Occam's Razor

NOVEMBER 2, 2015

Facebook, at last count, has 1.5 billion monthly active users. YouTube has 1.2 billion users (watching 6 billion hours of videos!). Instagram has an estimated 400 million users. Those are some big gigantic numbers! I believe that every human with time to spare, and a connection to the web, should be on social media. The benefits are numerous. Facebook allows you to stay close to people you choose to. YouTube has democratized entertainment and education.

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The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

NOVEMBER 19, 2015

by SEAN GERRISH If you are a regular at this blog, thanks for reading. We will continue to bring you posts from the range of data science activities at Google. This post is different. It is for those who are interested enough in our activities to consider joining us. We briefly highlight some of the things we look for in data scientists we hire at Google and give tips on ways to prepare. At Google we’re always looking for talented people, and we’re interested in hiring great data scientists.

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In(tegrate) the Clouds

JULY 16, 2015

I recently participated in an online web conference called Cloudcon 2015: Integration and Web APIs where I reviewed 5 signs you need better cloud integration: You’re Struggling with the Integrator’s Dilemma. You Have Unintegrated Integration: You Thought Cloud = API Utopia. You Still Have Swivel Chair Integration. You’re Considering Going Back to On-Prem Due to Diminishing SaaS Returns. It’s a topic I wrote about in this blog post last year.

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IT Data Integration Big Data 50

Darkhorse

APRIL 14, 2015

It is by now common knowledge among the viz-savvy crowd that pie charts are best avoided. Many pixels have been used explaining why pies are bad , when occasionally pies are good , and my personal favorite from my colleague at Darkhorse: Salvaging the Pie. Far less attention, however, has been paid to pie’s evil cousin, the radar chart. Perhaps it’s not as ubiquitous, but it can be more nefarious.

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Information Builders

JUNE 26, 2015

Information Builders , a leader in business intelligence ( BI ) and analytics, information integrity, and integration solutions, today announced that it has been honored with four 2015 Stevie Awards for outstanding customer service by the American Business Awards

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TIBCO

DECEMBER 9, 2015

Until recently, data analytics and data visualization tools have commonly been used by cities and government agencies to address societal challenges such as congestion, crime, and municipal services. But increasingly, government officials are applying these tools to help fight poverty and other forms of social inequality.

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Ms SQL Girl

AUGUST 6, 2015

Great news ! Azure Data Factory is now generally available. AND, there are quite a number of tutorials to help you get started. One thing that I’d like to highlight is there is an Azure Data Factory extension in Visual Studio. Yes, that means you can edit your workflow locally. I first saw this at Wee Hyong Tok’s Introduction to Azure Data Factory webinar yesterday. To get the Azure Data Factory extension in Visual Studio: Launch Visual Studio 2013.

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ScienceSoft

JUNE 12, 2015

What accounts for consistent and timely delivery of high quality healthcare services? Analytical software and BI solutions help to identify and track the best practices in healthcare management and leadership, thus helping spread the knowledge across the industry. For over 22 years Truven Health Analytics have been sieving and sifting through terabytes of data to crystallize the ways in which certain health systems excel in their work

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Srividya Sridharan

APRIL 8, 2015

This is a guest post by Samantha Ngo, Researcher on the Customer Insights team. Wonder how your loyalty strategies compare to others in the industry? As a refresh to our 2012 benchmarks, we invite you to take part in our 2015 Customer Loyalty Benchmark survey. If you manage or make decisions about your company's […]. customer insights

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Wise Analytics

FEBRUARY 18, 2015

Last week I was part of a panel discussion with Robin Bloor of the Bloor Group and Marc Clark from Teradata to discuss the TCO of cloud analytics and the strategic benefits and challenges of cloud deployments. The reality is that more organizations are looking to the cloud due to broader storage, big data management, and perceptions of lower cost and easier to maintain solutions. As organizations struggle with larger and more complex data sets, this trend will become even broader.

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Speaker: Dr. Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks

The software development ecosystem exists in a state of dynamic equilibrium, where any new tool, framework, or technique leads to disruption and the establishment of a new equilibrium. Predictability is impossible when the foundation architects plan against is constantly changing in unexpected ways. It’s no surprise many CIOs and CTOs are struggling to adapt, in part because their architecture isn’t equipped to evolve. This webinar will discuss what’s at stake if companies continue to use long term architecture plans.

Software

Occam's Razor

SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

The difference between a Reporting Squirrel and Analysis Ninja? Insights. As in, the former is in the business of providing data, the latter in the business of understanding the performance implied by the data. That understanding leads to insights about why the performance occurred, which leads to so what we should do. Do you see how far away a Reporting Squirrel's job is from that of an Analysis Ninja?

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The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

OCTOBER 7, 2015

by HENNING HOHNHOLD, DEIRDRE O'BRIEN, and DIANE TANG In this post we discuss the challenges in measuring and modeling the long-term effect of ads on user behavior. We describe experiment designs which have proven effective for us and discuss the subtleties of trying to generalize the results via modeling. A/B testing is used widely in information technology companies to guide product development and improvements.

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In(tegrate) the Clouds

DECEMBER 28, 2015

Gaurav Dhillon , the co-founder and CEO of SnapLogic , who also co-founded Informatica in the early ’90’s and was CEO of that company for 12 years, posted 4 data predictions and 1 market prediction this week on LinkedIn and the SnapLogic blog. His predictions are as follows: Data Eats the World and Integration Strategies Will Drive Digital Transformation. Rising Data Lakes will Drown the Warehouse. IoT Goes from Over-Hyped to Emerging Reality. Multi-Cloud is the New Reality.

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Darkhorse

JULY 21, 2015

Recently the Alberta government hosted Apps for Alberta - a competition using the province’s open data. Being an Alberta-based data visualization firm, we felt encouraged, perhaps even duty-bound, to enter. So we did. We managed to pull together a couple submissions, the first of which is a look at high school grades in the province. In an ideal world , you start by asking: What question am I helping to answer?

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Analytics

Martha Bennett

JANUARY 28, 2015

Between 2012 and 2014, mobile BI adoption shot up: Forrester survey data shows that the percentage of technology decision-makers who make some BI applications available on mobile devices has nearly quadrupled, and the percentage who state that BI is delivered exclusively via mobile devices has risen from 1% in 2012 to 7% in 2014. While […]. business intelligence chief information officer (CIO

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Information Builders

MAY 28, 2015

Today at its 2015 Summit User Conference, Information Builders, a leader in business intelligence ( BI ) and analytics, information integrity, and integration solutions announced three new capabilities that build on the companys 40 years of innovation in the BI and analytics industry

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MLWhiz

OCTOBER 8, 2015

Shell Commands are powerful. And life would be like hell without shell is how I like to say it(And that is probably the reason that I dislike windows). Consider a case when you have a 6 GB pipe-delimited file sitting on your laptop and you want to find out the count of distinct values in one particular column. You can probably do this in more than one way. You could put that file in a database and run SQL Commands, or you could write a python/perl script

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Ms SQL Girl

AUGUST 6, 2015

Great news ! Azure Data Factory is now generally available. AND, there are quite a number of tutorials to help you get started. One thing that I’d like to highlight is there is an Azure Data Factory extension in Visual Studio. Yes, that means you can edit your workflow locally. I first saw this at Wee Hyong Tok’s Introduction to Azure Data Factory webinar yesterday. To get the Azure Data Factory extension in Visual Studio: Launch Visual Studio 2013.

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Reporting

Jim Harris

DECEMBER 24, 2015

Have you ever experienced that sinking feeling, where you sense if you don’t find data quality, then data quality will find you? In the spring of 2003, Pixar Animation Studios produced one of my all-time favorite Walt Disney Pictures— Finding Nemo.

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Srividya Sridharan

MARCH 18, 2015

Gone are the days when we have to “sell” the idea of using customer and marketing data to drive better business decisions. The sheer scale and diversity of customer data will provide rich new sources of insight and allow firms to effectively engage with customers using enterprise marketing technologies. In fact, customer analytics solutions, one […]. customer analytics customer insights customer intelligence

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Marketing Enterprise Technology Customer Analytics 40

Howard Dresner

JANUARY 4, 2015

When it comes to commentary with valuable real-world insights, I can always count on the participants at my weekly #BIWisdom tweetchats on Fridays. I kicked off a recent discussion with this question to the group: “What are the top five worst practices in business intelligence?” It took only a few minutes for them to toss out a lot more than five. As I commented then, there are a bunch of successful overachievers who participate in #BIWisdom tweetchats!

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Occam's Razor

AUGUST 11, 2015

Standard reports stink. Custom reports rock! If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are quite familiar with this sentiment. I've expressed it often. :). The primary reason is simple: You are unique. Your business is unique. Why would a report created for everyone work for the special someone that you are? There are other great reasons as well. Custom reports allow you to deeply focus (by eliminating the rif-raf metrics and dimensions, they save time and show just what you want).

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Data Science

The Unofficial Google Data Science Blog

SEPTEMBER 9, 2015

by SEAN GERRISH and AMIR NAJMI To deliver the services our users have come to rely upon, Googlers have to process a lot of data — often at web-scale. For doing analyses quickly, it helps to abstract away as much of the repeated work as possible. In this post, we’ll describe some things we have learned about mixing declarative and procedural programing paradigms to simplify MapReduce as used by data scientists.

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In(tegrate) the Clouds

DECEMBER 21, 2015

I can’t help it. I enjoy the end of the year technology predictions, even though it’s hard to argue with this tweet from Merv Adrian: By 2016, 99% of readers will be utterly sick of predictions. Merv Adrian (@merv) December 19, 2015. platform.twitter.com/widgets.js. With that in mind, I recently participated in a SandHill.com Q&A on predictions and the year in review.

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Darkhorse

MARCH 31, 2015

This is part two in a series of articles about effective analytics implementation. The first part “ The Five Faces of Analytics ” explores the roles necessary to develop a successful analytics team. So you’ve assembled a team of world beaters and they’re chomping at the bit. They’re ready to transform your organization into a data-driven decision-making juggernaut. But where should they start? How do you coordinate this team in such a way that they’ll actually be effective.

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Nutanix

JUNE 18, 2015

The Swedish language has a word “lagom” that means “not too much, not too little”, or loosely interpreted as “just right

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Information Builders

JUNE 15, 2015

Information Builders , a leader in business intelligence (BI) and analytics, information integrity, and integration solutions, today announced that the Public Technology Institute (PTI) has named its customer, the City of Charlotte, a 2015 Solutions Award Winner in the IT and Telecommunications category

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MLWhiz

SEPTEMBER 12, 2015

When it comes to data preparation and getting acquainted with data, the one step we normally skip is the data visualization. While a part of it could be attributed to the lack of good visualization tools for the platforms we use, most of us also get lazy at times. Now as we know of it Python never had any good Visualization library.

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Ms SQL Girl

JUNE 22, 2015

Yes, it’s that time of the year again with 24 Hours of PASS. I’m very proud to see 24 amazing speakers lined up from different parts of the world. Check them out here. These webinars on SQL Server, R, Azure and Professional Development topics are free. Even though they will be recorded, I always find it more useful to tune in live to ask questions. I’ll be moderating 2 sessions – SSAS Design and Performance Best Practices. Speaker: Alan Faulkner.

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Jim Harris

JULY 13, 2015

Background: “Apathy is the enemy of data quality”. I began work on data quality in the late 1980s at the great Bell Laboratories. We worked in partnership with a couple of AT&T groups and made rapid strides. The AT&T groups that applied our methods made order-of-magnitude improvements and, in so doing, saved tens of millions of dollars per year.

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