Tablets usage for e commerce. http://t.co/SMXFEvIZqa
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) December 6, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
December 05, 2013 at 08:30PM
via IFTTT
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Tablets usage for e commerce. http://t.co/SMXFEvIZqa
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
December 05, 2013 at 08:30PM
via IFTTT
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Design thinking ( musk/ jobs) http://t.co/U9APTdqyma
Design thinking ( musk/ jobs) http://t.co/U9APTdqyma
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) December 4, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
December 04, 2013 at 09:04AM
via IFTTT
Friday, November 22, 2013
Data scientist still the sexiest profession alive !!! http://t.co/WHT8xMcfXb
Data scientist still the sexiest profession alive !!! http://t.co/WHT8xMcfXb
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) November 22, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
November 22, 2013 at 06:21AM
via IFTTT
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Analytics 3.0 Tom davenport article in hbr. http://t.co/jpmcOhZSph
Analytics 3.0
Tom davenport article in hbr. http://t.co/jpmcOhZSph
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) November 21, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
November 20, 2013 at 05:36PM
via IFTTT
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Deep learning @google http://t.co/fh1vqheJQl
Deep learning @google http://t.co/fh1vqheJQl
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) November 17, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
November 17, 2013 at 11:02AM
via IFTTT
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Jawbone up... Now ...connects you to the internet of things, http://t.co/T5xC4nnnhG
Jawbone up... Now ...connects you to the internet of things, http://t.co/T5xC4nnnhG
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) November 16, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
November 16, 2013 at 11:31AM
via IFTTT
A tale of two drugs. Why drugs are so expensive...!!! http://t.co/H57LUZbCQj
A tale of two drugs.
Why drugs are so expensive...!!! http://t.co/H57LUZbCQj
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) November 16, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
November 16, 2013 at 11:17AM
via IFTTT
Favorite tweets
A quick synthesis of Mu sigma decision sciences summit (oct 24-25 2013@ Chicago ) http://t.co/C1emRnuxA8
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) November 15, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
November 15, 2013 at 07:54AM
via IFTTT
Favorite tweets
Elon Musk's Secret Weapon: A Beginner's Guide to First Principles - Microlancer Blog http://t.co/DDPLpFzNjB
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) November 15, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
November 15, 2013 at 08:14AM
via IFTTT
Favorite tweets
Open data: Unlocking innovation and performance with liquid information @McKinsey_MGI http://t.co/RXFGuAqIJh
— Gopi Vikranth (@GopiVikranth) November 15, 2013
from Twitter https://twitter.com/GopiVikranth
November 15, 2013 at 07:58AM
via IFTTT
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Thursday, October 3, 2013
A interesting way of news gathering and distribution? http://lnkd.in/bHEtJJU
http://lnkd.in/bHEtJJU
via LinkedIn
via LinkedIn
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
http://lnkd.in/b9Tuheq Are loyalty cards working for walgreens? Seem so..
http://lnkd.in/b9Tuheq
via LinkedIn
via LinkedIn
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
If reps can't visit docs they need alternative mechanism especially in onc. http://lnkd.in/bqXDpJr
http://lnkd.in/bqXDpJr
via LinkedIn
via LinkedIn
Monday, September 30, 2013
Why everyone is trying to learn the language of internet http://lnkd.in/bpy24tM
http://lnkd.in/bpy24tM
via LinkedIn
via LinkedIn
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
State by state breakdown of how obamacare might get implemented. http://lnkd.in/bAUgPQK
http://lnkd.in/bAUgPQK
via LinkedIn
via LinkedIn
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Recent Read: Articles: Understanding Perils of co creation: HBR article
http://hbr.org/2013/09/understand-the-perils-of-co-creation/ar/1
The rise of social media has generated tremendous opportunities for companies to engage with customers. Many allow customers to participate in value-creating activities, such as brainstorming advertising taglines or product ideas—a process often referred to as co-creation. These activities not only help companies innovate at low cost but also engage customers—every marketer’s dream.
In practice, however, these programs are hard to run. Some customers “hijack” them—instead of offering real ideas, they seize the chance to ridicule the company. Such hijacking is one of the biggest challenges companies face. Prior research suggests that about half of co-creation campaigns fail.
Consider Henkel, a large German manufacturer of detergent and other products. It ran a contest in which customers could submit innovative packaging suggestions—and was deluged with negative ideas. (One was a label describing the detergent as “Yummi Chicken Flavor.”) General Motors invited customers to tweak its advertisements, resulting in a rash of ads criticizing its SUVs as gas-guzzlers that contribute to global warming. McDonald’s set up a Twitter campaign to promote positive word of mouth, but the effort became a platform for consumers looking to bash the chain (see examples below).
When Tweets Attack
Managers considering co-creation initiatives should think carefully about the risks. Our research identifies three areas of particular concern:
Strong brand reputation. Firms with strong brands need to protect them—they have a lot to lose. They must be aware that these initiatives give customers opportunities to tarnish the brand. Strong brand reputations are generally built through consistent, effective marketing, and companies should weigh the potential for misbehaving customers to undo their careful efforts.
High demand uncertainty. Companies are more likely to ask for customer input when market conditions are shifting. But this frequently backfires when demand is highly uncertain, because customers in fast-changing markets often don’t know what they want or what they’ll like. Porsche got lots of negative feedback when it announced plans to release an SUV, but it proceeded anyway, and the Porsche Cayenne was a great success.
Too many initiatives. Companies ordinarily benefit from working repeatedly with the same suppliers, but that doesn’t hold when the “suppliers” are customers. Experience shows that the quality, quantity, and variety of input decrease as the frequency of engagement increases. A study of the Dell IdeaStorm program (in which customers were invited to submit product or service ideas) found that people submitted ideas repeatedly—including many for things the company was already offering. And customers whose ideas were implemented tended to return with additional ones that were quite similar to their first suggestions.
This isn’t to say that firms should never try to crowdsource value creation in an attempt to engage customers. It can be a viable strategy—but managers must understand the high probability of misbehavior. They need to monitor engagement activities continuously and intervene if customers begin offering too much comedy and too few genuine ideas.
Peter C. Verhoef is a professor, Jenny van Doorn is an associate professor, and Sander F.M. Beckers is a PhD student, at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.
The rise of social media has generated tremendous opportunities for companies to engage with customers. Many allow customers to participate in value-creating activities, such as brainstorming advertising taglines or product ideas—a process often referred to as co-creation. These activities not only help companies innovate at low cost but also engage customers—every marketer’s dream.
In practice, however, these programs are hard to run. Some customers “hijack” them—instead of offering real ideas, they seize the chance to ridicule the company. Such hijacking is one of the biggest challenges companies face. Prior research suggests that about half of co-creation campaigns fail.
Consider Henkel, a large German manufacturer of detergent and other products. It ran a contest in which customers could submit innovative packaging suggestions—and was deluged with negative ideas. (One was a label describing the detergent as “Yummi Chicken Flavor.”) General Motors invited customers to tweak its advertisements, resulting in a rash of ads criticizing its SUVs as gas-guzzlers that contribute to global warming. McDonald’s set up a Twitter campaign to promote positive word of mouth, but the effort became a platform for consumers looking to bash the chain (see examples below).
When Tweets Attack
Strong brand reputation. Firms with strong brands need to protect them—they have a lot to lose. They must be aware that these initiatives give customers opportunities to tarnish the brand. Strong brand reputations are generally built through consistent, effective marketing, and companies should weigh the potential for misbehaving customers to undo their careful efforts.
High demand uncertainty. Companies are more likely to ask for customer input when market conditions are shifting. But this frequently backfires when demand is highly uncertain, because customers in fast-changing markets often don’t know what they want or what they’ll like. Porsche got lots of negative feedback when it announced plans to release an SUV, but it proceeded anyway, and the Porsche Cayenne was a great success.
Too many initiatives. Companies ordinarily benefit from working repeatedly with the same suppliers, but that doesn’t hold when the “suppliers” are customers. Experience shows that the quality, quantity, and variety of input decrease as the frequency of engagement increases. A study of the Dell IdeaStorm program (in which customers were invited to submit product or service ideas) found that people submitted ideas repeatedly—including many for things the company was already offering. And customers whose ideas were implemented tended to return with additional ones that were quite similar to their first suggestions.
This isn’t to say that firms should never try to crowdsource value creation in an attempt to engage customers. It can be a viable strategy—but managers must understand the high probability of misbehavior. They need to monitor engagement activities continuously and intervene if customers begin offering too much comedy and too few genuine ideas.
Peter C. Verhoef is a professor, Jenny van Doorn is an associate professor, and Sander F.M. Beckers is a PhD student, at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Recent Read: Mobile monetization
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/30/how-facebook-went-from-sucking-at-mobile-to-killing-in-mobile-in-12-short-months/
A little over a year ago, Facebook was so bad at monetizing mobile that the company tried to hide that fact in its legally required pre-IPO documentation, adding it only days before the company went public. The whole mess contributed to what ended up almost being the worst IPO in a decade and a share price that still hasn’t recovered its IPO heights.
Then a week ago, Facebook announced record earnings and a massive 41 percent of revenue from … mobile.
How did the company turn it around that quick?
“Every single year we’ve heard people say ‘This is the year of mobile,” Nanigans SVP Dan Slagen told me, laughing. “But this is the first time we’ve seen someone come forward and put forward the kind of number that Facebook did.”
Nanigans might be the single biggest conduit of Facebook ads on the planet, managing “nine figures” of annual ad spend. So Slagen knows a little about Facebook and revenue. And he says that Facebook targeting has gotten so good in the last year that “there’s really no excuse for someone seeing your ad who doesn’t want your product.” That’s had a massive impact on Facebook profitability, especially on mobile.
Mobile ad exec Krishna Subramanian agrees.
He’s the CMO of mobile advertising company Velti, and he says the massive shift is due to Facebook’s data-centric approach to products and decisions.
“I don’t think it was luck,” Subramanian told me yesterday. “Facebook executed flawlessly after spending the second half of last year experimenting and looking at all the possibilities of making money in mobile.”
Perhaps most interesting is that Facebook’s mobile revenue has gone through the roof this year at the same time that Google’s mobile earnings have tapered off — in spite of layering in mobile into AdWords, which was supposed to increase click prices but actually did not.
For Slagen, it’s all about creative, targeting, and optimization, which have never been better on Facebook.
“Mobile ad units used to be tiny little banners, but Facebook completely broke through that model,” he said. “Facebook’s mobile ad spot is a massively large ad unit, which has given advertisers a whole new opportunity on mobile.”
“Never seen clickthrough rates this high”
Because Facebook’s mobile ad unit is large, brands can be creative again. Aesthetics and visuals are the first things that grab attention, and there’s plenty of room to add a title and some copy — perhaps a call to action. Add in Facebook’s unparalleled targeting capability, and you’ve got a winner, advertisers say — and profitable winner.“We’ve never seen clickthrough rates this high outside of Google Adwords,” Slagen says.
Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/30/how-facebook-went-from-sucking-at-mobile-to-killing-in-mobile-in-12-short-months/#qOHulv9FPTyVRTdk.99
When Apps meet cloud storage: Upcoming trends?
quick snippet:
While both announcements garnered their fair share of press attention, most failed to notice that these developments are only the tip of the iceberg with respect to the tectonic shifts afoot in the cloud computing space.
This integration of consumer cloud storage with the applications represents an interesting trend — one that Filepicker.io, my company, has been actively catalyzing and aggressively pushing forth on for a while now.
So what are these tectonic shifts, and what does it means to enterprise and independent developers, as well as ultimately to users?
The Death of Local Storage
Notice that both the Dropbox and the Google Drive developments are a marriage of storage with applications. Users are increasingly storing their content online in platforms and that means the death of local storage is near.
Facebook has become my defacto online photo hard drive, while friends with DSLRs use Picasa or Flickr for this purpose. I’ve passively collected a lot of family photos and work PDFs in Gmail. Evernote stores my memories. Google Docs, Box, Alfresco and Office Live have my documents. Even Youtube or Vimeo keeps a cache of my favorite videos. Users don’t realize it fully yet but the content you care about lives online now.
Recent Read: Amazon upending retail and Bezos
http://www.fastcompany.com/3014817/amazon-jeff-bezos
Amazon upended retail, but CEO Jeff Bezos -- who just bought The Washington Post for $250 million -- insists it’s still "Day One." What comes next? A relentless pursuit of cheaper goods and faster shipping. The competition is already gasping for breath.
The first thing you notice about Jeff Bezos is how he strides into a room.
A surprisingly diminutive figure, clad in blue jeans and a blue pinstripe button-down, Bezos flings open the door with an audible whoosh and instantly commands the space with his explosive voice, boisterous manner, and a look of total confidence. "How are you?" he booms, in a way that makes it sound like both a question and a high-decibel announcement
Each of the dozen buildings on Amazon's Seattle campus is named for a milestone in the company's history--Wainwright, for instance, honors its first customer. Bezos and I meet in a six-floor structure known as Day One North. The name means far more than the fact that Amazon, like every company in the universe, opened on a certain date (in this case, it's July 16, 1995). No, Day One is a central motivating idea for Bezos, who has been reminding the public since his first letter to shareholders in 1997 that we are only at Day One in the development of both the Internet and his ambitious retail enterprise. In one recent update for shareholders he went so far as to assert, with typical I-know-something-you-don't flair, that "the alarm clock hasn't even gone off yet." So I ask Bezos: "What exactly does the rest of day one look like?" He pauses to think, then exclaims, "We're still asleep at that!"
AmazonFresh Is Jeff Bezos' Last Mile Quest For Total Retail Domination
Amazon upended retail, but CEO Jeff Bezos -- who just bought The Washington Post for $250 million -- insists it’s still "Day One." What comes next? A relentless pursuit of cheaper goods and faster shipping. The competition is already gasping for breath.
The first thing you notice about Jeff Bezos is how he strides into a room.
A surprisingly diminutive figure, clad in blue jeans and a blue pinstripe button-down, Bezos flings open the door with an audible whoosh and instantly commands the space with his explosive voice, boisterous manner, and a look of total confidence. "How are you?" he booms, in a way that makes it sound like both a question and a high-decibel announcement
Each of the dozen buildings on Amazon's Seattle campus is named for a milestone in the company's history--Wainwright, for instance, honors its first customer. Bezos and I meet in a six-floor structure known as Day One North. The name means far more than the fact that Amazon, like every company in the universe, opened on a certain date (in this case, it's July 16, 1995). No, Day One is a central motivating idea for Bezos, who has been reminding the public since his first letter to shareholders in 1997 that we are only at Day One in the development of both the Internet and his ambitious retail enterprise. In one recent update for shareholders he went so far as to assert, with typical I-know-something-you-don't flair, that "the alarm clock hasn't even gone off yet." So I ask Bezos: "What exactly does the rest of day one look like?" He pauses to think, then exclaims, "We're still asleep at that!"
Recent Read: Inside the mind of Bezos (old 2004 article)
That morning in March 2003, while carrying the richest and arguably most renowned passenger of his long career, Cheater nearly lost control of the copter in the powerful winds. He brought it to a quick landing, but the main rotor sliced into a cedar tree. The airframe split, and the helicopter rolled over and finally settled in the shallow waters of Calamity Creek. The copter was destroyed, but its passengers used their cell phones to call for help, and the U.S. Border Patrol sent a rescue party.
One year later, back at Amazon.com's headquarters in Seattle, Bezos shows no sign of the minor head laceration he was hospitalized for -- and no emotional trauma either. "People say that your life races before your eyes," he says. "This particular accident happened slowly enough that we had a few seconds to contemplate it." He lets out one of his famously booming laughs. Bezos's laugh is like a streak of exclamation points. He laughs much the way a businessman from an earlier era might have slapped your back or pounded the table. But it's a backslap that would break three of your ribs, and a table-pounding that might chop a wooden desk in half like a bravura karate stunt.
"I have to say, nothing extremely profound flashed through my head in those few seconds. My main thought was, This is such a silly way to die." He laughs and laughs and laughs. "It wasn't life-changing in any major way. I've learned a fairly tactical lesson from it, I'm afraid. The biggest takeaway is: Avoid helicopters whenever possible! They're not as reliable as fixed-wing aircraft." Then he laughs hysterically, as though his brush with death were the funniest thing imaginable.
It's tempting but too facile to dismiss Bezos as a guy enjoying a charmed life. His boundless optimism is matched only by his outrageous good luck. The chopper accident was just the latest hairy episode he has survived in nine years as founder and chief executive officer of Amazon. Back in 1997, when the book barons at Barnes & Noble launched their rival Web site, Forrester Research chief George Colony famously predicted that Bezos's little venture was "Amazon.toast." A lot of people in the press and on Wall Street -- and inside the company as well -- thought the critic was correct. But Bezos flourished. Later, when the collective delusion of the 1990s finally ended, Amazon's shares fell from $100 to $6. Bezos remained sanguine. "Jeff irrepressibly casts every challenge as an opportunity," says his longtime friend Linda Stone, a former executive at Apple and Microsoft.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
2012 Reading list
2012 Reading List (completed books)
- The Big Short
- Boomerang
- freakonomics
- The name of the wind
- Wise Man's Fear
- A crown imperiled
- Mist Born: Final Empire
- Mist Born 2: Well of ascension
- MistBorn 3: The hero of ages
- Kill Shot (Vince Flynn)
- MistBorn 4: The alloy of law
- Super Freaknomics
Favorite TV shows
Currently watching
- Suits
- True blood
- Sleepy hollow
- Doctor Who
- Game of thrones
- White collar
- Justified
- House of cards
- Person of interest
- The good wife
- Blue bloods
- Orphan Black
- Davinci demons
- Hannibal
- The mentalist
- Ray Donovan
- Californication
- The black list
- Falling skies
- Elementary
- The originals
- House of lies
Favorites:
- Battlestar Galactica
- BSG: chrome and blood
- Stargate SG1 and atlantis
- Supernatural
- Sherlock
- Boston Legal
- The practice
- Greek
- Fringe
- Alias
- Friends
- Seinfield
- Coupling
- HIMYM
- Kyle XY
- Heroes
- Dexter
- Castle
- Melrose place 2.0
- Caprica
- Firefly
- Star trek TNG
- Star trek: orig
- Arrested development
- Two and half men
- Lost girl
- X files
- 30 rock
- Weeds
- Nikita
- 24
- Lost
- Prison break
- The west wing
- Studio 60 on the sunset strip
- Dresden files
- Damages
- 4400
- The dead zone (t s4)
- Downtown Abbey
- Homeland
- The chicago code
- The wire
- Shield
- Dark Blue
- The state within
- Political animals
- Modern Family
- Remington steele
- The following
- Smallville
- Entourage
- Las Vegas
- Dark angel
- Angel
- Spartacus
- Dirty sexy money
- Sanctuary (S1,2)
- Street hawk
- Knight rider
- Terminator: Sarah Connor chronicles
- Mad men
- Life
- The Event
- Breaking bad
Ok ish
The vampire diaries
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Email metadata and visualizing your life
Https://immersion.media.mit.edu/demo
If you don't use gmail and have Facebook then
Www.wolframalpha.com/Facebook
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Interesting Quotes
Statistically, strength comes from pooling people together, but then the icing on the cake is when you individualize the findings.
— Patrick Wolfe, a statistician who studies social networks at University College, London.
Recent Read: big data and personal analytics
The Data Made Me Do It
The next frontier for big data is the individual
The former chief scientist of Amazon.com, now directing Stanford University’s Social Data Lab, told me a story about awakening at dawn to catch a flight from Shanghai. That’s when an app he’d begun using, Google Now, told him his flight was delayed.
The software scours a person’s Gmail and calendar, as well as databases like maps and flight schedules. It had spotted the glitch in his travel plans and sent the warning that he shouldn’t rush. When Weigend finally boarded, everyone else on the plane had been waiting for hours for a spare part to arrive.
For Weigend, a fast-talking consultant and lecturer on consumer behavior, such episodes demonstrate “the power of a society based on 10 times as much data.” If the last century was marked by the ability to observe the interactions of physical matter—think of technologies like x-ray and radar—this century, he says, is going to be defined by the ability to observe people through the data they share.
So-called anticipatory systems such as Google Now represent one example of what could result. We’re already seeing the transformations that big data is causing in advertising and other situations where millions of people’s activity can be measured at a time. Now data science is looking at how it can help individuals. Timely updates on a United Airways flight may be among the tamer applications. Think instead of statistical models that tell you what job to take, or alert you even before you feel ill that you may have the flu.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Recent Read: Experiments: What happened when one man pinged the entire internet
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514066/what-happened-when-one-man-pinged-the-whole-internet/
A home science experiment that probed billions of Internet devices reveals that thousands of industrial and business systems offer remote access to anyone.
A Map of all systems that were online and were pinged!
You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. “I have a lot of cooling equipment to make sure my house doesn’t catch on fire,” says Moore, who leads research at computer security company Rapid7. In February last year he decided to carry out a personal census of every device on the Internet as a hobby. “This is not my day job; it’s what I do for fun,” he says.
A home science experiment that probed billions of Internet devices reveals that thousands of industrial and business systems offer remote access to anyone.
A Map of all systems that were online and were pinged!
You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. “I have a lot of cooling equipment to make sure my house doesn’t catch on fire,” says Moore, who leads research at computer security company Rapid7. In February last year he decided to carry out a personal census of every device on the Internet as a hobby. “This is not my day job; it’s what I do for fun,” he says.
Monday, April 29, 2013
Recent Read: Internet of things
http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/29/internet-of-things-ibm/
While we’re still figuring out what the Internet of Things
will eventually look like, we do know this: It’s going to be very, very busy.
To help make sense of the noise IBM is announcing
MessageSight, a new, somewhat mysterious appliance that will help manage the
flood of data coming from Internet-connected sensors and devices. To pitch the
need for the box, IBM cites data from IMS Research, which says that there will
be 22 million web-connected devices by 2020. All these devices, which will
generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day, are going to need hardware to
process them — or so IBM says.
If the understanding of the “Internet of Things” still
eludes you, envision a scenario where every component of you car had its own
sensor, and all of these sensors periodically phoned home about what was going
on inside them. Leaky tire? Faulty brake light? Empty fuel tank? With sensors,
your car could keep track of this information and warn you when bad Things are
going down. But getting sensors in devices is easy. The real challenge is
processing all of their data.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Recent Read: Data visualization
http://hbr.org/special-collections/insight/visualizing-data
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/tell_better_data_stories_with.html
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/04/tell_better_data_stories_with.html
Tell Better Data Stories with Motion and Interactivity
When it comes to making sense of vast amounts of complicated
data, time really is on your side. It's a simple concept, one that everyone
understands: an action starts, then eventually stops. The distance between
those two points conveys information — information about then, about now, and
about the differences between the two.
If you apply that simple yet elegant measuring stick to an
overwhelming glut of information, you have the beginnings of a powerful data
visualization that can simplify the complex, identify trends, and shape your
audience's comprehension of the story you want to tell.
However, when time is the canvas for your data, you'll need
one, or both, of these techniques: motion and interactivity.
Hans Rosling, who gained popular fame in his 2006 TED Talk
on "stats that reshape your worldview" uses the power of motion in
the software that runs his Gapminder trend-finding operation.
When Data Visualization Works — And When It Doesn't
I am uncomfortable with the growing emphasis on big data and
its stylist, visualization. Don't get me wrong — I love info graphic
representations of large data sets. The value of representing information
concisely and effectively dates back to Florence Nightingale, when she
developed a new type of pie chart to clearly show that more soldiers were dying
from preventable illnesses than from their wounds. On the other hand, I see
beautiful exercises in special effects that show off statistical and technical
skills, but do not clearly serve an informing purpose. That's what makes me
squirm.
Ultimately, data visualization is about communicating an
idea that will drive action. Understanding the criteria for information to
provide valuable insights and the reasoning behind constructing data
visualizations will help you do that with efficiency and impact.
For information to provide valuable insights, it must be
interpretable, relevant, and novel. With so much unstructured data today, it is
critical that the data being analyzed generate interpretable information.
Collecting lots of data without the associated metadata — such as what is it,
where was it collected, when, how and by whom — reduces the opportunity to play
with, interpret, and gain insights from the data. It must also be relevant to
the persons who are looking to gain insights, and to the purpose for which the
information is being examined. Finally, it must be original, or shed new light
on an area. If the information fails any one of these criteria, then no
visualization can make it valuable. That means that only a tiny slice of the
data we can bring to life visually will actually be worth the effort.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
How Robots and Military-Grade Algorithms Make Same-Day Delivery Possible
more comments to follow:
Key themes:
- Store to door
- Predictive stocking
- 7-11 lockers
- Man+ machine integration in picking right items and humans figuring out quality
- City as a warehouse (how ebay has participants from Walgreens to radioshack to THD)
- Couriers (with mobile app tracking)
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Recent Read: biological computer
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/29/biological-computer_n_2981753.html
Researchers at Stanford University announced this week that they've created genetic receptors that can act as a sort of "biological computer," potentially revolutionizing how diseases are treated.
In a paper published in the journal "Science" on Friday, the team described their system of genetic transistors, which can be inserted into living cells and turned on and off if certain conditions are met. The researchers hope these transistors could eventually be built into microscopic living computers. Said computers would be able to accomplish tasks like telling if a certain toxin is present inside a cell, seeing how many times a cancerous cell has divided or determining precisely how an administered drug interacts with each individual cell.
Once the transistor determines the conditions are met, it could then be used to make the cell, and many other cells around it, do a specific thing--like telling cancerous cells to destroy themselves.
Researchers at Stanford University announced this week that they've created genetic receptors that can act as a sort of "biological computer," potentially revolutionizing how diseases are treated.
In a paper published in the journal "Science" on Friday, the team described their system of genetic transistors, which can be inserted into living cells and turned on and off if certain conditions are met. The researchers hope these transistors could eventually be built into microscopic living computers. Said computers would be able to accomplish tasks like telling if a certain toxin is present inside a cell, seeing how many times a cancerous cell has divided or determining precisely how an administered drug interacts with each individual cell.
Once the transistor determines the conditions are met, it could then be used to make the cell, and many other cells around it, do a specific thing--like telling cancerous cells to destroy themselves.
Recent Read: Big data analytics plan
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_whats_your_plan
A quick snippet
A quick snippet
Big data: What’s your plan?
Many companies don’t have one. Here’s how to get started.
March 2013| byStefan Biesdorf, David Court, and Paul Willmott
The payoff from joining the big-data and advanced-analytics management revolution is no longer in doubt. The tally of successful case studies continues to build, reinforcing broader research suggesting that when companies inject data and analytics deep into their operations, they can deliver productivity and profit gains that are 5 to 6 percent higher than those of the competition.1 The promised land of new data-driven businesses, greater transparency into how operations actually work, better predictions, and faster testing is alluring indeed.
But that doesn’t make it any easier to get from here to there. The required investment, measured both in money and management commitment, can be large. CIOs stress the need to remake data architectures and applications totally. Outside vendors hawk the power of black-box models to crunch through unstructured data in search of cause-and-effect relationships. Business managers scratch their heads—while insisting that they must know, upfront, the payoff from the spending and from the potentially disruptive organizational changes.
The answer, simply put, is to develop a plan. Literally. It may sound obvious, but in our experience, the missing step for most companies is spending the time required to create a simple plan for how data, analytics, frontline tools, and people come together to create business value. The power of a plan is that it provides a common language allowing senior executives, technology professionals, data scientists, and managers to discuss where the greatest returns will come from and, more important, to select the two or three places to get started.
But that doesn’t make it any easier to get from here to there. The required investment, measured both in money and management commitment, can be large. CIOs stress the need to remake data architectures and applications totally. Outside vendors hawk the power of black-box models to crunch through unstructured data in search of cause-and-effect relationships. Business managers scratch their heads—while insisting that they must know, upfront, the payoff from the spending and from the potentially disruptive organizational changes.
The answer, simply put, is to develop a plan. Literally. It may sound obvious, but in our experience, the missing step for most companies is spending the time required to create a simple plan for how data, analytics, frontline tools, and people come together to create business value. The power of a plan is that it provides a common language allowing senior executives, technology professionals, data scientists, and managers to discuss where the greatest returns will come from and, more important, to select the two or three places to get started.
Recent Read: Big data in healthcare
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/health_systems/the_big-data_revolution_in_us_health_care
Big data could transform the health-care sector, but the industry must undergo fundamental changes before stakeholders can capture its full value.
A big-data revolution is under way in health care. Start with the vastly increased supply of information. Over the last decade, pharmaceutical companies have been aggregating years of research and development data into medical databases, while payors and providers have digitized their patient records. Meanwhile, the US federal government and other public stakeholders have been opening their vast stores of health-care knowledge, including data from clinical trials and information on patients covered under public insurance programs. In parallel, recent technical advances have made it easier to collect and analyze information from multiple sources—a major benefit in health care, since data for a single patient may come from various payors, hospitals, laboratories, and physician offices.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Recent read: Network approach to problem solving
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Strategic_Thinking/Five_routes_to_more_innovative_problem_solving_3074
The flexons approach
Finding innovative solutions is hard. Precedent and experience push us toward familiar ways of seeing things, which can be inadequate for the truly tough challenges that confront senior leaders. After all, if a problem can be solved before it escalates to the C-suite, it typically is. Yet we know that teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do.2 When a diverse range of experts—game theorists to economists to psychologists—interact, their approach to problems is different from those that individuals use. The solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innovative answer will be found.
The flexons approach
Finding innovative solutions is hard. Precedent and experience push us toward familiar ways of seeing things, which can be inadequate for the truly tough challenges that confront senior leaders. After all, if a problem can be solved before it escalates to the C-suite, it typically is. Yet we know that teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do.2 When a diverse range of experts—game theorists to economists to psychologists—interact, their approach to problems is different from those that individuals use. The solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innovative answer will be found.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
DNA transistors
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/30/4164468/dna-transistors-biological-computing
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/03/27/science.1232758.abstract?sid=8b3ba921-4f1a-409e-9749-351d3750c5b0
Scientists at Stanford University have engineered a basic form of transistor using bacterial DNA, potentially paving the way for more complex biological computing systems. In a paper published in the journal Science this week, the five researchers describe how they used special enzymes to control the flow of nucleic acids in E. coli bacteria, creating living versions of the key logic gates — AND, OR, XOR, etc. — that form the basis of computer programming languages.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/03/27/science.1232758.abstract?sid=8b3ba921-4f1a-409e-9749-351d3750c5b0
Scientists at Stanford University have engineered a basic form of transistor using bacterial DNA, potentially paving the way for more complex biological computing systems. In a paper published in the journal Science this week, the five researchers describe how they used special enzymes to control the flow of nucleic acids in E. coli bacteria, creating living versions of the key logic gates — AND, OR, XOR, etc. — that form the basis of computer programming languages.
Biological computing: Rewritable digital data
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/05/14/1202344109
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18158131
The use of synthetic biological systems in research, healthcare, and manufacturing often requires autonomous history-dependent behavior and therefore some form of engineered biological memory. For example, the study or reprogramming of aging, cancer, or development would benefit from genetically encoded counters capable of recording up to several hundred cell division or differentiation events. Although genetic material itself provides a natural data storage medium, tools that allow researchers to reliably and reversibly write information to DNA in vivo are lacking. Here, we demonstrate a rewriteable recombinase addressable data (RAD) module that reliably stores digital information within a chromosome. RAD modules use serine integrase and excisionase functions adapted from bacteriophage to invert and restore specific DNA sequences. Our core RAD memory element is capable of passive information storage in the absence of heterologous gene expression for over 100 cell divisions and can be switched repeatedly without performance degradation, as is required to support combinatorial data storage. We also demonstrate how programmed stochasticity in RAD system performance arising from bidirectional recombination can be achieved and tuned by varying the synthesis and degradation rates of recombinase proteins. The serine recombinase functions used here do not require cell-specific cofactors and should be useful in extending computing and control methods to the study and engineering of many biological systems.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18158131
The use of synthetic biological systems in research, healthcare, and manufacturing often requires autonomous history-dependent behavior and therefore some form of engineered biological memory. For example, the study or reprogramming of aging, cancer, or development would benefit from genetically encoded counters capable of recording up to several hundred cell division or differentiation events. Although genetic material itself provides a natural data storage medium, tools that allow researchers to reliably and reversibly write information to DNA in vivo are lacking. Here, we demonstrate a rewriteable recombinase addressable data (RAD) module that reliably stores digital information within a chromosome. RAD modules use serine integrase and excisionase functions adapted from bacteriophage to invert and restore specific DNA sequences. Our core RAD memory element is capable of passive information storage in the absence of heterologous gene expression for over 100 cell divisions and can be switched repeatedly without performance degradation, as is required to support combinatorial data storage. We also demonstrate how programmed stochasticity in RAD system performance arising from bidirectional recombination can be achieved and tuned by varying the synthesis and degradation rates of recombinase proteins. The serine recombinase functions used here do not require cell-specific cofactors and should be useful in extending computing and control methods to the study and engineering of many biological systems.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Sunday, January 27, 2013
2013 Reading List
- Steve Jobs
- The Last man (Vince flynn)
- Forge of darkness (Steven Erikson, Karkhanas trilogy book 1)
- Atlas Shrugged (Re read)
- Magicians End
- Way of kings
- consider phelbas
- Steelheart
- Excession
- Start with Why
- Signal and the Noise
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Recent Read: Super Freakonomics (A Summary)
Summary of Super
Freakonomics:
Key themes that were overarching and illustrated in
the narrative are:
- People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable or manifest, therefore one of the most powerful laws of universe is the law of unintended consequences and this applies to a variety of people
Some interesting observations/conclusions/messages:
- A shrewd entrepreneur keeps his/her overhead low, maintains quality control, learns to price discriminate effectively, and has a good understanding of the market forces of supply and demand. they also enjoy their work
- The trait that we commonly call raw talent is vastly overrated. There is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it. Mastery arrives through deliberate practice. Deliberate practice has three components:
- Setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback, and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome
- History is studded with examples where For most problems that seem to be impervious to any solution, the fix is remarkably simple and cheap:
- Some of the examples are making doctors disinfect their hands before proceeding from autopsies to other operations
- Use of seat belt in automobile industry back in late 50s which effectively reduced the automobile fatality rate by 70%
- Positive externalities: Not all externalities are negative; one of the unlikeliest positive externalities on record came cloaked in a natural disaster: What do Al Gore and Mt. Pinatubo have in common?
- In 1991 an eroded wooded mountain on the Philippine island of Luzon began to rumble and spew sulfuric ash. It turned out that beloved mount Pinatubo was a dormant volcano.
- On June 15, Pinatubo erupted for nine furious hours, the explosions were so massive that the top of the mountain caved in on itself creating a bowl shaped crater, its new peak 850 feet lower
- Within 2 hours of the main blast sulfuric ash reached 22 miles into the sky and by the time it was done 20 MM tons of sulfur dioxide was discharged into the stratosphere. For the next two years the haze was settling out and the earth cooled off by an average of nearly 1 degree F.
- A single volcanic explosion practically reversed, albeit temporarily the cumulative global warming of the prior 100 yrs.
- A few such volcanic eruptions every few years might cool down the entire planet?
Some Interesting questions and stories about seemingly bizarre patterns:
- In the history of unintended consequences, few match the one uncovered by ignatz semmelweis:
- Medical doctors while in pursuit of live saving knowledge, conducted thousands upon thousands of autopsies and headed to maternity wards, since they did not clean their hands properly they carried infections which inturn costed thousands of lives, and was one of the biggest epidemic for which none was able to find the cause till ignatz discovered the relation by analyzing statistics and the pattern of doctors performing autopsies and then going for maternity wards
- 1840s, one of the gravest threat of childbearing in Europe was puerperal fever. Between 1841 and 1846 doctors delivered 20,000 babies and 2000 (1 in 10) of mother died by 1947 1 in every 6 mothers died due to the fever
- The solution was strikingly simple sprinkling a bit of chloride of line in the doctors hand wash and implementing it in hospitals
- Solutions to complex problems are often simple and are very cost effective too:
- By 1950s US had about 40 MM cars and nearly 40k people died in accidents in 1950. and the death rate was climbing as vehicles increased.
- Enter Robert mc namara who was hired by ford to figure out a solution. After a lot of research it was found that in a crash the driver was often impaled on the steering wheel and the passenger was injured because he'd hit the windshield or the header bar or the instrument panel.
- Though Mc namara ordered new padded steering wheel and tried to figure out what materials are drivers supposed to be wrapped when a crash occurs to avoid injuries what he realized was that the best fix was also the simplest one
- Rather than worrying about what a passengers head would hit when he was flung about during an accident, wouldn’t it be better to keep him from being flung at all. Mc namara knew that airplanes had seat belts; then why not cars?
- Seat belts at about $25 a pop are one of the most cost effective devices ever invented. To put this in perspective in a given year it costs roughly $500MM to put them in every vehicle vs.air bags cost roughly $4 billion a year
- A few interesting ideas that are not implemented but pose some seemingly simple fixes to problems which seem beyond the reach of any solution (A few such people created an unusual laboratory called Intellectual ventures and are in Seattle)
- A laser which detects malaria causing female mosquitoes by their wing beat frequency to zap them
- Project IV: a very long hose which pumps sulfur dioxide into stratosphere, which might be able to replicate the volcano eruption effect in a very cheap way - though no one knows or any government might not agree to dump sulphur into stratosphere!
- A hurricane busting device: Hurricanes are essentially heat engines, massive storms that are formed when the topmost layer of the ocean edges above 26.7*c. However the warm water in the ocean is a thin layer of 100 ft underneath which is trillions upon trillions of cold water. So essentially the trick is to modify the surface temperature and dissipate the heat before hurricanes can gather the energy.
- Solution proposed is to strategically place an inner tube with a skirt (like a man made large jelly fish) which will allow the warm water to go down and the outer tube bubbles up the cold water. Technically this is playing with Mother Nature but well it’s an interesting idea, such a device can be constructed from materials from home depot. US gov is considering it though
- How is a street prostitute like a department-store santa?
- They both take advantage of short term job opportunities brought about by holiday spikes in demand
- Another such situation was the advent of cable tv in rural india: Indian women ran an outsize rank of unwanted risk of pregnancy and STDs including a high rate of HIV. In turn had an impact on quality of life. The government tried a multitude of initiatives to control the population growth and improve the life of women in rural areas (ranging from advertisements, charitable programs, free condoms)
- A different sort of intervention relying on technology, plain old TV, specifically cable tv in rural areas seemed to have an effect.
- Rural Indian families who got cable TV seem to have a lower birthrate than families without a TV. And in rural india lower birth rate generally meant more autonomy for women and fewer health risks. It was also found that families with TV seemed to keep their daughters in school more too.
- While there might be no way to decisively prove if cable TV did empower women in rural india but overall the problem seems to have gone down, perhaps the husbands were just too busy watching cricket!!!
- It is no exaggeration to say that potentially a person’s entire life can be greatly influenced by the fluke of his or her birth where the fluke is one of time place or circumstance
- If you know someone in southeastern Uganda who is having a baby next year in May, it will be roughly 20% more likely to have visual hearing or learning disabilities as an adult and three years from now however may would have been fine month, however the danger will have only shifted to April and not disappeared. The same pattern has been found half way round the world in Michigan
- The reason behind this troubling phenomenon is Ramadan. Islam calls for a day time fasting from food and water for the entire month of Ramadan. Most Muslim women participate in Ramadan. Since Islam follows a lunar calendar Ramadan comes eleven days earlier each year. Babies are prone to developmental after effects due to the fasting experienced during gestation. This effects are worst when the first month of pregnancy coincides with Ramadan and the effects have been seen upto the 8th month of coincidence with Ramadan
- Michigan with a large muslim population has one of the worst observed effects specifically when ramadan coincides with summer time where there is upto 15 hrs of daylight!
- Such effects are also observed in professional soccer and some other sports where the cutoff date for player’s age is dec 31. Players born in earlier months like January have a physical advantage over say someone born later say October or November. Birthrate bulges are evident are everywhere. Consider the case of Major league baseball players most youth leagues in US have a july 31 cut off date. As it turns out a US born boy is ~50% more likely to make the majors if he is born in august instead of july
- But as prevalent as birth affects are, it would be wrong to over emphasize their pull. Birth timing may push a marginal child over the edge but other forces are far far more powerful. For instance there is a single factor that would make a boy 800 times more likely to play in the majors than a random boy. Having a father (or perhaps a mentor) who also played major league basketball from a young age.
- The story of Ian horsley (imaginary name): Terrorists are unlikely to buy health insurance?
- Ian designed an algorithm post the british 7/7 terrorist attacks to predict people who are likely to be terrorists based on their banking account information.
- Two variables which happened to make this possible along with a score of other general variables are
- One that a 26 -35 yr old person in general population is likely to buy life insurance due to family reasons however a suicide bomber has no incentive to buy one
- The other variable "X" a special behavioral attribute measure the intensity of a particular banking activity. While not unusual in low intensities among the general population, this behavior occurs more frequently among people who have other terrorist markers i.e
- Don’t have a savings account,
- Don’t withdraw money from an ATM on a Friday afternoon
- Predominantly men between 26-35
- Own a mobile phone, is a student, rent rather than own a home
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Recent Reads: How technology and data helped President Obama win the election
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/509026/how-obamas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/
A recent intersting read: Quick synopsis
The significance of Wagner’s achievement went far beyond his
ability to declare winners months before Election Day. His approach amounted to
a decisive break with 20th-century tools for tracking public opinion, which
revolved around quarantining small samples that could be treated as
representative of the whole. Wagner had emerged from a cadre of analysts who thought
of voters as individuals and worked to aggregate projections about their
opinions and behavior until they revealed a composite picture of everyone. His
techniques marked the fulfillment of a new way of thinking, a decade in the
making, in which voters were no longer trapped in old political geographies or
tethered to traditional demographic categories, such as age or gender,
depending on which attributes pollsters asked about or how consumer marketers
classified them for commercial purposes. Instead, the electorate could be seen
as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed
on their own terms. Now it was up to a candidate who wanted to lead those
people to build a campaign that would interact with them the same way.
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