14 2009] One Communications, the largest privately-held regional provider of telecommunications services in the United States, depends on SAS® Business Analytics to quickly and efficiently monitor the system of inter-operator compensation for calls switched between networks. The result: $500,000 saved in the first year and several million dollars since. With annual revenue of… Continue

Added by Sun on October 28, 2009 at 12:05am — No Comments

Unexpected consequences of mandatory health insurance

If the plan is to require every US (legal) resident to purchase an insurance, the following will happen:

To enforce the new policy, the government will have to punish people who can't afford or don't want coverage with a tax penalty. Here we have three major categories of uninsured people:
- Group 1: People who don't make enough money - they will get insurance for free or at a steep discount.

… Continue

Added by Sun on September 27, 2009 at 2:30pm — 4 Comments

From Terabytes to Petabytes: Computer Scientists Develop New Hybrid Database System

From Terabytes to Petabytes: Computer Scientists Develop New Hybrid Database System Yale University (08/26/09) Muzzin, Suzanne Taylor Yale computer scientists recently demonstrated HadoopDB, their new open source system for managing huge amounts of data, at the VLDB conference in Lyon, France. The computer scientists used the gathering to discuss the results of a performance analysis and to provide an overview of its characteristics, run-time performance, loading time, fault tolerance, and scal… Continue

Added by Sun on August 28, 2009 at 12:55pm — No Comments

Defying Experts, Rogue Computer Code Still Lurks

New York Times (08/26/09) Markoff, John Conficker, a rogue software program that was discovered spreading across the Internet last November, continues to baffle top security experts working to eradicate the program and discover its origin and purpose. Conficker uses a flaw in Windows software to co-opt machines and connect them to a virtual computer that can be remotely controlled by the software's creators. More than 5 million computers, including government, business, and home computers in mo… Continue

Added by Sun on August 28, 2009 at 12:30pm — No Comments

And You Thought a Prescription Was Private - Data Mining of Prescription Records

From Milt Freudenheim, New York Times MORE than 10 years after she tried without success to have a baby, Marcy Campbell Krinsk is still receiving painful reminders in her mail. The ads and promotions started after she bought fertility drugs at a pharmacy in San Diego. Marketers got hold of her name, and she found coupons and samples in her mail that shadowed the growth of an imaginary child — at first, for Pampers and baby formula, then for discounts on family photos, and all the way through t… Continue

Added by Sun on August 11, 2009 at 8:51pm — No Comments

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics

Source: Steve Lohr, New York Times MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls “all the computer and math stuff” that was part of the job. Carrie Grimes, senior staff engineer at Google, uses statistical analysis of data to help improve the company's search engine. “People think of field archa… Continue

Added by Sun on August 6, 2009 at 10:00am — 3 Comments

Just Browsing? A Web Store May Follow You Out the Door (from the New York Times)

By RANDALL STROSS Published: May 16, 2009 IF you try on a sweater in a department store dressing room, but choose not to buy it, a persistent sales clerk won’t pursue you into the street yelling, “Hey, are you sure?” Nor will you receive a call at your home the next day to check again if you want to complete the purchase. But in the online world, visitors to Web stores who touch the goods but leave without buying may be subjected instantaneously to “remarketing,” in the form of nagging e-mail… Continue

Added by Sun on June 5, 2009 at 9:33am — No Comments

Approximate Solutions to Linear Regression Problems

Here we assume that we have a first order solution to a regression problem, in the form

Y = Σ w_i R_i,

where Y is the response, w_i are the regression coefficients, and R_i are the independent variables. The number of variables is very high, and the independent variables are highly correlated. We want to improve the model by considering a second order regression of the

… Continue

Added by Sun on March 4, 2009 at 11:23am — No Comments

How to Cure the Economy with an Unusual Markov Chain with Three States

The three different states where money can be found are:
- Category A: Individuals and companies, except financial institutions involved in credit, debt elimination, investments, cash deposits and savings (credit card, mortgage companies and banks)
- Category B: companies involved in credit, debt elimination, investments, cash deposits and savings (credit card, mortgage companies and banks)
- Category C: blackhole - money that evaporated from category A or B as a res

… Continue

Added by Sun on January 14, 2009 at 11:17pm — 4 Comments

The Commoditization of Analytics

By Alberto Roldan, owner of R & R Analytics Source: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dxs2crw_2d2sn4n9d The delivery of profit-boosting initiatives in a downturn economy has never been greater for Finance and Information Technology executives. The pressure on CFO and CIO to deliver cost-efficient and profit enhancing technologies are increasing daily. Executives must be able to know what areas have standardized process that c… Continue

Added by Sun on December 25, 2008 at 6:00pm — No Comments