Group items tagged

BusinessWeek's 2006 Cover Story, "Math Will Rock Your World," announced a new age of numbers. With the rise of new networks, the story argued, all of us were channeling the details of our lives into vast databases. Every credit-card purchase, every cell-phone call, every click on the computer mouse fed these digital troves. Those with the tools and skills to make sense of them could begin to decipher our movements, desires, diseases, and shopping habits-and predict our behavior. This promised to transform business and society. In a book expanding upon this Cover Story, The Numerati, Senior Writer Stephen Baker introduces us to the mathematical wizards who are digging through our data to decode us as patients, shoppers, voters, potential terrorists-even lovers.

Data analytics is shorthand for the method of warehousing, organizing, and interpreting the massive amounts of data accrued by online learning platforms and student information systems - now as elemental to higher education as classrooms and filing cabinets - in hopes of learning more about what makes students successful, then giving instructors (and the platforms themselves) the chance to nudge those students accordingly.

Summify automatically identifies the most important news stories for you across all of your social networks and delivers to you a personalized email digest in your inbox.

In the first commercial application of CeNSE technology, HP and Shell will build a wireless sensing system to acquire high-resolution seismic data. By vastly improving the quality of seismic imaging, the new system will allow Shell to more easily and cost-effectively explore difficult oil and gas reservoirs.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest philanthropy, and the foundation associated with Pearson, the giant textbook and school technology company, announced a partnership on Wednesday to create online reading and math courses aligned with the new academic standards that some 40 states have adopted in recent months.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the BD market. But big data probably deserves a place in overall enterprise IT strategy for generating business insight. Best practices include generating a list of important challenges or questions that the current approach to data does not address. Could big data deliver the answers enterprises are looking for? If so, then it's all about discipline. A disciplined, targeted approach to big data - one focused on answering very specific questions. (my emphasis - I'll get to those later)

Life insurers are testing an intensely personal new use for the vast dossiers of data being amassed about Americans: predicting people's longevity.

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)-but also big headaches

The majority of the information that we use in our daily lives is "dumb", or unconnected. The next step is "linked data", or data that talks to each other.

The availability of new sets of data has changed the way we live our lives: here are 10 examples of data which have changed everything from how we assess wars to how companies deliver milk.

What new things could we discover if social network analysis took time and space into account, in addition to the raw connections between people?

Kynetx offers the premier platform for building a new breed of Apps that are context-aware, cross-platform, and act as event listeners in the cloud. Capable of interfacing with users on any URL or web-enabled device, Kynetx Apps give developers a way to "Program the Internet" and solve problems in uniquely interconnected ways.

Ian Ayres visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book, "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart." This event took place on November 8, 2007 as part of the Authors@Google series.

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, talks about his quest to make all knowledge computational -- able to be searched, processed and manipulated. His new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has no lesser goal than to model and explain the physics underlying the universe.

These, and other similar projects, promise the emergence of a new social and theoretical paradigm whose goal is to decipher the web of social interactions generated by social media.

A profile in Wired Magazine of the founder of hunch (and founder of Flickr!): Caterina Fake

Evaluating training: some alternatives to the Kirkpatrick method

But the bigger point is, adding more, independent data usually beats out designing ever-better algorithms to analyze an existing data set. I'm often suprised that many people in the business, and even in academia, don't realize this.