Attensity: Pumping Up Effort in Europe?
September 7, 2013
“Steinbrück gewinnt TV-Duell im Netz haushoch” reported that Attensity identified more negative answers in a televised debate. Who were the debaters? Angela Merkel and Peer Steinbrrück. Like many US political debates, the Wirtschafts Woche report suggested there was no clear winner.
What I find interesting is that Attensity is using its methods to analyze political debates in Germany as a marketing tactic. I just returned from Europe, and I formed the opinion that the economy of Germany and a some other large European countries was not exactly in turbo-charge mode.
Will Attensity close deals with this approach to marketing? I don’t know, but if Attensity does book some big deals with data analysis, I anticipate a rush of me-too efforts.
Unfortunately, the analyses by Attensity and others are only able to support the no clear winner conclusion. Is this a common problem of next generation analytics programs?
I address some of these issues in my ISS lecture in late September. See the ISS program for more information.
Facebook and Google Plus Face Off in the Ring
September 7, 2013
Which social media platform is better? Google Plus and Facebook each have their pros and cons, but for a serious comparison read the article from Makeuseof.com: “The Final Showdown: Google Plus Vs. Facebook, Which One Is Really The Best?” Each social media platform is broken down into the basic functions and like an elementary school open response question they compare and contrast. A tally score is kept.
User interface goes to Google Plus, because it is slicker and looks like it was made in 2013. Facebook, by a small amount, wins the profile challenge with its Timeline function. The chat feature contest ends in a draw. Google Plus takes the lead with its circles when it comes to managing friends, plus it scores another point for its easy updating ability. Both platforms offer good ways to upload photo albums, but Google Plus seems to be easier to use.
Google fails, though, when it comes to privacy settings. We all know that Google gathers data on all its users, but managing the social networking aspect is hidden somewhere in the account settings. Facebook at least has its privacy out in the open.
The end result is that Google Plus is the winner, but:
“The main reason most of us still prefer Facebook is simple: it’s where people are. Why are people there? Probably because it was first. This is a recursive argument, because if we all move to Google+, that’s where people will be. But it’s not easy, and in the mean time, if you truly want to stay updated and have an audience, you will understandably stick to Facebook (I know I do).”
It all comes down to a matter of preference again. Does not everything?
Whitney Grace, September 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Save On College Expenses by Downloading Free Textbooks
September 7, 2013
After paying tuition, dorm fees, moving expenses, and for a meal plan, college students can expect to pay an extra six hundred or more on textbooks. Purchasing college textbooks has always had the feel of a racketeering group, where only the book publisher, bookstore, and occasionally the professor who assigns his book to make a couple extra dollars profit. The student is always left out in the cold with barely a few bucks for reselling their books back at a quarter of the price.
Textbooks are also a bother in their physical format, but thankfully there are alternatives in the digital age. Students can buy cheaper digital versions through Amazon and other textbook Web sites, but the savvy student is aware of free resources out there. Lifehacker tells us about, “Download Free, Open Source Textbooks From OpenStax College.” Rice University’s OpenStax College is where many students will be able to find their textbooks:
“This nonprofit initiative is supported by philanthropic foundations and the peer-reviewed textbooks are provided to over 200 universities and colleges, as well as individual students. Currently about a dozen textbooks are available, covering mostly the sciences, but history, economics, and other subjects are coming soon.”
The books are downloadable in EPUB or PDF formats and available to read on mobile devices. The selections are small at the moment, but expect it to grow. The article also points to other free textbook Web resources.
Whitney Grace, September 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
LinkedIn: Content but Lost?
September 6, 2013
I read “All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go.” The write up discusses the “glorified résumé distribution service.” I am not looking for a job. As I race towards 70 years of age, I just don’t have the stamina to keep up with the wheel reinventing younger wizards. However, lots of people do use LinkedIn. I know because I get invitations to connect with folks whom I don’t know. I also get endorsement about skills which surprise me. After working at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, I have seen some spectacular résumés only loosely anchored in reality.
The author of the write up states:
This frenetic networking-by-vague-association has bred a mordant skepticism among some users of the site. Scott Monty, head of social media for the Ford Motor Company, includes a disclaimer in the first line of his LinkedIn bio that, in any other context, would be a hilarious redundancy: “Note: I make connections only with people whom I have met.” It’s an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder.
And this from Ford whose in car automation system is almost as amazing as some of the LinkedIn services.
The article tackles “influencers” on LinkedIn as well:
Still, there’s a distinctly perfunctory quality to the offerings of the charmed circle of “influencers.” They often simply repost things on LinkedIn that they’ve written (or had ghostwritten, in some cases) for their personal sites. Their advice—on LinkedIn, “thoughts” almost always equal “advice”—ranges from the semi practical (embrace three digital media trends; get all of your employees on social media) to the lofty (be on a mission that doesn’t suck; search for a noble purpose) to the downright confusing (how to create time; how do careers really work?). The worst of the bunch reads like management-speak Mad Libs, such as this bit of gobbledygook about the career success ladder: “Failure to make a decision is often worse than making the wrong one. This ability is developed and honed over time based on both successes and failures,” writes one thought leader, who includes a complicated chart that is in no way ladder-like. Cue the vacuous, grammar-challenged sloganeering: “High-level thinking, problem-solving and critical decision-making is the cornerstone of long-term success.”
Then there is the notion of “thought leadership.” The author asserts:
Thanks to such fast-and-louche appropriations of the mantle of thought leadership, even its apostles are denouncing the fast-multiplying apostasies that dilute the essence of the one true faith. “In only 15 years we’ve managed to dumb down the idea of thought leadership from someone who has changed their area of business to someone who can create a marketing plan that implants the idea that they are a thought leader,” wrote sales guru Paul McCord in 2009. “When everybody’s one, nobody is one.”
Okay. I do want to point out a couple of characteristics I have noticed about LinkedIn.
First, I get spam of various sorts. The most egregious comes from recruiters who view me as a candidate for a job. Yo, recruiters! What part of my being almost 70 and residing in rural Kentucky is unknown to you? I know that LinkedIn is selling my email to these folks who just spam away. Profitable? Probably. Annoying? You bet.
Second, LinkedIn owns Slideshare. I don’t see much integration of the content on LinkedIn with the content on Slideshare. For example, the person who manages my LinkedIn presence posts the titles of my for-fee articles. We do this to see if any LinkedIn users follow up. Since we added this “content” a couple of years ago, we have received exactly zero inquiries about a full text copy. Furthermore, the input form for the content does not make it possible to list the articles in reverse chronological order. Careless? Nah. I think LinkedIn is just snagging content in the hopes that it will be useful in the future. But why not integrate the content from the two services so a person could snap between the two services, find related content, or better yet, find other LinkedIn folks who have written about a related topic? On a related note, we learned yesterday that for certain queries from behind our firewall, Slideshare would not process the query. We solved the problem by using a different Internet service and registering for a new account. Filtering? Sure seems like it to the law librarian and professional tech journalist who watched the LinkedIn system block my queries. Anomaly? Sure, why not say that?
Third, I find the entire idea of sending me emails from folks I don’t know interesting. The purpose is to get me to click a link and then try to figure out how to get past the different messages displayed to me. I usually just delete the LinkedIn emails. Too much hassle. I wonder if the youngsters whom LinkedIn is now chasing as “members” will get into the LinkedIn swimming pool. Even Facebook is less annoying says the gosling who manages my LinkedIn account.
Fourth, the content in the groups is pretty darned amazing. I see folks asking questions which can be answered via a Google or Yandex query. More interesting are the long dissertations about some topics by folks who want to show off their knowledge. I have instructed the analyst who looks at the LinkedIn content to post only questions in response to the most wacky write ups. Remarkably some people try to answer my questions. Fascinating and usually uninformed are the “answers.”
With LinkedIn chasing more money via a stock offering, I look forward to more bobbing and ducking. See “Linked In Cashing In: Social Network to Raise $1 B in Share Offering as Stock Flies High.”
In the meantime, LinkedIn will continue to make my “pulse” beat more rapidly. (See “LinkedIn’s Acquisitions of Pulse Promotes Role of Game Changer.” Wait, wait. I meant make my pulse beat more “vapidly.”
Stephen E Arnold, September 6, 2013
A New Search Tool Kicks Its Heels
September 6, 2013
Apache Lucene/Solr is already the most popular open source search software, but there are other options available including GigaBlast and Elasticsearch. Another search project wishes to join the ranks of open source search. Visit the main Web site and read the synopsis entitled, “Introducing Searchkick” to gain a basic understanding of the new technology. Searchkick is touted as helping developers “bootstrap their search.” It is an out-of-the-box solution that can stem, use special characters, ignore extra white space, handle misspellings, and is smart enough for custom synonyms.
Interestingly the new search tool is an intelligent search function:
“Searchkick uses conversion data to learn what your users are looking for. If a user searches for “ice cream” and adds Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey to the cart (the conversion metric), that item gets a little more weight for similar searches. Results get better as more people search.”
Searchkick can also reindex without any downtime, uses SQL, and can be deployed to any language. The search software is available via Github for download and development. We see a lot of small search projects starting off using open source software. The main problem is that they are often abandoned. Searchkick appears to be off to a better start than others. Let us see if the spark sticks.
Whitney Grace, September 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Power Search for Open Source Developers
September 6, 2013
Open source is cutting across the world as solution revolution. It is making technology cheaper and more widely available. It could have positive far reaching consequences in education and aerospace technology, but all revolutions need a little help getting off the ground.
“Open source projects need all the help they can get. If not with funding, then with volunteers contributing to open source programming and free tools they can brandish. Search engines tuned with algorithms to find source code for programming projects are among the tools for the kit bag. While reusing code is a much debated topic in higher circles, they could be of help to beginner programmers and those trying to work their way through a coding logjam by cross-referencing their code.”
Makeuseof.com points to the article, “Open Source Matters: 6 Source Code Search Engines You Can Use For Programming Projects” that lists code search engines to help developers out in their projects. Ohloh Code is one of the largest code search engines with over ten billion code lines in its system. It allows users to search by different code classes, but currently it does not support regular expressions. SearchCode searches through open source communities such as Github, SourceForge, and CodePlex. Amazingly, a single person maintains it. For those who have code with special symbols, Google and other engines cannot cut it. That is where Symbol Hound sniffs around the Net for odd character.
There are a few more code search engines described in the article, but head on over to read it on your own. Code search engines are indicative of the open source mentality-share and spread the wealth.
Whitney Grace, September 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Reading Minds with Big Data
September 6, 2013
I thought it might come down to this eventually: big data being used to read people’s minds. It is only a pipe dream at the moment, but ReadWrite takes a look at the process in the article, “Dyson: Big Data Driven Thought Control Is Here.” It starts out with the doomsday prophecy that big data can anticipate human behavior, but that it could lead to the government and businesses using it to predict our actions and invade our privacy. Possible? Yes, according to science historian and author George Dyson. He is concerned that the NSA will use these measures against people under the guise of tracking terrorists.
The doomsday prophecy is not scary. Humans are unpredictable creatures, but that does not matter:
“It’s not that a machine can understand exactly what we’re thinking at any given point in time. It doesn’t have to. As Dyson explains, ‘A reasonable guess at what you are thinking is good enough.’”
Individual data is being turned into metadata, which is being pulled by big data to create an analytical profile of who you are. That is the scary part. If actions can be predicted, then thoughts are on their way to being punished. There is still that spark of unpredictability, though. Humans can change in an instant. Plus there is the technological problem. Even if thoughts can be predicted, how are they going to connect to a human head to get the “real-time” data?
Whitney Grace, September 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
The New Yahoo: A Logo and Pressure on an Executive
September 5, 2013
Yahooooo. I read two stories about the grandma of Web sites. The first was “Introducing Our New Logo!.” I like the exclamation point. The logo is okay, but it seems to be cosmetic. When I was in Portugal in August, Yahoo would not render 70 percent of the time. Why? I am no rocket scientist, so I suppose I could blame it on the hapless Portuguese connectivity providers. But Gmail worked about 90 percent of the time, so maybe the problem is Yahoo’s. Will a new logo address the time outs? One hopes.
Then I read “Pressure Mounts on Yahoo’s De Castro.” No exclamation point after Yahoo, however. The main point of the write up in my opinion was:
Sources close to Yahoo say that De Castro is feeling increasing pressure to deliver better ad results, as the blustery exec has found himself on the outs with CEO Marissa Mayer. There even has been talk that De Castro could be gone by the end of the year, according to numerous sources. The big knock against De Castro is, despite Mayer’s string of mobile acquisitions, lots of positive press and the massive Tumblr deal, the company’s ad business has languished in a marketplace that is enjoying robust growth. Particularly alarming is that Yahoo’s display business is getting hit on both the branding front and programmatic, which would theoretically be a De Castro strength, given his Google background.
My thought is that a new logo and creating discomfort for senior managers adds a different octave to the Yahoo yodel. Do I hear a screech? No, no. The sound is what I hear when one of the goslings tries to:
- Figure out which page will display when accessing Yahoo.com
- Looking at search results which have modest relevance to the query
- Scanning a shopping search result.
I hope that the new logo and excellent management will make the Yahoo yodel more melodious for the fellow in Big Bear, California.
Stephen E Arnold, September 5, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky. Oh, wait. I am Xenky.
Open Source Says Line Them All Up
September 5, 2013
If you ever wanted to visualize data sets containing up to one million lines of code, the impossible just became a reality without a commercial license. PRWeb has the good news: “Tableau Software Extends Tableau Public To 1 Million Rows Of Data.” Tableau Software is a data specialization company that helps its users share, analyze, and visualize their data. The company has an open source end portal Tableau Public that also allows its users to share their content on blogs and personal Web sites. Users demanded to have the line limit increased and Tableau Software added the one million limit to its public end.
“ ‘Since Tableau Public launched in 2010, we’ve seen an explosion in the number of data sets available on the web for public consumption,” said Tableau Public Product Marketing Manager Ben Jones. “It’s becoming more common for these data sets to exceed one hundred thousand records, so this change allows users of our software to share interactive visualizations of these larger data sets with their readers.’ ”
Some organizations that have big data sets out in the public are: airline on-time statistics and delay causes, US Medicare payments to hospitals, and historical weather station data recorded hourly. As the Internet grows the amount of space needed will grow proportionally and perhaps even larger. Wonder when they will release a trillion lines.
Whitney Grace, September 05, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Enlisting Judges in Taming eDiscovery Process
September 5, 2013
Philip Favro at e-discovery 2.0 holds that the often overwhelming eDiscovery process could be tempered with the help of our judiciary system, he shares in “The Need for a More Active Judiciary in eDiscovery.” Hmm, would this apply to secret judicial proceedings?
Favro writes:
“In a recent article published by the University of Kansas Law Review, Professor Steven Gensler and Judge Lee Rosenthal argue that many of the eDiscovery challenges facing lawyers and litigants could be addressed in a more efficient and cost-effective manner through ‘active case management’ by judges. According to Professor Gensler and Judge Rosenthal, a meaningful Rule 16 conference with counsel can enable ‘the court to ensure that the lawyers and parties have paid appropriate attention to planning for electronic discovery.’
“To facilitate this vision of a more active judiciary in the discovery process, the Advisory Committee has proposed a series of changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Most of these changes are designed to improve the effectiveness of the Rule 26(f) discovery conference and to encourage courts to provide input on key discovery issues at the outset of a case.”
The article goes on to describe the changes proposed by the University of Kansas Law Review advisory committee. For example, they suggest that Rule 26(f) discovery conferences be required to include a discussion of any issues surrounding electronically stored information (ESI). See the post for more details. Favro emphasizes that, were these recommendations to be implemented, their success would depend on whether the courts take them seriously. Will judges find it worth the effort?
Cynthia Murrell, September 05, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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