State of Data Last Week - #37

#analysis – Why Travel Sites kick tires so much better – ‘biggest advantage for travel sites was “prices vs. the same products offline”: 40% reported than online travel sites offer better prices than do offline locations, vs. 10% for non-travel sites’

#architecture – Death Match! Cloud vs. Hosted SSD –  MySQL Chief Performance Architect concludes ‘put simply, price is in the same order of magnitude, but performance is two to three orders of magnitude different’

#big_data – A really powerful server at 0% load consumes 32% of peak power. Land is <2% of Data Center costs, Mechanical & Electrical are 70-85%. See this Data Center Energy report from Microsoft (PDF) on ‘why the industry is nuts to focus on density’.

#DBMS – Can a ‘UNION’ be converted to ‘FULL OUTER JOIN’? In the cases it could be, see how it would.

#learning – ‘Encyclopedia of Machine Learning’ is now available online / for download, FREE.

#visualization – ‘The UX of Data’ – device independence is just one UX outcome of data in the cloud, at some level the ‘devices’ itself start generating more data leading to a Great Barrier Reef like self-sustaining ecosystem

#etc

• Oops! – Professor uses data and statistical model to flag over 200 students had cheated in an exam.

• Not exactly data, but – Stanford d-School’s (‘design thinking’) Bootcamp (PDF) latest version is now available free. Lots of design tools – e.g., ‘Empathy Map’ of Say, Do, Think, Feel quadrant behaviors of your users could influence the solution; ‘Power of Ten’ scaling up / down; Why-How laddering are explained exceptionally well.

• For the real enthusiast – SQL Arrival Patterns and Impact questions whether the ingrained assumption of ‘arrival rate is Poisson distributed’ (aka bell curved) holds in a SQL subsystem. The outcome? ‘Expect the unexpected, just not that often’.

• Win $10,000 – Co-sponsored by Google – How to best visualize how Federal Government spends your tax dollars.

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