kindageeky

Great tidbit from Tim O’Reilly - We’re at the beginning of new breed of computational science, The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits is at play in creative destruction, valuable things become commoditized, adjacent things become valuable.  

I was fascinated with the parallels between commodity PC hardware and open source software. When IBM made PC hardware a commodity, Microsoft figured out how to make PC software proprietary and valuable. As the Internet and open-source software made software more of a commodity, companies like Google figured out how to make data and algorithms into something that was proprietary and very valuable. I think we’re going to see the same thing in the world of open access.

… looking forward to his talk at CDB.

Compute is virtualized. Storage is getting there. Networking is next. 

Two key ideas …

• Recommendation engines: the ability to produce a customized playlist for every student every day will be a core personalization capability
• Achievement recognition systems: managing competency-based environments will require systems of standard-aligned benchmark assessments and a big gradebooks to deposit evidence—game scores, papers, projects, quizzes and more—and badges or bar charts—a visual dash board of achievement that monitors and motivates progress.

There’s an underbelly of complexity to deal with here too.  Rule-based systems won’t personalize sufficiently IMHO.

Just got into storm for our hackathon, very promising technology for realtime stream processing / realtime bigdata.

Cloudstat is R in the cloud, the gallery app they have up so far inspects a twitter search, which reminds me of the clever presentation on twitter sentiment analysis with R by Jeffrey Breen.  To amuse yourself, click on the title link and search @united.  I hacked my way through the same presentation a few months back and at the time measured @united’s sentiment at 27%, maybe not surprising as airlines generally fare worse in approvals than the postal service.  Anyway, seems like there is a lot more brand management going on now as @united mentions itself in a positive light anytime a user registers for a contest for a trip to london.  Here is the topic cloud that cloudstat generated:

Yet when you look at the posts minus the brand management, you get a very different picture, for example this one …

@United’s plane was 3 hours late getting in to Boston. They asked me to fill out a survey, which is 404. http://t.co/lnpeEUwB

This whole space around sentiment analysis is very interesting, and especially hard to solve with posts as short as twitter. I have yet to see any evidence that sarcasm is being detected in sentiment analysis services, though there appears to be some promising research. 

Back to CloudStat, digging deeper there are various recipes (mostly against twitter) for doing analysis with R.  Apparently, I could work on my politeness.

> Result(x)

@kindageeky is ok polite, only better than 59 percent of twitter users. 

[1] "Ok."

> 

This is the output of CloudStat’s politeness tracker.  The notion of having an R language Cloud Robot is kinda cool, will have to look through the tutorials.

Added to wish list, Judea Pearl is the 2012 ACM Turing Award winner