State of Data -#46
April 28, 2011 Leave a comment
#analysis – Wow! Amazon.com’s latest letter to shareholders (PDF) – from Jeff Bezos – mentions “data” 13 times and starts as if it is a Data Company –
‘Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture.’
#architecture – 22 Free Tools (e.g., Data Wrangler, Google Refine) for Data Analysis & Visualization – notice how the browser has become default IDE for data.
#big_data – How Orbitz uses Hadoop to complement their Enterprise Data Warehouse Strategy – Presentation made in Chicago Data Summit on 04/26
#DBMS – Core vs. Thread – Craig Shallahamer was intrigued by ‘a couple examples where database servers have exhibited more power then the number of CPU cores could provide, which implies threads are indeed providing some extra power…so some investigation seems warranted’
#learning – Visual Gotcha – Why bridges look totally non-realistic on Google Earth – “The images are the result of mapping a 2-dimensional image onto a 3-dimensional surface. Basically, the satellite images are flat representations in which you only see the topmost object—in this case you see the bridge, and not the landmass or water below the bridge. However, the 3D models in Google Earth contain only the information for the terrain–the landmass or the bottom of the ocean.”
#visualization – Grand winner for ‘Visualize Your Taxes’ (earlier mentioned here) is wheredidmytaxdollarsgo.com, just enter your earning and see where your tax money is being spent!
#etc
- Win $8000 – New Data Mining / Recommendation System challenge for videolectures.net
- Intuition 1 vs. Algorithm 0 – IRS is typically not an airport in searcher’s mind especially around April.
- Intuition 2 vs. Algorithm 0 – When price-matching algorithms fight each other, both lose. Not one, but two copies of a book on fly were priced over $1M
- In SoD #45, we saw doubts on Pie charts – let’s give the other side a chance this week – “In Defense of Pie Charts” came out soon after
About Nilendu Misra
