Google contributes to the big data battle against human trafficking

When we think of slavery, we think of something that has been eradicated from modern civilization. But the fact remains that nearly 21 million people around the world are effectively enslaved.

Despite being illegal, human trafficking flourishes as a $32 billion industry that is abetted by sophisticated use of technology. The hope is that technology can also be used against the traffickers in the form of big data solutions. Read more in Fighting Human Trafficking With Big Data

Collaboration as a winning strategy

We're used to thinking of competition as the key to lower prices. But in certain cases, cooperation leads to more efficient use of resources. That was the case for an Ohio hospital alliance that realized substantial savings just a few months after pooling resources. Read more in 

Collaboration & the Supply Chain

Where to begin?

Usually, the answer is: "Begin at the beginning."  But where is that?

A while back, I started a discussion on LinkedIn about useless advice for writing. What topped my list was, "an essay has a beginning, a middle, and an end."  Writers may be told the same for novels, and it is really just as useless there because you don't necessarily start with what happened first in the story. In fact, classical works are famous for beginning in medias res. So, there is very good precedent for the beginning of a piece of writing not to lay out the framework to set the chronology.

The key thing is to begin in a way that draws the reader into wanting to continue reading the story, the essay, or the poem. And, yes, you should think of making it interesting even when your  reader is also your  teacher.

What doesn't work for openers? That question will get different answers. Today someone, no doubt thinking of Bulwer-Lytton  posted the warning not to open a novel with the weather. As some pointed out, though, there are novels that do it quite effectively. I would say that there are no set rules for opening novels, and that's a good thing. The perception that there are rules for opening essays, in my humble opinion, is what leads to very formulaic and boring openers, like the one I just read this morning. It started with "The Oxford dictionary defines... ." Now, that is the sort of thing I  expect students to rely on -- in high school. It's something they should get beyond in college. Certainly, it's not what I'd expect to find in a piece written by someone who gets paid for his work. It's true that you do sometimes want to use a formal definition to clarify how you use a particular term, but it's not exactly an attention-grabber.

Any thoughts on what you find does work well for openers?

Big data, analytics, and insight into health

Mobile phones coupled with apps make it possible for people to hold the key to their own health information in their hands at all times. There are major ramifications for this possibility.

  Healthcare Analysis: Doctor vs. Device explores the position that doctors are becoming obsolete, replaced by more timely feedback from monitoring devices.

IFighting Heart Disease With Big Data  looks at the Health eHeart plan to collect health data of a million people over ten years in an effort to learn more about heart disease, the leading cause of death in America.  

Opportunities in Africa

Which region promises the greatest expansion? IBM thinks the answer is Africa. It’s not alone among tech companies that are seeking new markets and trainable talent on that continent. While growth tapers off in many more developed regions, Africa offers great potential, particularly as its workforce gains access to education and technology for communication. Read more in 

Africa: The New China

Big data and social networks for students preparing for college

The common denominator between both these uses of technology is the nonprofit organization College Summit.  You can check it out at Charity Navigator

In Bridging the Gap to the Goal With Educational Data
I focus on the use of data:

Armed with that information, educators can make informed decisions about what modifications are needed to better prepare the next batch of students for their college careers.As Camille Jacobs, Assistant Principal, Pathways College Preparatory High School, Queens, NY, noted in the College Summit whitepaper, "With postsecondary data, we have the ability to work backwards, improving or revising our practices to provide targeted instruction and services, addressing the varying needs of each of our students."

In College Apps for College Apps I look at the social media apps designed to help students to and through college. College Summit was one of the key organizations behind  The College Knowledge Challenge, which awarded prize money to the best apps for student use. 

Getting libraries out of the horse-and-buggy days

In 1967, Dr. Vannevar Bush, who envisioned a computer capable of massive data retrieval in device he called a memex  published Science Is Not Enough, which included a chapter entitled "Memex Revisited," which considers the question of data compression and retrieval.  You can read the entire chapter here: http://www.bekkahwalker.net/comt111a/reading_pdf/memex-revisited.pdf

On p. 88, he brings a critical observation about priorities: 

The great digital machines of today have their exciting proliferation because they could vitally aid business, because they could increase profits. The libraries still operate by horse-and-buggy methods, for there is no profit in libraries. Governments spend billions on space since it has glamour and hence public appeal. There is no glamour about libraries, and the pubic do not understand that the welfare of their children depends far more upon effective libraries than it does on the collection of a bucket of talcum powder from the moon. So it will not be done soon. But eventually it will.

Now, 46 years, later, the public is understanding the importance of libraries, and the power of the internet to gather all the world's digitized information at put them at one's fingertips.On April 18 and 19, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will celebrate its launch at the Boston Public Library. In keeping with the ideals underlying the project, there is no charge to attend, though the registration forms indicate the event has filled up.

The dream of the DPLA was to harness the power of the Internet to break through the silos that isolate vast quantities of data collection at various universities, museums, and libraries. It began to take shape in late 2010 when representatives of various institutions met at the Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and resolved to take the necessary steps to bring together that data through cooperative content sharing. In bridging the public-private divide, DPLA has had to overcome the challenge of managing metadata variations and staying on the right side of copyright law.
Read more in Metadata Key for Digital Public Library of America

Humans, big data, and cheesecake

"For all their brilliance, computers can be thick as a brick," observed Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist. Read more about this in There’s Still Room for Humans

Another post on big data looks at how a restaurant chain uses the technology in

The Cheesecake Factory's Big Data Entrée

A tablet specifically for schools

Everything for school squeezed into a 10" tablet. Will they buy it? Prices start at $299 with a $99/ year subscription. Read about it in Amplify Tablet Custom-Made for Schools

EHR in NYC

Though the Big Apple has had a bad time with storms and power outages, last month, it got to report some good news. At the “NYC Celebrates Improved Health Through Technology” event on February 7th, New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced positive results for the adoption of electronic health records. Read more about it in 

Big Data for a Healthy Big Apple

Misplacing a valued client

Citibank was nice enough FedEx me an illustration of a misplaced modifier. The letter begins: "As a valued client, we recently mailed a letter to you regarding an incredible opportunity to receive relief on your mortgage payment through Home Affordable Refinance Program. " As far as grammar is concerned, we only need to focus on the first five words. The way the sentence is set up the first four words are a description that should be followed by what they modify, but instead, they are followed by the pronoun "we," that is the entity that makes up Citibank, which is not its own valued client. 

To make the sentence work grammatically, Citibank could have opened with something like thins, "Because we value you as a client, we want to let you know about an incredible opportunity," or something along those lines.

For more on misplaced modifiers, see http://www.infoplease.com/cig/grammar-style/misplaced-modifiers-lost-found.html and my favorite grammar site, Purdue OWL,

Your guide, not you're guide

In honor of National Grammar Day, which is celebrated on March 4th,  here's a quick guide to pronouns and apostrophes. While people tend to get confused and add in unnecessary apostrophes at times, when it comes to pronouns, all you have to think about is this: contractions do have apostrophes, whereas possessive forms do not.

The apostrophes in contractions take the place of the letters that get knocked off when two words are combined into one, thus "I am" becomes "I'm," and "it is" becomes "it's." In contrast, possessive pronouns inherently convey possession without any apostrophe. Just like we write "his" and not "hi's" or "his'" for belonging to him,  we write "its" (with no apostrophe) for belonging to it.

Here's the list of pronouns in contraction and possessive form:

                                         Contraction                          Possessive Pronoun

                                             I'm                                             my

                                            you're                                         your
                                            he's                                             his
                                            she's                                            her
                                            it's                                               its
                                            we're                                           our
                                           they're                                          their

From the list above, people tend to confuse the ones that sound alike: it's/its and they're/their. Interesting enough, I don't really see "you're" mistaken for "your," even though both words sound exactly the same, The thing to remember is that just as you would not write "you're" or the nonexistent "you'r"  for the word that mean belonging to you, you cannot write "it's" for the word that means belonging to it, no matter how common the error.

The same holds true for "their," which is not only confused with the contraction "they're" but even with the third homonym for the grouping, "there."

Note: for the rules of apostrophe usage for plural forms, see http://www.dailywritingtips.com/when-to-form-a-plural-with-an-apostrophe/

Trailing the Tiger Trade

You can learn how stealth cameras work in the tiger exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. In at least one case, the picture recorded by the stealth cam   sealed the conviction for tiger poachers in Thailand last year.  Just like fingerprints, the patterns of tiger stripes are individually distinctive.  Consequently, the poacher’s picture proved that they did break the law. Thanks to the laws and enforcement that EIA works for, one was sentenced to four years and another to five, the longest such sentence yet for this sort of crime.  Read more about the efforts to save big cats with big data in

Trailing the Tiger Trade With Big Data

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Writer's homework

When I read articles by people who didn't bother to investigate the subject properly, I really wonder, why are they getting paid for this? I just read a Guardian piece on the advantages and drawbacks of  massive open online course AKA MOOCs.  Iit includes an assertion that the courses only can be given for subjects that involve multiple choice tests: 

Moocs are limited to subjects that can be assessed with multiple choice exams, marked automatically.Written any essays in your degree? Your professor's critique of them can't be replicated by a mooc – yet.

First of all, MOOCs like Coursera have come up with a way around that, as I explained in a blog posted last year:

Another innovative aspect to Coursera is the way it assesses student work in courses that are not limited to technology or mathematics.

As founder Ng observes, "Multiple choice doesn't really work for a poetry class." Also, with thousands enrolled in a single class, instructors would find it impossible to personalize responses to student work.

Coursera's solution to that problem is the introduction of "a system for peer grading, in which students will be trained to evaluate each other's work based on a grading rubric provided by the professor." This is not all that different from peer reviews encouraged in writers' groups, which some teachers employ in their own classroom, though the Coursera system is designed to ascertain that the students comprehend the instructor's standards before being allowed to grade another's work.

 Second of all, there are already some systems to automate grading for written work as I explained here:

For example, Pearson’s Write to Learn is designed to offer instant feedback and personalized direction on student writing. The software can be accessed at computers in the school or through an Internet connection remotely. Teachers using the software are happy to have much of the grunt work associated with guiding students through revision and editing lifted from their shoulders.  The automated critique also reduces personal confrontations. As one teacher featured in a Write to Learn case study says, there's no "evil professor" who delights in finding fault in student work.

Educational Testing Service's e-rater is another automated assessment tool. It can score 16,000 essays in 20 seconds, a breathtaking rate of productivity when compared to the one to two minutes per essay typically allotted to human scorers.

Students responded positively when the New Jersey Institute of Technology introduced e-raters. An assistant professor there, Andrew Klobucar, observes that whereas students see drafting and revising multiple times as "corrective, even punitive," when assigned by evil professors, they do not have the same negative view when doing it for an e-rater.

I do wish writers would do their own homework when offering an opinion on the current state of educational technology.

New site

I set up a new site at http://writewaypro.net