But what is left to buy. In terms of richness of data available for data mining for better advertising- it is Twitter and LinkedIn that have the best sources of data.

and LinkedIn is worth only 9 billion dollars and Twitter is only $8.5 billion dollars. Throw in a competitive dynamic  premium, and you can get 50 % of both these companies at 13 billion dollars. if owners dont want to sell 100%, well buy a big big stake.

Makes a good case- buy the company- buy the data- sell them ads- sell them better products.

What do you think?

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As per Minequest-http://www.minequest.com/

Prices start from $1206.

WPS  is a SAS language alternative application that can run most of your existing Base
programs without modification. WPS also provides support for a limited subset of
graphics via WPS Graphing and statistical procedures via WPS Statistics.

In addition to the broad language support, WPS is affordably priced and much less
restrictive in its licensing. WPS supports many elements of the language including
the macro language facility, the data step, most of the PROCS found in base, and
includes access engines to ODBC, DB/2, Oracle, MySQL, OLE DB, Informix,
GreenPlum, Sybase, Teradata, SPSS and other database systems.

WPS has a feature that allows you to develop extensions for it.

http://teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps/modules/language_sdk

Develop Custom Language Items

Anyone who is familiar with traditional programming languages such as Assembler, C or C++ can use the WPS Language SDK developer module to add language items to extend the language of SAS support in WPS.

Once you have created your own custom language items, you can freely redistribute them to anybody who uses WPS on the same platform.

Some existing third Party extensions are-

http://www.minequest.com/Bridge2R.html

Bridge to R for WPS
The Bridge to R is an application created and developed by MineQuest that allows the WPS
programmer to access the R system. With the Bridge to R, WPS Users can write and execute R code
from within the WPS Workbench or in batch mode using WPS. A simple yet powerful integration facility
allows the WPS developer to write R statements to access advanced features found in R, test
algorithms and create new statistical methodologies.

One of the greatest advantages of the Bridge to R is that you and your developers can use the SAS
language for manipulating and reporting your data and use R for advanced graphics and statistical
computing. The Bridge to R allows WPS Users to write R code and execute R code from within the
WPS Workbench and receive the results back in the appropriate log and listing window. The Bridge to
R even supports running your WPS and R programs in batch for production purposes.

It allows you to use either 32-bit or 64-bit R depending on whether your OS platform supports 64-bit computing. On 64-bit  platforms with sufficient RAM, developers can process large amounts of data using R.

The Bridge to R requires WPS 2.5 or higher. The Bridge is provided as part of the Analyst Power Package
and is included when you license WPS from MineQuest.

http://www.minequest.com/WindowsPowerPack.html

Parallel Process with MPExec
MPExec allows the WPS developer to dramatically reduce processing time by easily implementing parallel processing on their Windows workstation or  server. MPExec allows WPS developers to take existing WPS/SAS code and by inserting a few statements, allow your programs to access all the cores  and resources on your Windows hardware platform. MPExec allows you to parallel process up to 255 tasks and manages the collection of log and listing  files for you.

Other 3rd party applications are-

http://www.uniqcus.com/english/products.html

UniQZConnect

UniQZConnect will allow your SAS and WPS users to have a SAS or WPS session on a Windows Workstation to connect directly to SAS or WPS on z/OS. This give the user the ability to download and upload data from and to z/OS, but also to submit SAS jobs for remote execution.

The product support Wizard user dialog, full script interface, and a mixture of theese.

The Performance of the product is only limited by your current mainframe bottle necks and the current transfer limits of your FTP connection. The Security is handled through FTP ensuring that you are in compliance with your current security policies.

You can download a product sheet for UniQZConnect here.

and an upcoming application from Wolfgang at http://www.wcmat.com/cmat/

Things ToDo
CMAT was first written for Unix and later for Windows. We are now working on a 32 bit version for Linux and Unix, and after that on a 64 bit version for Windows, Linux, and Unix. We are also working on an interface to WPS and R.

—–

Overall creating applications or extensions can help WPS reach a wider audience. While Rapid Miner also has an marketplace for extensions and JMP also has extensions, one critical feature in statistical computing development is where coders can finally earn some money by creating algorithms, packages and extensions (atleast to compare with game creators on mobiles!!)

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I look now at the explosion of data, at the cloud computing enabled processing power on demand, and competitive dynamics of businesses to venture out my opinion-

1) We now have large , even excess data than we had before for statisticians a generation ago.

2) We now have extremely powerful computing devices, provided we can process our algorithms in parallel.

3) Even a slight uptick in modeling efficiency or mild uptick in business insight can provide huge monetary savings.

Call it High Performance Analytics or Big Data or Cloud Computing- are we sure statisticians are creating enough mathematical theory or are we just taking it easy in our statistics classrooms only to be subjected to something completely different when we hit the analytics workplace.

Do we  need more theorists as well? Is there ANY incentive for corporations with private R and D research teams to share their latest cutting edge theoretical work outside their corporate silo.

Related-

“a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”

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No poetry (unless I get really inspired and my scrapbook fills up)

No random internet browsing (except search for research)

Hell no, Facebook

–

No TV

No Movies

No goofing off

No wasting time using creative juice stewing as an excuse

–

Write the book

Write the book

Write the book, dammit

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We’re sorry to have to tell you that our Machine Learning course will be delayed further. There have naturally been legal and administrative issues to be sorted out in offering Stanford classes freely to the outside world, and it’s just been taking time. We have, however, been able to take advantage of the extra time to debug and improve our course content!

We now expect that the course will start either late in February or early in March. We will let you know as soon as we hear a definite date. We apologize for the lack of communication in recent weeks; we kept hoping we would have a concrete launch date to give you, but that date has kept slipping.

Thanks so much for your patience! We are really sorry for repeatedly making you wait, and for any interference this causes in your schedules. We’re as excited and anxious as you are to get started, and we both look forward to your joining us soon in Machine Learning!

Andrew Ng and the ML Course Staff

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http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1515738

Integrates R Statistical Programming Language into Oracle Database 11g

News Facts

Comprehensive In-Database Platform for Advanced Analytics

Supporting Quotes

Oracle Advanced Analytics — an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition – extends the database into a comprehensive advanced analytics platform through two major components: Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Data Mining. With Oracle Advanced Analytics, customers have a comprehensive platform for real-time analytic applications that deliver insight into key business subjects such as churn prediction, product recommendations, and fraud alerting. Oracle R Enterprise tightly integrates the open source R programming language with the database to further extend the database with Rs library of statistical functionality, and pushes down computations to the database. Oracle R Enterprise dramatically advances the capability for R users, and allows them to use their existing R development skills and tools, and scripts can now also run transparently and scale against data stored in Oracle Database 11g. Oracle Data Mining provides powerful data mining algorithms that run as native SQL functions for in-database model building and model deployment. It can be accessed through the SQL Developer extension Oracle Data Miner to build, evaluate, share and deploy predictive analytics methodologies. At the same time the high-performance Oracle-specific data mining algorithms are accessible from R.

	BENEFITS
	Scalability—Allows customers to easily scale analytics as data volume increases by bringing the algorithms to where the data resides – in the database Performance—With analytical operations performed in the database, R users can take advantage of the extreme performance of Oracle Exadata Security—Provides data analysts with direct but controlled access to data in Oracle Database 11g, accelerating data analyst productivity while maintaining data security Save Time and Money—Lowers overall TCO for data analysis by eliminating data movement and shortening the time it takes to transform “raw data” into “actionable information”

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From

http://www.crowdanalytix.com/contests/airport-guest-sentiment-analysis-1544282253/view/

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2) In the 21 st Century,It is okay to insult someone over his software , but not over most other things. Sometimes I think people are passionate not just for their own software but to just diss the other guys. It is a politically convenient release.

3) Bloggers writing about software are full of bull-by products. If they were any good in writing code, they would not have time to write a blog. Mostly bloggers on code are people whose coding enthusiasm is more than their coding competence.

4) Software is easier than it looks to people who know it. To those who dont know how to code, it will always be a bit of magic.

5) Despite immense progress, initiatives and encouragement- the number of females writing code is too low . Comparatively, figuratively and literally. If you are a male and want a social life- get into marketing while the hair is still black.

Man walks into Bar. Says to Women at Bar. ” Hey,What do you do, Me- I write code”

See!

6) People who write software end up making more money not just because they create useful stuff that helps get work done faster or helps reduce boredom for people. They make more money because they are mostly passionate, logical problem thinkers, focused, hard working and better read on a variety of subjects than others. That’s your cue to how to make money even if you cannot code.

7) I would rather write much more code rather than write poetry. But I sometimes think they are related. Just manipulating words in different languages to manipulate output in different machines or people.

Kids should be taught software at early age , as that is a skill that helps in their education and thinking. More education for the kids!

9) Laying off talented software people because you found a cheaper , younger alternative half across the globe is sometimes evil. It is also inevitable. Learn more software as you grow older.

10) The best software is the one in your head. It was written by a better programmer too.

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http://teamwpc.co.uk/press/wps3_released

WPS software ready for Big Data, Cloud Computing and Apple Mac

ONDON, UK – 2 February 2012 – World Programming today released version 3 of their leading WPS data processing and analytics software.

Big data processing at affordable prices is driving adoption of WPS in the datacentre and across the enterprise for analytics, business intelligence and prediction, data management, ETL and reporting.

WPS version 3 boosts support for the language of SAS, extending core data processing capabilities as well as analytics and graphing. Further improvements have been made to performance and scalability together with a wide range of supported platforms.

The popularity of Linux platforms continues to grow as organisations look for platform flexibility and control over costs. WPS Link technology with WPS version 3 offers the option to use the popular WPS Workbench user interface (GUI) to connect to and run programs in server, grid, cluster and cloud environments, suiting modern datacentre-driven compute facilities.

Version 3 also brings the WPS Workbench user interface to Mac OS X, Solaris, AIX and Linux platforms including Linux for System z. The WPS Workbench benefits from significant enhancements including: improved handling and display of automatically generated output; importing and exporting data; multiple concurrent program execution; code generation templates and more.

WPS statistical analysis capability continues to expand. Organisations are increasingly looking to use their data to provide the insight, prediction and intelligence to make decisions that will affect their future. WPS has the power to handle the big data volumes of the modern enterprise and to produce results that can be depended on.

WPS version 3 is available as a free upgrade to all WPS license holders.

Related Links

www.teamwpc.co.uk/support/release/wps : Summary of all the major new features in WPS version 3 plus additional downloadable documents (release notes, change log, issues).

www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps : Explore in more detail all the features of WPS software.

More Information About WPS

WPS is a competitively priced, high performance, highly scalable data processing and analytics software product that allows users to execute programs written in the language of SAS. WPS is supported on a wide variety of hardware and operating system platforms and can connect to and work with many types of data with ease. The WPS user interface (Workbench) is frequently praised for its ease of use and flexibility, with the option to include numerous third-party extensions.

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http://code.google.com/p/reaver-wps/

Reaver implements a brute force attack against Wifi Protected Setup (WPS) registrar PINs in order to recover WPA/WPA2 passphrases, as described in http://sviehb.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/viehboeck_wps.pdf.

Reaver has been designed to be a robust and practical attack against WPS, and has been tested against a wide variety of access points and WPS implementations.

On average Reaver will recover the target AP’s plain text WPA/WPA2 passphrase in 4-10 hours, depending on the AP. In practice, it will generally take half this time to guess the correct WPS pin and recover the passphrase.

Also read-

http://www.wi-fi.org/files/20110421_China_Symposia_full_merge.pdf

and

http://www.secdev.org/projects/scapy/

and

http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/

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Rapid Miner has a tonne of new stuff (Statuary Ethics Declaration- Rapid Miner has been an advertising partner for Decisionstats – see the right margin)

see

http://rapid-i.com/component/option,com_myblog/Itemid,172/lang,en/

Great New Graphical Plotters

and some flashy work

and a great series of educational lectures

A Simple Explanation of Decision Tree Modeling based on Entropies

Link: http://www.simafore.com/blog/bid/94454/A-simple-explanation-of-how-entropy-fuels-a-decision-tree-model

Description of some of the basics of decision trees. Simple and hardly any math, I like the plots explaining the basic idea of the entropy as splitting criterion (although we actually calculate gain ratio differently than explained…)

Logistic Regression for Business Analytics using RapidMiner

Link: http://www.simafore.com/blog/bid/57924/Logistic-regression-for-business-analytics-using-RapidMiner-Part-2

Same as above, but this time for modeling with logistic regression.
Easy to read and covering all basic ideas together with some examples. If you are not familiar with the topic yet, part 1 (see below) might help.

Part 1 (Basics): http://www.simafore.com/blog/bid/57801/Logistic-regression-for-business-analytics-using-RapidMiner-Part-1

Deploy Model: http://www.simafore.com/blog/bid/82024/How-to-deploy-a-logistic-regression-model-using-RapidMiner

Advanced Information: http://www.simafore.com/blog/bid/99443/Understand-3-critical-steps-in-developing-logistic-regression-models

and lastly a new research project for collaborative data mining

http://www.e-lico.eu/

e-LICO Architecture and Components

The goal of the e-LICO project is to build a virtual laboratory for interdisciplinary collaborative research in data mining and data-intensive sciences. The proposed e-lab will comprise three layers: the e-science and data mining layers will form a generic research environment that can be adapted to different scientific domains by customizing the application layer.

1. Drag a data set into one of the slots. It will be automatically detected as training data, test data or apply data, depending on whether it has a label or not.
2. Select a goal. The most frequent one is probably “Predictive Modelling”. All goals have comments, so you see what they can be used for.
3. Select “Fetch plans” and wait a bit to get a list of processes that solve your problem. Once the planning completes, select one of the processes (you can see a preview at the right) and run it. Alternatively, select multiple (selecting none means selecting all) and evaluate them on your data in a batch.

The assistant strives to generate processes that are compatible with your data. To do so, it performs a lot of clever operations, e.g., it automatically replaces missing values if missing values exist and this is required by the learning algorithm or performs a normalization when using a distance-based learner.

You can install the extension directly by using the Rapid-I Marketplace instead of the old update server. Just go to the preferences and enter http://rapidupdate.de:8180/UpdateServer as the update URL

Of course Rapid Miner has been of the most professional open source analytics company and they have been doing it for a long time now. I am particularly impressed by the product map (see below) and the graphical user interface.

http://rapid-i.com/content/view/186/191/lang,en/

Product Map

Just click on the products in the overview below in order to get more information about Rapid-I products.

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http://blog.radoop.eu/?p=12

What is Radoop?

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I was getting slower browsing speeds on OpenDNS http://www.opendns.com/

so I switched to Google DNS (though I am not sure how people in Iran and China – who have a much greater need for DNS verification services will get secure resolution of DNS)

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

	What is Google Public DNS? Google Public DNS is a free, global Domain Name System (DNS) resolution service, that you can use as an alternative to your current DNS provider. To try it out: Configure your network settings to use the IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 as your DNS servers or Read our configuration instructions. New! For IPv6 addresses, see our configuration instructions. If you decide to try Google Public DNS, your client programs will perform all DNS lookups using Google Public DNS.
	Why does DNS matter? The DNS protocol is an important part of the web’s infrastructure, serving as the Internet’s phone book: every time you visit a website, your computer performs a DNS lookup. Complex pages often require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, so your computer may be performing hundreds of lookups a day.
	Why should you try Google Public DNS? By using Google Public DNS you can: Speed up your browsing experience. Improve your security. Get the results you expect with absolutely no redirection.

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It has just been launched this month!!

It is an incredible book- and I really  like the way O Reilly has made it so easy to download E Books

I am trying to read it while trying to a write a whole lot of other stuff— and it seems easy to read and understand even for non-hackers like me. Esp with Stanford delaying its online machine learning course- this is one handy e-book to have  to get you started in ML and data science!!

Click the image to see the real deal.

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018483.do

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We assume you have Gmail. If you dont have Gmail, you deserve the Spam

You click -show original on the drop down in the spammy message

you see a lot of mumbo jumbo

(or you just pick the IP addresses from comment spam)

Step 2-

You pick the IP addresses from the mumbo jumbo above (called headers )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_address

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label assigned to each device (e.g., computer, printer) participating in a computer networkthat uses the Internet Protocol for communication.^[1] An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and locationaddressing

Step 3-

You find out who has that IP address using arin

https://www.arin.net/

Step 4-

You put those IP addresses in your firewall for your computer

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733090(v=ws.10).aspx

(or if you have a self-hosted blog using Website cpanel ip deny)

http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/cpanel/ip_deny_manager.htm

Step 5-

Communicate to that IP Address using IRC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing.[1] It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels,[2] but also allows one-to-one communication via private message[3] as well as chat and data transfer,[4] including file sharing.[5]

or use HOIC to test your own firewall better before people  spam  you

http://gizmodo.com/5883146/what-is-hoic or

http://www.decisionstats.com/occupy-the-internet/

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CONFERENCE: Predictive Analytics World – San Francisco

March 4-10, 2012 in San Francisco, CA
http://predictiveanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2012
Discount Code for $150 off: AJAYBP12

CONFERENCE: Text Analytics World – San Francisco
March 6-7, 2012 in San Francisco, CA
http://textanalyticsworld.com/sanfrancisco/2012
Discount Code for $150 off: AJAYBP12

VARIOUS ANALYTICS WORKSHOPS:
A plethora of 1-day workshops are held alongside PAW and TAW
For details see: http://pawcon.com/sanfrancisco/2012/analytics_workshops.php

SEMINAR: Predictive Analytics for Business, Marketing & Web
March 22-23, 2012 in New York City, NY
July 26-27, 2012 in São Paulo, Brazil
Oct 11-12, 2012 in San Francisco
A concentrated training program lead by PAW’s chair, Eric Siegel
http://businessprediction.com

CONFERENCE: Predictive Analytics World – Toronto
April 25-26, 2012 in Toronto, Ontario
http://predictiveanalyticsworld.com/toronto/2012
Discount Code for $150 off: AJAYBP12

CONFERENCE: Predictive Analytics World – Chicago
June 25-26, 2012 in Chicago, IL
http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/chicago/2012/
Discount Code for $150 off: AJAYBP12

From Ajay-

CONTEST- If you use the discount code AJAYBP12, you will not only get the $150 off, but you will be entered in a contest to get 2 complementary passes like I did last year . Matt Stromberg won that one

http://www.decisionstats.com/contest-2-free-passes-to-predictive-analytics-world/

see last year results-

http://www.decisionstats.com/congrats-to-matt-stromberg-winner-2-free-passes-to-paw-new-york/

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