Data Nerd's Corner

States already strapped for funds are likely to take advantage of the federal matching funds and jump on the data mining bandwagon to help generate additional revenue.

Data mining is the domain of more than just big name data brokers like Acxiom, Experian and Equifax - companies focusing on gathering and utilizing data number in the thousands. So with little regulation and ever increasing room to grow as the world's population spends more time online, data mining holds promise for investors.

While PRISM is potentially the least troubling with respect to its legality and the type/volume of information of the 4 programs we’ve learned about, it is also the most technically puzzling. There have been many theories on the architecture of PRISM and I’ve been inundated with requests to help press/advocates understand it — so here goes.

However, it was revealed that thetrack record for corporate change management initiatives is quite poor.  It was proposed that two factors contribute to ineffective change management: 1) over-emphasizing the organizational chart, and 2) a lack of focus on relational interactions and networks.  Social network analysis (SNA) was proposed as a method for improving understanding of relational factors and engineering organizational network change.  This article goes into detail concerning the information that can be gleaned from SNA.

There is another unique factor on Facebook that needs to be considered. I call it the “Newbie Factor”. Facebook not only has the largest social network population in the world, it also has the largest inexperienced social media population in the world. You know, those consumers and SMB’s that have never been on Twitter or Google Plus and are not experienced with social media marketing, let alone hashtags. This could materialize as a massive opportunity for brands and marketers if done properly.

As powerful as the lattice package is though, I found the learning painful. It seemed I could ultimately always do what I wanted, but not before, at times, pulling my hair out. Maybe it’s me, but the workings of lattice often seem mysterious, even with the support of package developer Deepayan Sarkar’s excellent text “Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization in R.” Today I’ll still come across lattice code posted somewhere and wonder where a feature I’d never seen before had been for 10 years

Well, Const. Michael Pearce, a police spokesman, used an Excel spreadsheet to classify the data of the 1,986 people arrested during the first 11 months of 2011. Then, to provide an interesting astrological perspective, Pearce applied an algorithm to the birth dates of all the arrestees.

It takes a certain amount of pride to say no to things you’ve done well in the past and yes to an exciting new project. It takes downright hubris to try truly amazing things that might fail–things like fight cancer with a social platform, things like building a statistical software platform for the Mac when it’s only 1989 and everyone else thinks you’re mad, things likebuild a search engine when there are already a thousand search engine companies.

Although Twitter decided not to announce its latest offering anywhere on the web, not much can happen on the popular social network without someone noticing. Two savvy marketers, Christopher Penn and Danny Olson, have pointed out that all users can now access Twitter Analytics, a service that was once only available to ad buyers, according to the Next Web.

38 percent of respondents have data retention policies with defined destruction dates (up 16 percent from 2012), and in terms of organizations with no real retention policy, or one that involves keeping information without a defined destruction date, survey results remained in the single-digit range. Most troubling to consultants at Protiviti were responses in two other categories, where organizations had either a “basic” or “detailed” classification system to define data, with varying retention policies and destruction dates depending on the classification. Basic system practitioners were down 9 percent from last year, representing one-quarter of survey respondents in 2013. Nineteen percent of respondents had detailed systems, a 10 percent drop from 2012 that reflects CIOs and IT leaders hampered by other issues to the point where they’re “not taking the best approach” with these critical data management and retention practices.

IT departments today are focused more and more on ‘fighting fires"!

Some companies are seeing much higher levels of mobile traffic. The proportion of respondents who say that more than 20% of their traffic can be attributed to mobile has more than doubled in the last 12 months, from less than a fifth (17%) in 2012 to 41% this year

Thanks to technology, privacy is almost extinct. We now have corporations that, with their data mining operations, often know more about you than you know about yourself.

Read more: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/judson-phillips-cold-hard-truth/2013/jun/17/obama-administrations-use-data-mined-information-l/#ixzz2WazwFr6H ;
Follow us: @wtcommunities on Twitter

However, converting the use of these tools into a self-service model is trickier business than many anticipate--not so much from the technology side, but from the user side.

Read more: Big data skills scarce among marketing pros, business users - FierceBigData http://www.fiercebigdata.com/story/big-data-skills-scarce-among-marketing-pros-business-users/2013-06-17#ixzz2WaRxtguS ;
Subscribe at FierceBigData

Yahoo said that between 1 December 2012 and 31 May 2013, it received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests, "inclusive of criminal, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other requests", and said the most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations.

However, echoing Twitter and Google, Yahoo also called on the US government to allow FISA requests — the most controversial ones because the US government insists in secrecy around them — to be reported separately

If you look at the intersection of data and digital things, this is right in the middle of that,” he said. “We can use complex algorithms and sensing to set the conditions to meet user comfort, and you’re also able to intelligently control to your needs.

Not that I’m complaining, exactly – the Swedish people I’ve met are incredibly nice. So nice in fact that it’s almost become a personal challenge I’ve given myself to see what makes them tick.

Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place,” reads a statement it published late Sunday night on its website.  ”There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it. For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data.

The translation process, however, is cumbersome and time-consuming. That drives up costs and slows down the crucial, time-sensitive insights that the new data inputs were supposed to deliver. Sticking with the old is a solution that is neither economically feasible nor strategically