Brenda Michelson

Active Info: Data Scientists vs. Business Intelligence Pros; Predicting Linsanity

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My latest posts on Active Information:

Data Scientists & Business Intelligence Pros, what’s the difference?

In a way, you could say data science leans towards innovation, while business intelligence leans towards optimization. Each are critical for business, government and societal progress.

Predicting Linsanity

For the vast majority, Lin’s breakthrough is a complete surprise. However, for numbers hobbyist Ed Weiland, Lin’s breakthrough was merely a matter of time.

Link Collection — February 12, 2012

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  • It’s Time to Kill the Elephant | cloudeventprocessing.com

    Colin on the need to break free of batch based MapReduce: “All of these recent shifts from companies like Google, Yahoo, and others no longer see a competitive advantage in batch based MapReduce. The future has arrived, let’s look at some evidence…”

    tags: continuousquery mapreduce hadoop realtime

  • Suffering-oriented programming – thoughts from the red planet – thoughts from the red planet

    Excellent post / advice:

    “I follow a style of development that greatly reduces the risk of big projects like Storm. I call this style “suffering-oriented programming.” Suffering-oriented programming can be summarized like so: don’t build technology unless you feel the pain of not having it. It applies to the big, architectural decisions as well as the smaller everyday programming decisions. Suffering-oriented programming greatly reduces risk by ensuring that you’re always working on something important, and it ensures that you are well-versed in a problem space before attempting a large investment.

    I have a mantra for suffering-oriented programming: “First make it possible. Then make it beautiful. Then make it fast.””

    tags: development storm pragmatism iteration

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Link Collection — February 5, 2012

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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Active Info: Software Architect lessons, Data-driven problem solving

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My latest posts on Active Information. It’d be fair to say I’m more focused on raising ideas than hit counts.

Software Architect Lessons from Amazon’s DynamoDB

I took a bit of a tangent (shocking!) on the DynamoDB announcement, pulling lessons from Werner Vogels’ recounting of the DynamoDB genesis that every software architect should embrace.

More data, more collaboration, more power.

In another showing of me being me, I ferret out a counter intuitive idea on the human change of data-driven decision-making.

The official excerpt:

“When you think about the human resistance in adopting data-driven decision-making, or really any change, at the root is the me question. What is the impact on my job, my span of control, my future opportunities?”

Link Collection — January 29, 2012

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  • The Rise of the New Groupthink – NYTimes.com

    “Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:

    “Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

    tags: creativity woz nytimes groupthink

  • The Synergist | Matthew E. May

    “Sounds like a Marvel Comics action hero, right? But having launched countless creative teams, I know from experience that when they’re in the throes of team hell, they in fact need a hero: someone with a special talent for being at once the glue and the grease that keeps the machine working at peak effectiveness. Someone who can lead them to predictable success.

    That’s where the “Synergist” comes in.”

    tags: synergy synergist matthewmay

  • The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the

    The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

    tags: creativity

  • Enterprise Hadoop: Big data processing made easier | Business Intelligence – InfoWorld

    Review of test drive: Amazon, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM and MapR

    tags: hadoop

  • AggregateOrientedDatabase

    Martin Fowler on need to mix and match db persistence models and programming models. Follow the link for PolyglotPersistence.

    “This is part of the argument for PolyglotPersistence – use aggregate-oriented databases when you are manipulating clear aggregates (especially if you are running on a cluster) and use relational databases (or a graph database) when you want to manipulate that data in different ways.”

    tags: nosql martinfowler

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Active Info: Football and Weekend Data Warriors

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This week on Active Information, I expanded on a random thought that popped into my head while watching the Patriots-Broncos game. Go Pats!

Football and Weekend Data Warriors

Fantasy sports is an $800 million business, attracting 29.6 million players in the US. That’s 30 million people investing leisure time in the study and application of data analytics… [read the post]

 

Active Info: If only there were an algorithm for that…

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This week on Active Information I riffed on a WSJ article that riffed on Daniel Kahneman‘s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which led me into the data scientist shortage and analytics-as-a-service.

Alas, as I didn’t lead with any of those buzzwords in the title, the post is sadly under-read. Anyway, the link and blurb follow. I’m off to hone my buzzword skills.

Rationality, delivered.

Quite possibly, we will find ourselves in a “there’s an algorithm to decide that” world. But, until the talent shortage is stemmed, we’ll need to get our rationality delivered.

Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Reclaim the “I” in CIO, Big Data & Collective Intelligence
  2. Recent Active Information Writing: Crash-proof code, data lessons & infographics

Link Collection — January 8, 2012

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  • Event Processing at the Large Hadron Collider | Complex Event Processing (CEP) Blog

    Paul Vincent on events and Higgs boson:

    “Earlier this month Dr Neil Geddes gave a fascinating presentation at the BCS on “Data Processing at the Large Hadron Collider”, describing how LHC experiments create 1 Billion events per sec of which they can record in detail 100 events per sec.”

    tags: event_processing tibco higgs-boson

  • Predicts 2012: Information Infrastructure and Big Data

    I would edit this to be: “Make event-driven architecture and complex event processing first-class citizens”, but I can live with the following from Gartner:

    “Make event-driven architecture and complex event processing first-class citizens in data modeling work and metadata repositories.”

    tags: 2012 gartner event_processing

  • Disruptions: Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone – NYTimes.com

    I get my best ideas during dog walks… not to mention, some really out there ideas as well.

    “Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and the author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” said in a phone interview that our brains often needed to become inattentive to figure out complex issues. He said his book discussed an area of the brain scientists call “the default network” that was active only when the rest of the brain was inactive — in other words, when we were daydreaming.

    Letting the mind wander activates the default network, he said, and allows our brains to solve problems that most likely can’t be solved during a game of Angry Birds.”

    tags: problem-solving

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection (weekly)
  2. Link Collection — December 18, 2011
  3. Link Collection- July 17, 2011

Active Information: Streaming through Computational World, Changing change via experimentation platforms

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My latest posts on the HPIO Active Information blog:

Streaming through a Computational World — (most popular post to date)

To take advantage of the computational world, or the nearer term internet of things, we need to infuse smarts throughout our data collection networks.  We need to employ up-front and intermediate filters, traffic cops, aggregators, pattern detectors, and intelligent agents.  We need to get over being data hoarders, and have the astuteness to leave data behind.

Busting cultural resistance via experimentation platforms — (changing change)

Culture, mistrust of the data, lack of interest. These very human factors are adoption barriers for 46% of the respondents. Yet, these barriers aren’t new. Nor, confined to big data and advanced analytics. To change a culture, you need to bring proof to the table.  And proof requires hands-on experimentation and real-world data. We need data to prove that we need data. How will we get that?

Related posts:

  1. Recent Active Information Writing: Crash-proof code, data lessons & infographics
  2. Active Information Writing
  3. Active Information: Reclaim the “I” in CIO, Big Data & Collective Intelligence

Link Collection — December 18, 2011

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  • Five big data predictions for 2012 – O’Reilly Radar

    FINALLY! –> Streaming data processing: “Over the next few years we’ll see the adoption of scalable frameworks and platforms for handling streaming, or near real-time, analysis and processing. In the same way that Hadoop has been borne out of large-scale web applications, these platforms will be driven by the needs of large-scale location-aware mobile, social and sensor use.

    For some applications, there just isn’t enough storage in the world to store every piece of data your business might receive: at some point you need to make a decision to throw things away. Having streaming computation abilities enables you to analyze data or make decisions about discarding it without having to go through the store-compute loop of map/reduce.

    Emerging contenders in the real-time framework category include Storm, from Twitter, and S4, from Yahoo.”

    tags: bigdata streaming realtime

  • Smart Innovators Value Smaller Teams Over Better Processes – Michael Schrage – Harvard Business Review

    “They work very hard to stay very small. Even top-tier talent is turned aside or denied. The emphasis has shifted from “how do we successfully scale the team?” to “how do we successfully scale the team’s influence and deliverables?” Instead of seeing an explosion of virtual teams, what’s emerged are teams cleverly using digital and social media to extend their reach both inside the enterprise and out. Key suppliers and channels are contacted on an “as needed” basis”

    tags: innovation teams hbr

  • Clive Thompson on Why Kids Can’t Search | Magazine

    “Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?

    Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill. The buck stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.”

    tags: information literacy criticalthinking

  • Don’t Let What You Know Limit What You Imagine – Bill Taylor – Harvard Business Review

    “Many organizations, she argues, struggle with a “paradox of expertise” in which deep knowledge of what exists in a marketplace or a product category makes it harder to consider what-if strategies that challenge long-held assumptions. “When it comes to innovation,” she writes, “the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it.” “

    tags: innovation hbr

  • Scott Aaronson – Quantum Computing Promises New Insights – NYTimes.com

    The goal in quantum computing is to choreograph a computation so that the amplitudes leading to wrong answers cancel each other out, while the amplitudes leading to right answers reinforce.

    tags: quantum computing

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection — December 4, 2011
  2. Link Collection — December 11, 2011
  3. Link Collection- July 17, 2011

Active Information: Big Data from left field; Big Data Rx

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My latest posts on the HPIO Active Information blog:

Ready or not, here comes Big Data

Sometimes though, a trend is so compelling (e-commerce, mobility), in-your-face (social media) or simple to comprehend (cloud), that it leaps into mainstream media and takes on a life of its own.  Instead of playing the role of serial advocate, corporate IT leaders and architects are suddenly in a game of catch-up.

Rx for AstraZeneca: Real-world evidence

Rethinking their prelaunch process, and data needs, AstraZeneca proposed a data collaboration with customers.

And one of my favorites:

Reclaim the “I” in CIO

Why do we still have titled CIOs, yet no clear candidate C-level executive to manage the organization’s information agenda?

Related posts:

  1. Active Information: Data Scientists, Moneyball, Competitive Analytics & Big Data Definition
  2. Active Information: Reclaim the “I” in CIO, Big Data & Collective Intelligence
  3. Active Information: Data-Driven Business Innovation

Link Collection — December 11, 2011

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  • The Technologies in I.B.M.’s Watson Used for Drug Research – NYTimes.com

    “I.B.M.’s Strategic Intellectual Property Insight Platform. Clearly, the Watson branding team didn’t work on this name.

    But then again, this isn’t for television, where Watson performed. It is for major corporate customers, seeking competitive advantage. The technology, sold as a cloud-based service, is the result of several years of joint development between IBM Research and four companies — AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer.

    The insight platform uses data mining, natural-language processing and analytics to pore through millions of patent filings and biomedical journals to look for chemical compounds used in drug discovery.”

    tags: ibm watson pharma bigdata

  • Gapingvoid: Flowers vs Elephants

    So true… Click to see cartoon

    tags: gapingvoid

  • Bre Pettis | I Make Things – Bre Pettis Blog – The Cult of Done Manifesto

    Good one—> “#13 Done is the engine of more.”

    tags: productivity done manifesto

  • Monitor: More than just digital quilting | The Economist

    “The maker movement is both a response to and an outgrowth of digital culture, made possible by the convergence of several trends. New tools and electronic components let people integrate the physical and digital worlds simply and cheaply. Online services and design software make it easy to develop and share digital blueprints. And many people who spend all day manipulating bits on computer screens are rediscovering the pleasure of making physical objects and interacting with other enthusiasts in person, rather than online. Currently the preserve of hobbyists, the maker movement’s impact may be felt much farther afield.”

    tags: makerfaire innovation diy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Related posts:

  1. Link Collection — December 4, 2011
  2. Link Collection — October 23, 2011
  3. Link Collection — October 9, 2011