Facebook Search- The fall of the machines

Increasingly I am beginning to search more and more on Facebook. This is for the following reasons-

1) Facebook is walled off to Google (mostly). While within Facebook , I get both people results and content results (from Bing).

Bing is an okay alternative , though not as fast as Google Instant.

2) Cleaner Web Results When Facebook increases the number of results from 3 top links to say 10 top links, there should be more outbound traffic from FB search to websites.For some reason Google continues to show 14 pages of results… Why? Why not limit to just one page.

3) Better People Search than  Pipl and Google. But not much (or any) image search. This is curious and I am hoping the Instagram results would be added to search results.

4) I am hoping for any company Facebook or Microsoft to challenge Adsense . Adwords already has rivals. Adsense is a de facto monopoly and my experiences in advertising show that content creators can make much more money from a better Adsense (especially ) if Adsense and Adwords do not have a conflict of interest from same advertisers.

Adwords should have been a special case of Adsense for Google.com but it is not.

5) Machine learning can only get you from tau to delta tau. When ad click behavior is inherently dependent on humans who behave mostly on chaotic , or genetic models than linear CPC models. I find FB has an inherent advantage in the quantity and quality of data collected on people behavior rather than click behavior. They are also more aggressive and less apologetic about behavorially targeted  ads.

Additional point- Analytics for Google Analytics is not as rich as analytics from Facebook pages in terms of demographic variables. This can be tested by anyone.

 

Play Color Cipher and Visual Cryptography

I was just reading up on my weekly to-read list and came across this interesting method. It is called Play Color Cipher-

 

Each Character ( Capital, Small letters, Numbers (0-9), Symbols on the keyboard ) in the plain text is substituted with a color block from the available 18 Decillions of colors in the world [11][12][13] and at the receiving end the cipher text block (in color) is decrypted in to plain text block. It overcomes the problems like “Meet in the middle attack, Birthday attack and Brute force attacks [1]”.
It also reduces the size of the plain text when it is encrypted in to cipher text by 4 times, with out any loss of content. Cipher text occupies very less buffer space; hence transmitting through channel is very fast. With this the transportation cost through channel comes down.

Reference-

http://www.ijcaonline.org/journal/number28/pxc387832.pdf

Visual Cryptography is indeed an interesting topic-

Visual cryptography, an emerging cryptography technology, uses the characteristics of human vision to decrypt encrypted
images. It needs neither cryptography knowledge nor complex computation. For security concerns, it also ensures that hackers
cannot perceive any clues about a secret image from individual cover images. Since Naor and Shamir proposed the basic
model of visual cryptography, researchers have published many related studies.

Visual cryptography (VC) schemes hide the secret image into two or more images which are called
shares. The secret image can be recovered simply by stacking the shares together without any complex
computation involved. The shares are very safe because separately they reveal nothing about the secret image.

Visual Cryptography provides one of the secure ways to transfer images on the Internet. The advantage
of visual cryptography is that it exploits human eyes to decrypt secret images .

References-

Color Visual Cryptography Scheme Using Meaningful Shares

http://csis.bits-pilani.ac.in/faculty/murali/netsec-10/seminar/refs/muralikrishna4.pdf

Visual cryptography for color images

http://csis.bits-pilani.ac.in/faculty/murali/netsec-10/seminar/refs/muralikrishna3.pdf

Other Resources

  1. http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/visualcrypto.htm
  2. Visual Crypto – One-time Image Create two secure images from one by Robert Hansen
  3. Visual Crypto Java Applet at the University of Regensburg
  4. Visual Cryptography Kit Software to create image layers
  5. On-line Visual Crypto Applet by Leemon Baird
  6. Extended Visual Cryptography (pdf) by Mizuho Nakajima and Yasushi Yamaguchi
  7. Visual Cryptography Paper by Moni Noar and Adi Shamir
  8. Visual Crypto Talk (pdf) by Frederik Vercauteren ESAT Leuven
  9. http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/~dstinson/visual.html
  10. t the University of Salerno web page on visual cryptogrpahy.
  11. Visual Crypto Page by Doug Stinson
  12. Simple implementation of the visual cryptography scheme based on Moni Naor and Adi Shamir, Visual Cryptography, EUROCRYPT 1994, pp1–12. This technique allows visual information like pictures to be encrypted so that decryption can be done visually.The code outputs two files. Try printing them on two separate transparencies and putting them one on top of the other to see the hidden message. http://algorito.com/algorithm/visual-cryptography

Visual Cryptography 

Ajay- I think a combination of sharing and color ciphers would prove more helpful to secure Internet Communication than existing algorithms. It also levels the playing field from computationally rich players to creative coders.

Color Palettes in R using RColorBrewer #rstats

The lovely colors at http://ColorBrewer.org can be used for much better color palettes in R.

library(RColorBrewer)

display.brewer.all()

and we use the function

brewer.pal(N,”Name”) as the col  parameter for the new color palettes

where we can see name of palettes  from the list above

 

data(VADeaths)
par(mfrow=c(2,3))
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(3,"Set3"),main="Set3 3 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(3,"Set2"),main="Set2 3 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(3,"Set1"),main="Set1 3 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(8,"Set3"),main="Set3 8 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(8,"Greys"),main="Greys 8 colors")
 hist(VADeaths,col=brewer.pal(8,"Greens"),main="Greens 8 colors")
Created by Pretty R at inside-R.org

Colors from [http://www.ColorBrewer.org] by Cynthia A. Brewer, Geography, Pennsylvania State University
• Erich Neuwirth (2011). RColorBrewer: ColorBrewer palettes. R package version 1.0-5. [http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=RColorBrewer]
Note-ColorBrewer is Copyright (c) 2002 Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower, and The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved. The ColorBrewer palettes have been included in the R package with permission of the copyright holder.

Cricinfo StatsGuru Database for Statistical and Graphical Analysis

Data from the ESPN Cricinfo website is available from the STATSGURU website.

The url is of the form-

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/stats/index.html?class=1;team=6;template=results;type=batting

http://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/engine/stats/index.html?

class=1;team=6;template=results;type=batting

If you break down this URL to get more statistics on cricket, you can choose the following parameters.
class
1=Test
2=ODI
3=T20I
11=Test+ODI+T20I
team
1=England
2=Australia
3=South America
4-West Indies
5=New Zealand
6=India ,7=Pakistan and 8=Sri Lanka

type
batting
bowling
fielding
allround
fow
official
team
aggregate

 

ESPN Terms of Use are here-you may need to  check this before trying any web scraping.

http://www.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/site/company/terms_use.html

 

However ESPN has unleashed the API (including both free and premium)for Developers at http://developer.espn.com/docs.

and especially these sports http://developer.espn.com/docs/headlines#parameters

/sports News across all sports/sections
/sports/baseball/mlb Major League Baseball (MLB)
/sports/basketball/mens-college-basketball NCAA Men’s College Basketball
/sports/basketball/nba National Basketball Association (NBA)
/sports/basketball/wnba Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA)
/sports/basketball/womens-college-basketball NCAA Women’s College Basketball
/sports/boxing Boxing
/sports/football/college-football NCAA College Football
/sports/football/nfl National Football League (NFL)
/sports/golf Golf
/sports/hockey/nhl National Hockey League (NHL)
/sports/horse-racing Horse Racing
/sports/mma Mixed Martial Arts
/sports/racing Auto Racing
/sports/racing/nascar NASCAR Racing
/sports/soccer Professional soccer (US focus)
/sports/tennis Tennis

 

I wonder when this can be enabled for Cricket as well (including APIs  free,academic,premium,partner ).

(Note you can use R packages XML , RCurl , rjson, to get data from the web among others).

Plotting is best done using ggplot2 http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ or d3.js at http://mbostock.github.com/d3/, and the current status of cricket graphics can surely look a change- they are mostly a single radial plot of shots played /runs scored or a combined barplot/line graph.

April Fool’s Day- Catblock!

Since Anonymous didnt disrupt the internet on April Fools Day by overloading the DNS Servers! , the best April Fool’s day imho goes to Adblock- that  nifty extension that allows you to block ads.

Well for today- it replaced ads with funny cats- and you can even buy the cats for ads extension  permanently. That’s right cats take over the Internet!

Only 2% of Chrome and Firefox users block ads! so what are you waiting for- this is how the NYTimes looks for me!!

 

Replace ads with cats-

for chrome here-

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom

for firefox here-

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/

read more on catblock here-

http://adblockforchrome.blogspot.in/2012/03/inturdusing-catblock.html

but if you want to buy catblock—

see this

https://chromeadblock.com/pay/?source=catblock