The Way to Fail in San Jose
August 19, 2013
When reading the San Francisco Gate’s article, “San Jose State Suspends Online Courses” our immediate reaction was “ouch!” Many public universities in the US offer online courses as an alternative to traditional face-to-face education. San Jose University offered five online classes and more than half of the enrolled students failed them. In response, the university suspended classes for the time being to reevaluate. This does not mean San Jose University will stop offering online courses; it will just stop classes from Udacity. The failing classes were part of the “Massive Open Online Courses” strategy that incorporated major public universities to increase their online class offerings. These five failures set the plan back, but it is not deemed a waste:
“Despite the high failure rate, Sebastian Thrun, a researcher at Stanford University and Google Inc. who launched Udacity said valuable data and experience were gained from the effort, which will help improve future classes. ‘We are experimenting and learning. That to me is a positive,’ Thrun said. The school and Udacity plan to look into providing more information about the syllabus at the beginning of the class, so students are better informed about the requirements before committing. Officials also want to look at whether the online semester should be longer than traditional school terms to provide students with more flexibility.”
Most of the students in these classes were non-traditional students, working a job and little college experience, which is probably why they failed. It was a learning experience for both students and the university. Both are learning from their mistakes.
Whitney Grace, August 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Raritan User Interface on Amazon Web Services
August 19, 2013
Raritan Technologies has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to launch a dynamic search user interface on the popular cloud platform. PR Newswire covers all the details in their article, “Raritan Releases Dynamic Search User Interface on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace.”
The article begins:
“Raritan Technologies announced a new relationship with Amazon Web Services to expand its search solutions through the CloudSearch Plus User Interface (UI). This search solution, which interacts with Amazon’s CloudSearch product, is now for sale on the AWS Marketplace. Raritan’s search UI is easily configured to access any CloudSearch collection, customizable for each company’s unique interface requirements and enables mobility for content retrieval and accessibility.”
Raritan is a partner with many open source solution providers, including LucidWorks. LucidWorks is known for their expertise in Apache Lucene Solr, and for their award winning customer support and training. Raritan will benefit from the partnership with LucidWorks, as well as other open source providers with a broad spectrum of expert areas. Open source is definitely an unstoppable force in enterprise, and partnerships like these are just one reason why the commercial search solutions should be afraid.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
DuckDuckGo Not Entirely Free Of Big Brother
August 18, 2013
Big Brother Google tracks your data and shares it with the National Security Agency (NSA). As citizens we value our privacy and many of those concerned have switched over to DuckDuckGo to keep their browsing data a secret. That does not mean, however, that the NSA is not still tracking you. Read over the Ether Rag’s blog post: “DuckDuckGo: Illusion Of Privacy” for how the alternate search engine is required to comply with certain laws.
Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), DuckDuckGo can be forced to release your Internet history. Also DuckDuckGo only protects its users from third party, not NSA spy drones. Can they prevent the NSA? Yahoo tried and lost their case.
The NSA will try to stop what it does not like and will do what it needs to do according to the agency’s purpose.
“This is not an indictment of DuckDuckGo per se. Except in as far as they are taking advantage of the hysteria to their own ends. Every provider needs to be upfront with saying, ‘If it is indeed true that the NSA is monitoring our ingress/egress traffic, we can make no guarantee of privacy regardless of encryption or other efforts on our part.’ In the larger picture, this is the crux of the problem not just for DuckDuckGo, but the internet as a whole. Until and unless agencies like the NSA are forbidden from conducting dragnet collection and analysis of data, there can be no privacy. Privacy is merely an illusion at this point.”
Can anybody else say great sarcastically? What is there do to at this point? Use DuckDuckGo and do not do anything to incite the NSA’s wraith.
Whitney Grace, August 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
IBM: Becoming More Open or Aggressive in a Search for Revenue
August 17, 2013
You may find “IBM Opens Up Power Chip Design, Partners with Google” suggestive. The notion of “opens up” and “partners with Google” strike me as interesting if not oxymoronic. Here’s the quote I noted:
IBM is opening its Power architecture at a time when the business has been struggling. Its Power division reported a 25 percent decline in revenue last quarter, while the broader Systems and Technology Group saw revenue decline 12 percent.Against that backdrop, IBM is making some of its employees take a mandatory furlough at the end of August, an IBM spokesman confirmed Tuesday. The furlough affects workers in the STG group and its Integrated Supply Chain division, which handles areas like procurement and logistics. The employees will receive an equivalent of one-third pay, while executives will not be paid for that week, IBM said. It declined to say how many workers are affected.
Hardware sales once were the annuity type of revenue described by bow tied business school professors. Today hardware is a little different, sort of like turkey with hoisin sauce.
Are IBM and Google “open.” Aren’t large information technology companies interested in cultivating the plants in a walled garden?
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Locate That Pesky Web Server
August 17, 2013
Where are Web sites hosted? The average user has no idea how to harness the right tools to locate where a server is located, but there might be a common solution. Makeuseof.com, gotta love that Web site, wrote the article, “Find Out Where A Web Site’s Server Is Located With FlagFox And Flag For Chrome.” Made for two open source OS, the Flag and FlagFox plugins are rather simple. Whenever you visit a Web site, the URL bar displays its server’s country of origin. Judging by the plugin’s name you can tell it displays the flag.
Pretty neat, huh? It is also pretty useful:
“This little flag isn’t just cool to show off, but it can also serve some interesting purposes, for example it can let you know which country a server is located in (especially when the server location doesn’t match the top-level domain like .co.uk, .de, etc.), help you troubleshoot why a certain connection may be acting slow, or help you identify when you’ve accidentally landed on a phishing Web site. Say you try to visit your bank’s website which usually shows your country’s flag, but suddenly you see a completely different flag. The chances that you’ve landed on a phishing site are very high. The flag shown by the extension also serves as a reminder of where our data goes — you practically visit the world through your browsing habits!”
It does more than show colorful flags too. Clicking on the flag displays technical data about the server: postal code, Web hosting provider, location, IP Address, and ISP. It also has the Web of Trust rating and embed other techy features. That is just for the Firefox version, the Google plug-in has a few more features that are specific to Google.
For the common users, use this tool as a way to prevent identity theft and catch phishing Web sites. Another simple tool to keep your Internet experience safe.
Whitney Grace, August 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Another Information Priority: Legacy Systems
August 16, 2013
The hoohah about cloud computing, Big Data, and other “innovations” continues. Who needs Oracle when one has Hadoop? Why license SPSS or some other Fancy Dan analytics system when there are open choice analytics systems a mouse click away? Search? Lots of open source choices.
Image from http://sageamericanhistory.net/gildedage/topics/gildedage3.html
We have entered the Gilded Age of information and data analysis. Do I have that right?
The marketers and young MBAs chasing venture funding instead of building revenue shout, “Yes, break out the top hats and cigars. We are riding a hockey stick type curve.”
Well, sort of. I read “Business Intelligence, Tackling Legacy Systems Top Priorities for CIOs.” Behind the consultant speak and fluff, there lurk two main points:
- Professionals in the US government and I presume elsewhere are struggling to make sense of “legacy” data; that is, information stuffed in file cabinets or sitting in an antiquated system down the hall
- The problems information technology managers remain unresolved. After decades of effort by whiz kids, few organizations can provide basic information technology services.
As one Reddit thread made clear, most information technology professionals use Google to find a fix or read the manual. See Reddit and search for “secrets about work business”.
A useful comment about the inability to tap data appears in “Improving business intelligence and analytics the top tech priority, say Government CIOs.” Here’s the statement:
IT contracts expert Iain Monaghan of Pinsent Masons added: “Most suppliers want to sell new technology because this is likely to be where most of their profit will come from in future. However, they will have heavily invested in older technology and it will usually be cheaper for them to supply services using those products. Buyers need to balance the cost they are prepared to pay for IT with the benefits that new technology can deliver,” he said. “Suppliers are less resistant to renegotiating existing contracts if buyers can show that there is a reason for change and that the change offers a new business opportunity to the supplier. This is why constant engagement with suppliers is important. The contract is meant to embody a relationship with the supplier.”
Let me step back, way back. Last year my team and I prepared a report to tackle this question, “Why is there little or no progress in information access and content processing?”
We waded through the consultant chopped liver, the marketing baloney, and the mindless prose of thought leaders. Our finding was really simple. In fact, it was so basic we were uncertain about a way to present it without coming across like a stand up comedian at the Laugh House. To wit:
Computational capabilities are improving but the volume of content to be processed is growing rapidly. Software which could cope with basic indexing and statistical chores bottlenecks in widely used systems. As a result, the gap between what infrastructure and software can process and the amount of data to be imported, normalized, analyzed, and output is growing. Despite recent advances, most organizations are unable to keep pace with new content and changes to current content. Legacy content is in most cases not processed. Costs, time, and tools seem to be an intractable problem.
Flash forward to the problem of legacy information. Why not “sample” the data and use that? Sounds good. The problem is that even sampling is fraught with problems. Most introductory statistics courses explain the pitfalls of flawed sampling.
How prevalent is use of flawed sampling? Some interesting examples from “everywhere” appear on the American Association for Public Opinion Research. For me, I just need to reflect on the meetings in which I have participated in the last week or two, Examples:
- Zero revenue because no one matched the “product” to what the prospects wanted to buy
- Bad hires because no one double checked references. The excuse was, “Too busy” and “the system was down.”
- Client did not pay because “contracts person could not find a key document.”
Legacy data? Another problem of flawed business and technology practices. Will azure chip consultants and “motivated” MBAs solve the problem? Nah.Will flashy smart software be licensed and deployed? Absolutely. Will the list of challenges be narrowed in 2014? Good question.
Stephen E Arnold, August 16, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Basho Releases Another Riak
August 16, 2013
Without further ado from Basho.com,“Basho Announces Availability Of Riak 1.4,” the popular NoSQL database. Technology news Web sites have been reeling about the new Riak upgrade and what it will offer its users. According to the article, version 1.4 offers more functionality, resolves issues, and adds functions as requested by its users. Also it gives a small taste of what to expect in version 2.0 that will be available for download later in 2013.
Here is what the upgrade features:
· Secondary Indexing Improvements: Query results are now sorted and paginated, offering developers much richer semantics
· Introducing Counters in Riak: Counters, Riak’s first distributed data type, provide automatic conflict resolution after a network partition
· Simplified Cluster Management With Riak Control: New capabilities in Riak’s GUI-based administration tool improve the cluster management page for preparing and applying changes to the cluster
· Reduced Object Storage Overhead: Values and associated metadata are stored and transmitted using a more compact format, reducing disk and network overhead
· Handoff Progress Reporting: Makes operating the cluster, identifying and troubleshooting issues, and monitoring the cluster simpler
· Improved Backpressure: Riak responds with an overload message if a vnode has too many messages in queue
Users will be happy with how Riak 1.4 will provide better functionality and management for clusters and datacenters. The updates and the 2.0 sample are enough to be excited about. There does not seem to be a thing NoSQL databases can do.
Whitney Grace, August 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Wolfram Alpha Is The Superman Of Databases
August 16, 2013
Before the better Internet we have today, school children used to have rely on poor search and hacked together Web sites to cheat on their homework. The Wolfram Alpha database did not exist and it made school children rely on their own skills. Wolfram Alpha is a powerhouse database with a snarky attitude that can answer veritably any question. Makeuseof.com points out “10 Surprising Things You Didn’t Know Wolfram Alpha Could Do” and how you can harness the tool to do more than cheat on chemistry homework. Originally built as a computational math engine, geeks have added other and often fun features to Wolfram Alpha. You can upload an image to see how it would look as a comic book, through a dog’s eyes, or via color blindness.
Want a Morse code translator or statistics on everything associated with NFL for the past twenty-five years? Look no further. You can also get a head start on your Christmas shopping by using it as product comparison tool:
“Instead of using filters on any shopping website, you can try an English language query in the search box and see if it helps narrow down your shopping choices. Wolfram Alpha handshakes with Best Buy’s API to source the results, so the results are America and Canada centric. You can also use Wolfram Alpha to make a direct comparison between two products in the same product line by typing in their brand names and model numbers. The results page includes enough details to help you bore down to the right choices.”
Calorie burning calculator, anniversary gift recommender, and medical prescription decoder are yet even more ways. The most artful and mathematical way takes Wolfram Alpha back to its original purpose…almost. The database can take any image and render it into a mathematical equation. What does the Mona Lisa look like in numbers? Play around with Wolfram Alpha and do not forget to ask it a Douglas Adams inspired question.
Whitney Grace, August 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
After Five US Patent Office Awards Search Patent To Simplexo
August 16, 2013
Is patenting search, a fundamental tool for users, the same as trying to trademark crust less peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? No, not if you just invent a new technology to improve the common feature. Techzone360 takes a look at the first search patent to be issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in five years in, “SearchYourCloud Awarded US Patent For Improve Search Engine Results.” Simplexo was given a patent for “Improved Search Engine-offers unprecedented search capabilities for users by leveraging Boolean and semantic search technologies to deliver enhanced search results.” Okay, so why is this important? Take apart the technical language and Simplexo offers a product that will search across clouds and its content, a better mobile design and security, improved Boolean search, and repetitive information reduction.
CTO of Simplexo Simon Bain had this to say:
“’The Improved Search Engine patent confirms SearchYourCloud as a leader in the search and application space and puts users in control of their data. SearchYourCloud’s technology enhances users’ productivity and lets users find and secure their data in one, fast step. Unlike other search engines our applications can find emails with a ‘to’ and ‘from’ name, and subject or content body without the user having to type in too many different search boxes. It can also find content from more than one source effortlessly and de-duplicate the results.’”
The demands on search engines are getting bigger and it is about time the expectations are met. It has not been decided how Simplexo will package its software, but expect it to change the way we search.
Whitney Grace, August 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Open Source and Innovation Go Hand in Hand
August 16, 2013
Open source, in all of its iterations, drives innovation and efficiency. More than ever, information technology circles are buzzing with news about how open source software (and an emerging open source hardware market) ensures that organizations of every shape and size can get their specific needs met by open source solutions. Tom Trainer covers this very topic in his article for Network Computing, “Open Source Poised for Innovation Explosion.”
Trainer begins:
“Open source software is now a common component in most organizations’ IT infrastructure, particularly at the server OS layer where Linux has made significant inroads. Now open source software is becoming more common in other data center realms such as storage, and is poised for significant growth.”
Trainer goes on to say that open source will continue to dominate the market for many reasons, but chief among them will be cost effectiveness. Even though the economy is on the rebound, efficiencies are still being demanded as the recession proved that companies really could do more with less. However, security and customer support are still concerns. For organizations with those concerns, a value-added open source solution is often a good fit. For instance, LucidWorks offers solutions for the enterprise including Big Data, with cloud and hybrid deployments. And while the solutions are award winning, the customer service and training offered by LucidWorks is unbeatable.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 16, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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