Smart Software: More Time to Drive Around
October 16, 2015
I walk my dogs, Tess and Max, each morning. Here in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, the traffic flows 24×7. We have the normal assortment of retired people, squirrel hunters, and soccer moms. I am not sure who works in the Commonwealth, where the economy has been slowing down. Tobacco production is in the dumper. Coal is (no pun intended) under fire. Manufacturing whimpering for sustenance.
I read “System That Replaces Human Intuition with Algorithms Outperforms Human Teams” suggested that the few professionals with “real” jobs may be joining the millions out of work. The bright side is that these folks will have more time to drive around aimlessly, hang out at the local general store, and fiddle with their mobile devices. The future seems to offer plenty of leisure time.
The write up reports with authority, of course:
MIT researchers aim to take the human element out of big-data analysis, with a new system that not only searches for patterns but designs the feature set, too. To test the first prototype of their system, they enrolled it in three data science competitions, in which it competed against human teams to find predictive patterns in unfamiliar data sets. Of the 906 teams participating in the three competitions, the researchers’ “Data Science Machine” finished ahead of 615.
Lawyers, investment gurus, even enterprise search consultants may face the squeeze as accountants try to reduce costs. Software does not require vacations, benefits, or snacks.
The write up points out:
“The Data Science Machine is one of those unbelievable projects where applying cutting-edge research to solve practical problems opens an entirely new way of looking at the problem,” says Margo Seltzer, a professor of computer science at Harvard University who was not involved in the work. “I think what they’ve done is going to become the standard quickly—very quickly.”
Imagine. An organization can select, configure, and procure an enterprise search system without dealing with the human wizards. Will search improve? Probably not. Smart software will know what it needs; humans often do not.
The upside is that humans will have more time for binge watching and being social. And there is more time for aimless driving around.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2015
The Tweet Gross Domestic Product Tool
October 16, 2015
Twitter can be used to figure out your personal income. Twitter was not designed to be a tool to tally a person’s financial wealth, instead it is a communication tool based on a one hundred forty character messages to generate for small, concise delivery. Twitter can be used to chat with friends, stars, business executives, etc, follow news trends, and even advertise products by sent to a tailored audience. According to Red Orbit in the article “People Can Guess Your Income Based On Your Tweets,” Twitter has another application.
Other research done on Twitter has revealed that your age, location, political preferences, and disposition to insomnia, but your tweet history also reveals your income. Apparently, if you tweet less, you make more money. The controls and variables for the experiment were discussed, including that 5,191 Twitter accounts with over ten million tweets were analyzed and accounts with a user’s identifiable profession were used.
Users with a high follower and following ratio had the most income and they tended to post the least. Posting throughout the day and cursing indicated a user with a lower income. The content of tweets also displayed a plethora of “wealth” information:
“It isn’t just the topics of your tweets that’s giving you away either. Researchers found that “users with higher income post less emotional (positive and negative) but more neutral content, exhibiting more anger and fear, but less surprise, sadness and disgust.” It was also apparent that those who swore more frequently in their tweets had lower income.”
Twitter uses the information to tailor ads for users, if you share neutral posts get targeted ads advertising expensive items, while the cursers get less expensive ad campaigns. The study also proves that it is important to monitor your Twitter profile, so you are posting the best side of yourself rather than shooting yourself in the foot.
Whitney Grace, October 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Whitepaper: Plan for Holiday Sales Now
October 16, 2015
Marketing pros and retailers take note: semantic tech firm ntent offers a free whitepaper to help you make the most of the upcoming holiday season, titled “Step-By-Step Guide to Holiday Campaign Planning.” All they want in return are your web address, contact info, and the chance to offer you a subscription to their newsletter, blog, and updates. (That checkbox is kindly deselected by default.) The whitepaper’s description states:
“Halloween candy and costumes are already overflowing on retail stores shelves. You know what that means, don’t you? It’s time for savvy marketers to get serious about their online retail planning for the impending holidays, if they haven’t already started. Why is it so important to take the time to coordinate a solid holiday campaign? Because according to the National Retail Federation [PDF] the holiday season can account for more than 20–40% of a retailer’s annual sales. And if that alone isn’t enough to motivate you, Internet Retailer reported that online retail sales this year are predicted to reach $349.06 billion a 14.2% YoY increase—start planning now to get your piece of the pie! Position your business for online success, more sales and more joy as you head into 2016 using these easy-to-follow, actionable tips!”
The paper includes descriptions of tactics and best practices, as well as a monthly to-do list and a planning worksheet. Founded in 2010, ntent leverages their unique semantic search technology to help clients quickly find the information they need. The company currently has several positions open at their Carlsbad, California, office.
Cynthia Murrell, October 16, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Technology Fear News Flash: Search Not in the Top 10
October 15, 2015
I read one of those out-of-the-blue research study summaries. The information appears in Network World, a corporate family member of my favorite mid tier consulting firm IDC. The write up is titled with a zippy angle: Fear; to wit, “Technology Scares the Hell Out of People, University Survey Finds.”
I found the article a fiesta of take-it-to-the-bank information.
The snappy graphic caught my eye. Each of the Top 10 fears warrants a cartoon treatment. Here’s an example for running out of money in the future Fear Number Nine.
Source: Network World which used a cartoon from Chapman University. Academia and cartoons. Interesting.
I like the human carrying a weight (at first glance it looks like a debt bomb) up the pile of what appears to be back issues of unsold copies of print version of IDC reports. Adult Swim may do a feature based on this fear. That will be a winner.
On to another gem from the article. I highlighted this passage in the write up:
Technology-related concerns account for 3 of the top 5 biggest fears among Americans surveyed recently by Chapman University of Orange, Calif. — and a couple of the other concerns on the top 10 list could be considered tech-related worries as well.
And the tech fears are:
- Cyber terrorism
- Corporate tracking of personal information
- Government tracking of personal information
The write up adds:
Numbers 7 (Identity theft) and #10 (Credit card fraud) could also be classified as tech-related worries.
Quite a payload of fear. The write up does not include any details about the sample size, the methodology, or the folks doing the work which could be undergraduates or adjuncts for all I know.
Stepping back, let’s think about technology and analytics. On the surface, those in the sample are not exactly comfortable with what I call the Silicon Valley way. Thinking more deeply, the fears suggest that the survey suggests trust is not part of the warp and woof of the lives of the lucky folks in the sample.
My hunch is that if we polled some government officials, big time technology company CEOs, a couple of hundred top one percenters, and 20 somethings looking for a job in Palo Alto, the results might be different. I look forward to a report from IDC on this topic. I hope the author is my favorite IDC expert Dave Schubmehl. He is not afraid of technology based on my experience.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2015
Traffic Pattern Information: News on the Hot Seat
October 15, 2015
The write up “Platforms for Everyone, Publications for No One.” The article contains some interesting information. Let me pull out a few points I highlighted in accounting department red:
- News site traffic is “tanking”
- Charts included in the write up show a decline in traffic for Thought Catalog and Elite Daily
- Facebook sharing is declining
- Digital big dogs are juggling their offerings to deal with “engagement”
- Apps are fluid with outfits like Facebook and Twitter trying to respond to what seems to be an opportunity
- Advertising based content may be the future of information.
What’s the impact on companies which specialize is developing and selling products based on the old school print approach to information? My hunch is that life is going to focus more narrowly on generating revenue? Which of the over extended vendors will find a solution to before falling off “the platform’s edge?”
Net net: Apple, Facebook, and Google may be the 21st century version of traditional news organizations. The fact that news organizations are just now grasping the shift is fascinating. I wonder if some of these outfits can emulate Buzzfeed-type of content, embrace draft brewing, or jump into the restorod business? Another interesting question, “Will Twitter make the transition?”
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2015
Netflix: Slow Subscriber Growth Due to Things Netflix Cannot Control
October 15, 2015
I like the idea of blaming what some MBA whiz called exogenous events. The idea is that hapless, yet otherwise capable senior managers, are unable to deal with the ups and downs of running a business. In short, an exogenous event is a variation on “it’s not my fault,” “there’s little I can do,” and “let’s just muddle forward.” The problem is that hunting for scapegoats is not a way to generate revenue. Wait. One can raise subscription fees.
I read “Netflix Is Blaming Slow US Growth on the Switch to Chip-Based Credit Cards.” The write up references a letter, allegedly written by the Netflix top dog. I noted this passage:
In his letter to investors, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings partially blamed America’s recent switch to chip-enabled credit cards. As credit card companies send new cards to their customers, some have been issuing new numbers, as well. And if people forget to update their credit card number with Netflix, they can’t pay their bill and become what Hastings called “involuntary churn.”
I like that involuntary churn. I remember working on a project for a telecommunications company in which churn was a burr under the saddle of some executives. Those pesky customers. Darn it.
The write up ignores the responsibility of management to deal with exogenous events. When a search system fails, is it the responsibility of customers to fix the system. Nah, users just go to a service that seems to work.
I interpreted this alleged explanation and the article’s willingness to allow Netflix’s management to say, in effect, “Hey, this is not something I can do anything about.” If not the top dog, who takes responsibility? Perhaps the reason is not chip enabled credit cards? Perhaps users are sending Netflix a signal about sometimes unfindable content, clunky search, and a lack of features. Not everyone is a binge watcher. Some folks look for Jack Benny films or other entertainment delights. When these are not available, perhaps some look elsewhere. See and you shall find often delivers the goods.
Stephen E Arnold, October 15, 2015
Google Declares It Has the Best Cloud Service…Again
October 15, 2015
Google is never afraid to brag about its services and how much better they are compared to their competitors. Google brandishes its supposed superiority with cloud computing on its Google Cloud Platform Blog with the post, “Google Cloud Platform Delivers The Industry’s Best Technical And Differentiated Features.” The first line in the post even comes out as a blanket statement for how Google feels about its cloud platform: “I’ll come right out and say it: Google Cloud Platform is a better cloud.”
One must always take assertations from a company’s Web site as part of its advertising campaign to peddle the service. Google products and services, however, usually have quality written into their programming, but Google defends the above claim saying it has core advantages and technical differentiators in compute, storage, network, and distributed software tiers. Google says this is for two reasons:
“1. Cloud Platform offers features that are very valuable for customers, and very difficult for competitors to emulate.
- The underlying technologies, created and honed by Google over the last 15 years, enable us to offer our services at a much lower price point.”
Next the post explains the different features that make the cloud platform superior: live migration, scaling load balances, forty-five second boot times, three second archive restore, and 680,000 IOPS sustained Local SSD read rate. Google can offer these features, because it claims to have the best technology and software engineers. It does not stop there, because Google also offers its cloud platform at forty percent cheaper than other cloud platforms. It delves into details about why it can offer a better and cheaper service. While the argument is compelling, it is still Google cheerleading itself.
Google is one of the best technology companies, but it is better to test and review other cloud platforms rather than blinding following a blog post.
Whitney Grace, October 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Add a Modicum or More of Value to Your Facebook Time with Detox
October 15, 2015
The article on Life Hacker titled Detox For Facebook Replaces Your Feed with Actual News begs the question: why search when you can graze like a millennial info ruminant? The idea of Detox is that Facebook wastes time. It is difficult to argue with that, especially as someone who has, on more than one occasion, closed a tab opened to Facebook only to be confronted with another tab, also open to Facebook, and perhaps even another. It is this mindless arena of continuous distraction. The article says,
“If you can relate, consider Detox: it replaces your Facebook feed with an actual news feed.
The browser extension is from previously mentioned news feed Panda. You simply download the extension, turn it on via Facebook, and it will replace your feed with content from sites available at Panda: Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Designer News to name a few. You can also use Detox’s “Auto Activation” and schedule specific days and times you want the extension to work.”
Perhaps you are someone immune to the onslaught of trite and meaningless status updates. But most of us are coping with a level of addiction that we really have no means of overcoming unless we “gasp” sign off entirely. If you aren’t quite ready for that, but hope to make your Facebook feed at least somewhat worth your perusal, this might be a nice compromise.
Chelsea Kerwin, October 15, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Can Online Systems Discern Truth and Beauty or All That One Needs to Know?
October 14, 2015
Last week I fielded a question about online systems’ ability to discern loaded or untruthful statements in a plain text document. I responded that software is not yet very good at figuring out whether a specific statement is accurate, factual, right, or correct. Google pokes at the problem in a number of ways; for example, assigning a credibility score to a known person. The higher the score, the person may be more likely to be “correct.” I am simplifying, but you get the idea: Recycling a variant of Page Rank and the CLEVER method associated with Jon Kleinberg.
There are other approaches as well, and some of them—dare I suggest, most of them—use word lists. The idea is pretty simple. Create a list of words which have positive or negative connotations. To get fancy, you can work a variation on the brute force Ask Jeeves’ method; that is, cook up answers or statement of facts “known” to be spot on. The idea is to match the input text with the information in these word lists. If you want to get fancy, call these lists and compilations “knowledgebases.” I prefer lists. Humans have to help create the lists. Humans have to maintain the lists. Get the lists wrong, and the scoring system will be off base.
There is quite a bit of academic chatter about ways to make software smart. A recent example is “Sentiment Diffusion of Public Opinions about Hot Events: Based on Complex Network.” In the conclusion to the paper, which includes lots of fancy math, I noticed that the researchers identified the foundation of their approach:
This paper studied the sentiment diffusion of online public opinions about hot events. We adopted the dictionary-based sentiment analysis approach to obtain the sentiment orientation of posts. Based on HowNet and semantic similarity, we calculated each post’s sentiment value and classified those posts into five types of sentiment orientations.
There you go. Word lists.
My point is that it is pretty easy to spot a hostile customer support letter. Just write a script that looks for words appearing on the “nasty list”; for example, consumer protection violation, fraud, sue, etc. There are other signals as well; for example, capital letters, exclamation points, underlined words, etc.
The point is that distorted, shaped, weaponized, and just plain bonkers information can be generated. This information can be gussied up in a news release, posted on a Facebook page, or sent out via Twitter before the outfit reinvents itself.
The researcher, the “real” journalist, or the hapless seventh grader writing a report will be none the wiser unless big time research is embraced. For now, what can be indexed is presented as if the information were spot on.
How do you feel about that? That’s a sentiment question, gentle reader.
Stephen E Arnold, October 14, 2015
Watson Weekly: A Connectors Festival
October 14, 2015
I read “IBM Adds to Watson Analytics with Expert Storybooks, Connectors to Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, AWS.” Watson is no longer a game show winning, recipe making, and cancer curing search system. Watson does analytics, which means that various IBM acquisitions’ technology can be used to count, calculate, and predict. Well, Watson is not search anymore, gentle reader. Watson is the brand, the new IBM, the revolution in cognitive computing for which you and I have been been longing.
The write up reports:
IBM today is announcing new ways for business users to easily explore and visualize company data with its Watson Analytics cloud-based big data analytics tool.
The cloud. Big data. Yes.
I learned:
IBM put together the Expert Storybooks — for working with data on sports, weather, marketing, social media, and finance — in partnership with AriBall, The Weather Co., OgilvyOne, Twitter, American Marketing Association, Nucleus Research, MarketShare, and Intangent.
Expert story books. Yes. Yes.
And what makes this solution hum is revealed in this way:
The connectors make it possible to hook up with the Redshift data warehouse service form the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, the Microsoft Azure public cloud (IBM’s SoftLayer competes with both Azure and AWS), IBM dashDB (competes with AWS Redshift) MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2 (which competes with SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase), Cloudera Impala, Apache Hive, Box (now a prominent IBM partner) Pivotal Greenplum, Salesforce, and Twitter, among others.
Isn’t Greenplum part of EMC Dell? Why not just use the Greenplum tools? Why not use the EMC import tools? Frankly I am not sure what IBM is offering. With some time and scripting ability, it may be possible to do analytics and “story books” with the systems to which IBM is “hooking up.”
My take is that IBM is trying really hard to make Watson into a significant revenue generating machine. Pitching as a benefit 100 million lines of code and telling readers of the New York Times about dozens of APIs are interesting approaches to making sales.
Connecting to competitive services, I must agree, is a master stroke on a par with the Watson business strategy. But IBM faces a long par five with Watson, the cognitive computing beastie.
Stephen E Arnold, October 14, 2015
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