Randy Pausch and working in groups

Randy Pausch is one of the people I admire. His last lecture is just awesome. I frequently remind myself of his statement "Brick walls are there for a reason". 

Anyhow, recently came across another article of his. This is about tips for working successfully in a group. Great advice indeed.

Eclipse on Linux

It's been a long time since I used Eclipse. Planning to get back to some Java programming. Hence installed Eclipse on Scientific Linux (SL) 6.3 today. It should have been easy except for the fact that I did not pay attention to the fact that I had 64 bit Java on my VM while I got the 32 bit Eclipse release. This resulted in an error "JVM terminated Exit code=13".  Wish the error message could have been less cryptic.

Anyhow, googling it I saw the reason for the error.  Quick search turned out this article. That ensured eclipse could start from the command line. But I wanted to add it to the Gnome launcher. More searching turned up this article.

So now I can start Eclipse on my SL 6.3 VM by selecting "Applications"-> "Programming".

Searching through big data

Found yourself having to search through lots of data. Came across an article that describes use of simple unix commands for this. For details check this article.

Two heads are better than one in data science

We have heard the saying "two heads are better than one". This has also been shown in the field of data science. The term used to describe this is Overkill analytics.

A simple description of the approach here is given in this article. The author uses this approach repeatedly in several places including a competition on Kaggle.

Simply put, the approach involves using simple models to predict and then using the ensemble of these models for the final prediction.  So sophisticated models are skipped in favor of brute force methods on simple models.  Further, the simple models chosen should be such that they complement each other. This way each model brings its own strengths to bear on the final prediction. This while contributing to cancelling the noise.  Hence the title --  two models (or two heads) are better than one.

An example of using the model in R is also given. I plan to give a similar example using Python.

Big Data

The current trend towards increased connectivity has an interesting byproduct. Lots of data. Data which can enable you to predict better, data which can enable you to analyze better. 

There is a big movement to take advantage of this deluge of data. The is the Big Data movement.  I have been working lately on several Big Data technologies. These include Hadoop, Mapreduce, NoSQL etc. 

Why the new technologies? This is because existing technologies are not sufficient to handle the amount of data that we are faced with. These new technologies bring a multitude of open problems with them. So an interesting area going forward.

Will start posting more details about these concepts as well as how to get your hands dirty with this stuff.

US postal service

I guess the whole world knows at this time of the challenges that the US postal service is facing. In this article on USPS, the author looks at the problem is more detail.

The author does show how revenue is going down faster than the expenses. This results in an loss incurring enterprise which is not sustainable. Therefore, this needs to be fixed and the author proposes various measures. These measures boil down to

• reducing costs by cutting unprofitable services. This includes closing several offices and reducing the frequency of mail delivery since it does not make sense to have the same level of service when the demand for such services has gone down.  
• increasing revenue by increasing the cost of other existing services and introducing new services 

Nothing revolutionary but just plain old common-sense. But we need strong leadership to execute on this. An illustration of why execution is very important in the life of an enterprise. 

interesting articles

Some interesting articles that i have come across recently. 

• A deep look into the recent Presidential election and why Romney lost. While somewhat verbose, the author has provides a detailed review with numbers. So Colorado was lost due to the immigration position, Virginia lost over women's issues, Ohio lost due to Romney's position on the auto bailout and Florida lost due to the impact on Medicare due to Paul Ryan being the vice-presidential candidate. 
• A very interesting article focused on domestication of a raccoon. 
• The author laments the loss of the web world as we knew it in this article. Probably the latest efforts by Twitter, Facebook etc towards closing their ecosystems could have been the catalyst for this article. These companies might have been forced by the demands of Wall Street to do this. 
• And then the author suggests solutions to the concerns expressed above here. The proposed steps include changing the funding model, build applications that provide great user experiences, democratizing the talent pool etc. 
• Good ideas for some DIY projects. Something to explore in the near future.
• Will robots take over? Well humans will still have to plan what the robots will have to do. 
• Coolest gadgets. I would be interested in some of these.