State of Data Last Week – Aug 15
August 16, 2010 Leave a comment
Cool Numbers – 1 and only 1!
- In a random data set, 1 appears as first-digit in almost 1/3rd (as opposed to 1 in 9). In most concocted fraudulent data the made-up numbers start with “6”. Thus, auditors do read Benford’s law to check for fraud!
- For the same reason above, Police usually omit numbering “1” in an identification line-up (because it’s been proven to influence a witness’s choice).
- Only 18 positions can be solved by 1 single move! Each of 43 quintillion positions of Rubic’s Cube can be solved in 20 or less moves (using 35 CPU years donated by Google). Thus, 20 is the new God’s number
- #1 state to undergrad to receive venture capital in 2010 so far – New York (Cornell comes first in schools out of 165 startups that raised capital)
Data is art. Martin Wattenberg’s (Flowing Media) presentation in MIT World (check out the similarity of “How to be” and “How not to be” search; FleshMap)
10 common Hadoop-able problems (from the guy who’d done it first)
Don’t fight, Integrate – Great deployment of noSQL (analytics) and RDBMS (payment) together.
How to solve Netflix recommendation challenge with (a) huge, yet, (b) limited data
Data Portability -
How opening up of data led to progress on Alzheimer’s
How did Weather Data get opened
A new Taxonomy of Social Networking Data (if you already know what’s “Incidental Data”, don’t bother 
)
Data Visualization – How Florence Nightingale collected data, presented statistical graphics (incl Bar Charts!) and brought in immense improvements in health standards.
Cocktail party cheat-sheet – What does your Credit Card provider know about you? If you use your credit card at dentist’s, you’re 4x times less likely to miss payments in next year compared to one who uses his card at a drinking place.
About Nilendu Misra
