Data is present in all the systems and processes in the world. IBM helps analyze this multitude of information to make intelligent decisions, while enabling business efficiency and adding value to many industries.

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.

We thought it would be useful to propose one possible taxonomy - we call it the Snice* taxonomy - of what a data scientist does, in roughly chronological order: Obtain, Scrub, Explore, Model, and iNterpret (or, if you like, OSEMN, which rhymes with possum).

A data analysis service for the learning science community

Several weeks ago, I posted a question on Quora asking for the best data blogs. There have been 26 replies with dozens of blogs recommended.

The British universities, Oxford and Cambridge included, are under siege from a system of state control that is undermining the one thing upon which their worldwide reputation depends: the caliber of their scholarship. The theories and practices that are driving this assault are mostly American in origin, conceived in American business schools and management consulting firms. They are frequently embedded in intensive management systems that make use of information technology (IT) marketed by corporations such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP. They are then sold to clients such as the UK government and its bureaucracies, including the universities. This alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened.

Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers, URLs, and other connected information/knowledge entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis [ONA].

Along with about 400 or so others world-wide, I've signed up for the LAK11 (Learning and Knowledge Analytics) MOOC run by George Siemens and colleagues at the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University. We're now into week 2, and I think I'm just about getting into the swing of things.

UCINET is a social network analysis program developed by Steve Borgatti, Martin Everett and Lin Freeman. The program is distributed by Analytic Technologies. UCINET works in tandem with freeware program called NETDRAW for visualizing networks. NETDRAW is installed automatically with UCINET.

Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.