Peerside blogs

Tweets from October Week 3

ppower — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:08:03 +0000

Most noted tweets for the 3th week of October 2009

Excel as the iPod of Downloaded Data « Gobán Saor http://bit.ly/4sa8dw about 16 hours ago from TweetDeck
The Future Is Big Data in the Cloud http://bit.ly/1gwP02 about 16 hours ago from TweetDeck
From natch.net: - an encounter with the TSA and the craziness of airport security rules - http://bit.ly/16oBvo 11:39 AM Oct 23rd from TweetDeck
Save the planet: eat a dog? | Stuff.co.nz http://bit.ly/1Rmeei 6:39 PM Oct 22nd from TweetDeck
RT @gilbane: More on NPR's Create Once Publish Everywhere "Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization"http://bit.ly/qudK4 4:36 PM Oct 22nd from TweetDeck
Worth Reading - Morgan Stanley and Mobile Trends - 1Bn mobile data users by 2013 - http://bit.ly/1dNDmO 5:01 AM Oct 22nd from TweetDeck
Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" Goes To Court - ZL Technologies Lawsuit - http://bit.ly/3VzwaN. Risky, if not foolish, strategy imho3:13 AM Oct 21st from TweetDeck
Project Gemini renamed PowerPivot for Excel 2010 - simple tool to analyse massive amounts of data plus sharePoint integration.7:14 PM Oct 19th from TweetDeck
Refresh Dublin - Trinity Science Gallery - Thursday October 29th, 2009 @6pm 3:43 PM Oct 19th from TweetDeck
RT @timoreilly: Wow: connection between increase in consumer debt television-watching patterns starting in 1950s:http://bit.ly/1kkpHw 2:24 PM Oct 19th from TweetDeck
#tdpug Teradata to promote open source user defined functions and portlets via their developer exchange2:08 PM Oct 19th from TweetDeck

The Problem with Thinking Outside the Box in a Corporation

ppower — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:59:06 +0100

Sometimes thinking outside the box means your ideas seen as blasphemy by the established status quo … a challenge if your success is measured by that same status quo.

del.icio.us Tags: disruption,thinking out side the box,status quo,innovation

Crowdsourcing Translation with Captchas

ppower — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:28:27 +0100

A reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

Every day the reCaptcha team serve over 30 million randomly chosen pairs of words from scanned books and newspapers to users around the world. For an overview of the reCaptcha system and how this min Mechanical Turk works check out the interview with co founder Luis Von Ahn.

Modern Examples of Disruption: The Good Enough Revolution

ppower — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:33:01 +0100

As an avid tracker of new, and particularly disruptive, technologies I despair every time someone reads the excellent Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen and announces that the pattern he highlights is no longer relevant, the examples are “obviously” old school companies that didn’t “get it” and today and of course “our company” is immune etc.

As you may have guessed I fundamentally believe in, and am a fan of, the disruptive cycle so I was glad to see the recent Wired article The Good Enough Revolution – When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine which highlights a number of modern examples including

The Pure Digital Flip vs the Digital Video Camera
Skype vs Traditional Fixed Line Telephone
MP3 vs High Fidelity Audio
The Predator vs the Specialized A10 Fighter
Kaiser Micro Clinics vs Traditional Hospitals

If you believe that every industry at some point will be disrupted by a good enough technology then the challenge is in spotting that technology or solution and working out how you harness ( not necessarily counter ) it.

What in your industry is cheap, doesn’t meet the specialized 20% of features you market and pretty simple to use ? If you can think of examples then they may just be good enough to disrupt your existence if not your entire market.

Worth reading/listening too:

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fall [INNOVATORS DILEMMA]

The Innovator's Dilemma Abridged on 2 CDs in Box

Peerside: The Innovators Dilemma in Summary

del.icio.us Tags: Innovators Dilemma,Disruption,Innovation,Case Studies

All 12 YCombinator Essays in one PDF

ppower — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 22:37:13 +0100

Sure you can get them from the YCombinator site themselves but when you’re out and about and want to think differently dip into these – the YCombinator Startup Essays in PDF

The Ultimate Laundry Service ? Purple Tie

ppower — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:52:55 +0100

Last night I was introduced to the purple tie laundry service by my neighbors' as a big, and very silent, purple and white truck turned in our drive way. Apparently not only do they offer a personal pick up and delivery service to your home anywhere in the bay area they also have a corporate service where they do the same from work locations and for a reasonable price. They also offer shoe and bag repair and film processing. All those awkward drop off and collect in a few days chores that just eat into time unless they’re literally next door to your home or work and open at decent non work hours.

The more things change - the more they stay the same ...

ppower — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:45:54 +0100

I stumbled upon this early 1960s interview with Ivan Sutherland about the invention of the revolutionary Sketchpad system.

The video is actually quite humbling ( for techies at least ) when you consider the number of groundbreaking concepts and boundaries his team pushed at the time - object orientated systems, graphical UIs, light pens, interactive problem solving etc.

For me the most interesting part of the interview is the prelude where Ivan outlines why the Sketchpad system is so revolutionary - particularly because it's a nirvana we still strive for - the day we can lean on a computer to not only find but solve problems we didn't even know existed. I particularly like his vision of a incremental feedback and interaction between the user and software program - something I believe we'll need more and more of to cope with the wave of data we're experiencing today.

Remember this is all 1963 - over 40 years ago !

"You will see a designer solve a problem step by step and he will not at the outset know precisely what his problem is nor will he know exactly how to solve it and little by little he will begin to investigate ideas and the computer and he will be in cooperation, in the fullest of cooperation, in this work.

The conventional way, the old way, of solving problems with a computer has been to understand the problem very,very, well indeed and moreover to know at the very outset to understand what steps have been required to solve the problem - so the computer has been nothing more than a very elaborate calculating machine. But now we're making the computer be more like a human assistant and the computer will seem to have some intelligence, it doesn't really - only the intelligence that we put in it - but it will seem to have intelligence."

See the interview here on youtube.

Keeping it Simple - Code Reviews

ppower — Tue, 26 May 2009 06:44:22 +0100

From OSNews Comics

del.icio.us Tags: comics, humour, software, code reviews

Win 1000 USD in the UCSD Data Mining Contest (Students only)

ppower — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:26:10 +0100

As most modern data wranglers know - big data and machine learning are the new black and on everyone’s future career path whether they like it or not. The folks at UC San Diago along with FICO are running a data mining contest where the challenge is to maximise accuracy of binary classification of a provided ecommerce data set. The prizes are nothing like the famed Netflix treasure and it’s limited to college students but even then, like the contest flyer points out, the best way to really learn machine learning is with practical experience – learn by doing.

So, if you’re interested read the contest flyer below and check out the 2009 UCSD Data Mining Contest home page

Welcome to the 2009 UCSD Data Mining Contest sponsored by FICO.

FICO has sponsored the data mining contest since 2004, which provides undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to test out their data mining skills on a real-world data set. FICO pioneered the use of predictive modelling to represent and explain the underlying relationships in data and make predictions and classifications about future events.

This year's contest consists of two classification tasks based on e-commerce transaction anomaly data. The first task is to maximize accuracy of binary classification on a test data set, given a fully labelled training data set. The performance metric is the lift at 20% review rate. The second task is similar to task 1, but provides a couple of additional fields that have potential predictive information.

FICO and UCSD will award prizes to first, second and third place winners in four categories: Task 1 undergraduate; Task 1 graduate; Task 2 undergraduate and Task 2 graduate. There is a total of $4,000 in prize money for each task, for a total of $8,000.

We launched the contest on May 15, 2009. The contest will end July 15, 2009. The contest is international. All current undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers studying full-time, in residence at an accredited university or college may compete for prizes. Others may compete but will not be eligible for prizes.

The UCSD Data Mining Contest offers students a chance to test their data mining skill on a real-world data set.

Teams will compete to build a system that correctly classifies data from an e-commerce website.
See the datasets page for details.

There are many reasons to participate:

Practical experience is the best way to learn.

Success in the competition looks great on a resume (graduate admissions, jobs, fellowships).

Participating is easy, and we encourage everyone to try!

The flyer for this competition.

The contest forum is now up and running. Learn from others and get your own ideas out there!

del.icio.us Tags: machine learning, classification, big data, data, prize, contest, innovation

Back to Blogging and Switching to Wordpress

ppower — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 23:00:54 +0000

Recently I've been focused very much on work related projects and some very cool stuff I'm hoping works out next year. Coming up to Christmas I'm hoping to turn my work brain off, clean up my online identity, reduce more paper from my life and get back to blogging - with Wordpress. I had considered spending the time to pick up the most recent Drupal release and updating this blog but recent experienes of other bloggers upgrading with module incompatabilities and a nagging attraction to both Buddypress and the new Wordpress UI convinced me to take the leap. Hopefully it's worth it and I'll end up with a cleaner blog that I can maintain with less effort. For anyone not up to date with what Wordpress are doing check out the recent Coltrane release