For a very long time, businesses had their documents filed in folders and stored in huge metal cabinets. But thanks to advances in technology, they were eventually coded and stored digitally. As we advance through the Age of Information, the traditional digital storage devices like the floppy, compact, and flash discs evolved into cloud storage. Eric Griffith, a…

It should be detailed, featuring appropriate and properly scaled business charts, organized in a meaningful way and commented:

Or to put it differently, when your metrics lie to you: how to find out, and what should you do? 

The purpose of this article is to let Google aware of the problem, and fix their Google Analytics reports (filtering out the fake traffic). This scheme also impacts many companies computing website rankings. Tons of websites now have their traffic…

The full version is always published Monday. Starred articles or sections are new additions or updated content, posted between Thursday and Sunday. 

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• How Zipfian Academy Graduate Alex Mentch became a Data Scientist…

Interesting listing published on Mashape. Only the top 12 are listed below. It would be nice to have a separate blog for voice recognition APIs. I've been thinking at using voice rather than passport or driving license, as a more secure ID. The voice has a texture unique to each individual.…

The old world original genus names for fruit trees were all named after women. Representing an implicit importance of relation a fruit bearing tree and its fruit to the human condition. A simple and elegant description between human perception and the reality of living.  Now we take liberty with fruit as it is available from all over the world any time of year. To look at a lovely ripe peach on a wonderful late summer day and to taste its wonderful essence over shadows the long rich story of…

Large Scale Data Sharing made safe and simple.

As the web gets more personal some ideas spread like wild fire and others just fizzle. Things like tokenized payment systems that take many years in concept for success all it takes is one large corporation to adopt it to make it mainstream. The mobile application movement is a lot like this expanding into data sharing with concepts like menu sharing among families and friends for dinner. This  can be considered by some as a sign of a new…

For long, the real money gaming industry had carried the persona of bright and shiny casinos, roulettes, long rows of slot machines, high stake poker tables, etc. However, in the world where internet has penetrated into each and every aspect of our lives, gaming is no exception. Online gaming has gained tremendous eyeballs over the past few years. In its latest avatar, online gaming has added another subset that involves real money. While it has been existent worldwide for quite some time…

In this data analysis a very interesting and powerful fact emerges. The data is taken from seed-db.com and analyzed to create visualizations.…

Summary:  If you’re making the decision to use NoSQL, how do you quantify the value of the investment?

If you are exploring NoSQL, once you become educated on the basics there are two questions that will rapidly move to the top of your list of considerations.  

• What does it…

Seasoned HR professionals have always been expected to make some instinctual decisions when it comes to hiring and managing employees. However, with the rise of Business Intelligence (BI) software, such practices may be at an end. Now that analytics have entered the comfortable cubicles of HR, there is far less room to make decisions based on hunches or personal opinions.

The future of HR is analytical and, well, more intelligent.

Business intelligence software in Human…

The market for data visualization software has bloomed. I'm suspicious.

Companies like Tableau, Spotfire, SAS Visual Analytics, Qlik and Zoomdata are positioning their tools far beyond traditional business intelligence.  Capabilities for graphically navigating data, recognizing patterns and finding relationships are growing in both functional and economic scope.  These new tools can provide charting forms only imagined in the last decade like word clouds, circular hierarchies, tree…

The full version is always published Monday. Starred articles or sections are new additions or updated content, posted between Thursday and Sunday. 

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• Bottom line on Data Visualization *…

The United Nations and World Bank are part of a growing globally-oriented Open Data movement.  After World Bank meetings last week in Washington, DC, those involved in defining the international Big Data Revolution asked for inputs.  This is what I posted:

There is no doubt that big data offers significant and exponential potential for international development work across multiple fields.  That this Independent Advisory Group has been formed is clear evidence that the United…

Data science is the result of a new paradigm taking place in IT. The question was raised recently, and here I explain how and why data science is part of this new paradigm, and not recycled material.

New arsenal of techniques and metrics

Many data science techniques are very different, if not the opposite of old techniques that were…

While there is much hype and confusion around "data science" and the hot new professional "data scientist…

What is pervasive analytics?

During eras of global economic shifts, there was always a key resource discovered that became the spark of transformation for groups of individuals that could effectively harness it. Today, that resource is data. In no uncertain terms, we are witnessing a global data rush and leading companies realize that data will grow enterprise over the next several decades as much as any capital asset. These forward-looking…

As organizations look for strategic direction on the Internet of Things (IoT), it’s their developers who are likely to be the strongest advocates for sifting out which technologies and standards can provide the best competitive edge.

Andy Stanford-Clark (@andysc) is the Chief Technologist for Smarter Energy in IBM’s consulting business in energy and utilities for IBM U.K.  He’s also an IBM distinguished engineer and a master…

We have produced a 90-second video (click on this link to view the video) showing a 'random walk' (a particular case of a Markov process) evolving over 400,000 steps. Figure 1 below shows the last frame (out of 2,000 frames, each one with 200 new steps).…

The celebrity of Toronto's mayor has certainly drawn a lot of attention to the city in recent years. Several candidates are now running for Rob Ford's job. Since the mayor is currently undergoing treatment for cancer, he decided to withhold his candidacy in the upcoming municipal election. Being a longtime resident of Toronto, and being aware of the city's wealth and poverty, I'm always interested in how these competing needs play out when it is time to vote.  Consider the interesting…