Search This Blog
Thursday, March 7, 2013
A tablet specifically for schools
EHR in NYC
Big Data for a Healthy Big Apple
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Misplacing a 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,
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Your guide, not you're guide
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:
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/
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Trailing the Tiger Trade
Trailing the Tiger Trade With Big Data
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Writer's homework
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.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
The Big Bow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory
The two are married together, so to speak, by Mathew Jockers, who declares them the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,"
Read more about the humanities going Google, as one article put it in my Big Data Republic blog, The Big Bow-Wow & a Bit of Ivory
DNA data storage
Friday, February 1, 2013
Smartphone signals for retail analytics
Post-Sandy Street Views
But not everyone is pleased about updates that include images of their hurricane-ravaged homes. Read more at New Maps After Sandy
Thursday, January 24, 2013
That's big data entertainment!
In the past, the device held by someone watching television was usually a remote control. In the future, it is just as likely to be a mobile device. Starting next fall, television ratings will be measured in tweets as well as Nielsen numbers as social conversations are analyzed to calculate the reach of a program. Nielsen and Twitter announced the new form rating last month, but their partnership has been in the works for over a year.
Snoopy was prophetic. 3-D movies have made a comeback. Consequently, movies today pack a lot more data per frame. But big data is also involved in the trend toward data streaming that is displacing discs and in the data on what people want to watch.Big data drives today’s movie industry, both in terms of the amount of data packed into each frame you see at theaters and in terms of video streaming online. It’s what delivers 3-D effects in the theater and personalized recommendations to Netflix viewers. And very big numbers ride on both.
In the past few years, 3-D movies have staged a comeback on a scale much greater than their brief heyday in the 1950s. Adding in the 3-D effect adds "anywhere from 100% to 200% more data per frame," according to Jeff Denworth, vice president of marketing for DataDirect Networks (DDN). Denworth attributes the proliferation of present-day 3-D films to the huge success James Cameron had with the 3-D film "Avatar" in 2009, which packed a petabyte of data.
"Avatar" cost about $237 million to produce, but it brought in more than ten times that amount. It earned the distinction of IMDB identifies it as "the highest-grossing film of all time." By the beginning of 2010, it had taken in $2,779,404,183. A rash of 3-D films followed this success, and many did very well. According to iSuppli Market Intelligence (owned by IHS) in 2011 3-D films brought in $7 billion at the box-office, 16 percent more than the previous year.
The full figures for 2012 are not yet in, though they will likely be higher as the number of 3-D screens have gone up from about 9,000 in "2009 to 43,000 in by the third quarter" of 2012. One of the biggest draws of the year, Marvel’s 3D superhero flick, "The Avengers," grossed $1,511,757,910 in 2012. As 3-D has grown so common at the theater, movie-makers have to point to something else to distinguish their offering.
"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" had to do 3-D one better with its "brand new format High Frame Rate 3D (HFR 3D)." Instead of the 24 frames per second, which is the movie standard, it packs in 48. The advantage to the viewer, it claims, is that the greater number offers an experience "closer to what the human eye actually sees." Perhaps so, but quite a number of viewers were less than thrilled by the effect. Nevertheless, by December 29, 2012, "The Hobbit" had already taken in $600,508,000, according to IMDB figures.
Big data is also the key to watching movies on the small screen. Instead of picking up a disc when they buy or rent a movie, people now can just have it come right to them. As Dan Cryan, senior principal analyst at HIS observed, in 2012 Americans made "a historic switch to Internet-based consumption, setting the stage for a worldwide migration from physical to online."
Estimates of online movie payments for the US in 2012 are “3.4 billion views or transactions, up from 1.4 billion in 2011. This form of video streaming is dominated by Netflix in the US, where it makes up "33% of peak period downstream traffic" Amazon, Hulu, and HBO Go follow far behind at 1.8%, 1.5%, and .5% respectively. It intends to keep its lead with the help of big data.
Netflix was the subject of a WSJ blog on using big data to improve streaming video. Though Netflix still offers to mail out the DVDs people select for rental, more customers now opt for streaming. In the interest of improving efficiency on that end, Netflix transferred its holdings to Amazon’s cloud. It also started using Hadoop, which enables it "to run massive data analyses, such as graphing traffic patterns for every type of device across multiple markets." That helps plan for improved data transmission and better understanding of the customer.
In addition to using big data solutions for delivery of content, Netflix applies algorithms to predict what their customers would likely want to watch next. This type of data mining technology makes Netflix confident that it can handle hosting original content. In fact, it bet more than $100 million on it; that’s the reported sum paid for the rights to two seasons of House of Cards, one of several original content series it plans on streaming.
As Netflix’s Chief Communications Officer, Jonathan Friedland, says, "We know what people watch on Netflix and we’re able with a high degree of confidence to understand how big a likely audience is for a given show based on people’s viewing habits."
So what do you think? Is it possible to guarantee a hit with big data?
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Seeing stones for military, rescue, and security operations
From Sorcery to Surfacing Data
National Safety in Big Numbers
"You can't have a data Tower of Babel" in which each system keeps its data isolated from other systems, Patrick Dreher, a senior technical director at DRC, told Military Information Technology.His company worked with the US Army on the Rainmaker cloud-based intelligence system, which integrates different data models used by the intelligence community. "For example, when Afghan drug lords finance Taliban insurgents, data from one database can be combined with Taliban financing data from an Army database inside the cloud, allowing analysts to make timely, critical connections and stay one step ahead of insurgents."
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Big Data on the Final Frontier
In the time it took you to read this sentence, NASA gathered approximately 1.73 gigabytes of data from our nearly 100 currently active missions! We do this every hour, every day, every year -- and the collection rate is growing exponentially...
In our current missions, data is transferred with radio frequency, which is relatively slow. In the future, NASA will employ technology such as optical (laser) communication to increase the download and mean a 1000x increase in the volume of data. This is much more then we can handle today and this is what we are starting to prepare for now. We are planning missions today that will easily stream more [than] 24TB's a day. That's roughly 2.4 times the entire Library of Congress -- EVERY DAY. For one mission.
Big Data on the Final Frontier
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Is your face your calling card?
Many books include pictures of the author on the back cover or inside the jacket. That is one thing I never bother to check when considering whether or not I want to read a book. I still don't really think about the author's appearance as I read. And I don't really think about my own as I write.
I use a quill for my signature picture here, as well as on my other blogs. It also serves as my profile photo on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I feel it conveys what I am about more accurately -- in terms of my role as writer - than my photo would. Or maybe I'm just camera-shy.
On the other hand, my actual photo does serve as my profile picture for the UBM boards on which I write. The policy there, as it is for many newspapers, is to require a photo for the writers. Those who comment only and don't blog can get away with using any picture they like for their profile photo or just use the default picture if they don't bother to upload one of their own.
Once I had my picture posted in that way, I put it in for my LinkedIn profile, as well. It seemed more consistent to have the same picture represent me there. Also the more standard practice on LI is to use an actual photo than a representational picture. I still can't see attaching a photo to a resume, though anyone who wishes to find my photo simply has to do an online search to find one in a fraction of a second.
While the net dooes tend to attach author faces to content, I don't believe I am more drawn to articles that feature faces.I must be in the minority, though, because I'm certain that those who demand faces find that they are effective at drawing more audience interest.
. What do you think about the face as calling card?
-
en.wikipedia.org No, Edison didn’t invent search engine optimization. But he did make a habit of tinkering around until he found what...
-
Bridge near Bear Mountain, photo by Ariella Brown I saw the title in my email and knew I really shouldn't click it, but my curiosity go...
-
No more boots for Ms. Green and other changes for M&M's candies A major component of marketing is tapping into trends and making an...