Reading highlights 9/30/12 - 10/6/12

This week had a large number of interesting posts to read.  There seemed to be a quite a bit of fighting going on:  election debate (Obama vs Romney & Stewart vs O'Reiley) to Syria and Turkey to Japan and China and even Google vs Microsoft in their patent war.  Below are some of the posts that caught my eye this last week:

The Power of Defining the Problem

Dwayne Spradlin from HBR provides three examples on how "...asking better questions delivers better results".  He presents how understanding the problem and clearly articulating it can yield innovative solutions.  I particularly like the one on NASA where big data was used.  Using a traditional governmental approach NASA would have probably spent a lot more that 30 K in getting this solution, if they would have gotten it at all.

How a rogue appeals court wrecked the patent system

Following all the patent lawsuits these days in the technology sector can be mind numbing.  Here's an interesting read on how things went astray.

Should You Trust Your Gut? The Answer Is Yes.

I talk about the process for decision making in my business.  In those talks I generally discuss that most decisions are made by the gut of the decider.  His or her experiences drive the decision.  One thing that I look to do is to bring analytics into the decision process so the decider can make a data driven decision with their gut.  Derek Andersen discusses this in this article centered about start-up / tech investment.

Which of the 3 cups has a cloud under it

With OOW underway and all the talk about cloud from Larry I found this article right on point.  Thiele lays out of the "false" arguments for or against cloud architectures that I face throughout my work week.  He closes with a discussion on what really matters:  "...getting on the actual cloud thought process."

Balancing team passion and product-market fit

Dave Kashen discusses in this post the notion of how passion is key to making it especially in the start-up arena.  I know from personal experiences that without passion that the long hard days of trying to make it on your own would simply crush you out.  He starts off by asking this simple question:

“You must follow your passion. Startups are so hard that if you’re not passionate about your mission, there’s no way you’ll succeed.” At the same time, the lean startup movement has entrepreneurs everywhere “building, measuring and learning” what the market wants, to find the illusive product-market fit. But what happens when what the market wants is not what you’re passionate about?

NYPD to bolster gang unit to battle teen violence fueled by dares, insults on social media

This is an interesting article in the Washington Post about NYC's exploitation of social media to stop crime and violence.  It is a short read but it highlights an on going discussion within Government on how to strike a balance between needed effects with a new information source and privacy.  They still haven't figured it out as far as I can see but here is an interesting quote:

The NYPD has developed strict guidelines for investigators using social networks “to instill the proper balance between the investigative potential of social network sites and privacy expectations,”

Fusion Centers

There were articles across the US this week discussing a Senate sponsored review of the 70+ Fusion Centers developed in 2003 to promote agency communication and data sharing in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US.  He is one of the quotes from the LA Times review of the report:

But the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, in a 146-page report released Tuesday that reviewed intelligence reports from fusion centers between April 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010, "could identify nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution any fusion center made to disrupt an active terrorist plot."

Ouch!  My business has tried for years to help DHS, State, and Local Governments in getting these centers performing better but it has been real tough to break into that market space. We'll see if attitudes change in the future and they become more open to innovated ideas on data sharing and intelligence driven operations.   Here are two of the most interesting reads from this week:
Senate panel criticizes anti-terror data-sharing centers - LA Times
Inquiry Cites Flaws in Counterterrorism Offices - The New York Times

Comic

Best comic of the week has to go to Mashable on Apple's Maps and Siri applications.

2012 Annapolis Boat Show

So to end this week here are a couple picture from the 2012 Annapolis Boat Show.  I attended two days of the show and loved every bit of it.  More to come on that in the future.

Interesting Interview on Predictive Analytics - CUE

Last year I was using Friday quite a bit. Friday basically logged your day from the use of your mobile phone.  The idea is that if you know how you spend your time you can optimize what you do in a better way.   It is billed as a personal assistant sometimes but the power is in the analytics it performs.  It did give me some insights that were interesting but I'm not sure I got the full potential out of the idea.

I recently bought a Nexus 7 with Jelly Bean installed.  It has a great new feature called Google Now which I really like.  It basically provides you "cards" that anticipate what you want to know.  It is invasive and requires you to give it access to your other Google services e.g. Calendar and Chrome searches, but it works pretty well.  I'll blog about that more later.

I came across another similar tech called Cue.  It is only available for the iPhone.  Here is an interesting YouTube interview from Scoble that is worth watching.  There are some interesting discussions on the topic of predictive analytics to help you with your day.

My Reading Highlights: 9/23/12 to 9/29/12

This weeks reading spanned big data to the American economy to how to handle email overload.   Oh and by the way, I added a great video on ping pong balls.  It's worth a watch.  Enjoy.

How "Big-Data-as-a-Service" Can Help Smaller Companies Compete

Great read from Brian Profitt in discussing the notion of a service model to providing analytics of Big Data to companies who cannot or should not invest in heavy IT infrastructure.   He offered up a great quote that sums up where we are all heading with analytics:

"Every time we perform a search, tweet, send an email, post a blog, comment on one, use a cell phone, shop online, update our profile on a social networking site, use a credit card, or even go to the gym, we leave behind a mountain of data, a digital footprint, that provides a treasure trove of information about our lifestyles, financial activities, health habits, social interactions, and much more," wrote former Tivoli CEO Frank Moss

IBM Readies “Project Sparta” Aimed at Simplifying Big Data

Looks like AllThingsD is reporting that IBM has an Oct 9th event planned to launch its new big data line and go head to head with Oracle.  I'm missing Oracle Open World this year but I'm sure the Oracle will announce improvements to their new Exadata line.

Treasure Data Launches Cloud-Based Data Warehouse With Investment From Ruby Creator Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto

Moving from IBM to Oracle, TechCrunch provides an overview of Treasure Data.  A cloud data warehouse environment that keeps users from making heavy capital investments in infrastructure.

Graph Databases: The New Way to Access Super Fast Social Data

Emil Eifrem provides an interesting discussion on the uses and benefits of Graph Databases.   As he puts it, "Graph databases, unlike their NOSQL and relational brethren, are designed for lightning-fast access to complex data found in social networks, recommendation engines and networked systems."  The article is worth a read and provides another approach beyond traditional relational databases.

Here's The Biggest Problem In The American Economy

Here is another interesting read from Henry Blodget on the problems with the American economy. He asserts new markets with cheaper labor, increased use of technology in production allowing companies to much more with fewer employees, tax policies, and a complete focus on shareholder value as the primary cause of the stagnant employment rate.

Liquid Nitrogen and 1500 Ping Pong Balls Video

I came across this YouTube video the other day.  It shows what happens when you mix liquid nitrogen in a bottle with 1500 ping pong balls.  I know but watch.  It is pretty cool.

How to Email Busy People

I learned a new acronym this week: TLTR = To Long To Read. This article was was very appropriately timed for this new bit of knowledge I just acquired. I'm not as bad as the guys they are talking about in this article; I'll receive on average 300+ emails a day. That said it is way too much to give each of them the attention the sender expects. The tips here are right on point. Get the subject line right on point and keep the body to 3 sentences max.

My Weekly Reading Highlights: 9/16 /12 to 9/22/12

I'm sure most people are now tired of the iPhone 5 reviews, comparisons, and tear-downs by now.  I know that I am.  Below are the most interesting article reads for me over the last week, excluding iPhone 5 ones.  

Meet Kevin Reynolds, The Man Behind The Most Mindblowing News Service In The World

Joe Weisenthal provides a great description of the Bloomberg Spead Desk.  Here he describes it as a "a mindblowing operation that spits out real-time news headlines from all over the world, 24/7 to customers who rent their fabled terminals. 

3 Interview Tips for Hiring Outstanding Developers

Everyone who is trying to hire top notch SW developers knows it is extremely time consuming and a difficult task.  Chad Lilly lays out three interesting approaches in weeding out the best developers from the crowd of okay developers.  

ESPN builds a Twitter-style firehose for sports news 

At work we are all over mining data from twitter and other social media sources.  The Twitter firehose is a valuable source of information.  Now for the sports fans out there this is a perfect new source.  Ryan Kim describes the SportsCenter Feed as having over 1000 updates from ESPN per day.

Here's The Most Efficient Way To Work With A Virtual Team

During my work week I'm working with quite a few remote workers.  I see this trend increasing over time.  One of the challenges is how to virtually integrate these valuable contributors into the daily meeting, huddles, and discussions that occur throughout the day.  Vivian Giang and Max Nisen lay out three barriers we are working to address to success utilize remote workers today.

Digital Life Design

Anyone living in a large city knows the general hassles of movement from one point to another is a pain undertaking.  Jamillah provides an overview of the Digital Life Design conference in London where people are discussing improvements to what we refer to as "city habitats" through the use of data analysis or smart city initiatives.  

5 ideas to help everyone make the most of big data

Derrick Harris provides a run down on the IE Group's Big Data Innovation event.  He provides five thoughts from the conference that resonates not only with him but me as well.

Forget your fancy data science, try overkill analytic

No weekend reading is complete without a good article on Data Science.  Clearly a hot field these days in the big data analytics area.  Derrick Harris reviews an approach on Overkill Analytics.

Putting 1 Trillion in Context

In reading a recent article about Amazon's S3 Cloud service I recalled a conversation with Mickey McManus up at Maya.  We were discussing Big Data last year and the ideas we had about working with ever increases volumes of data.

The Read Write Web article's title I just read was Amazon S3 Showing Signs of Slowing as It Approaches 1 Trillion Objects.  This got me thinking about the conversation with Mickey.  With the US deficit always being discussed in the Trillions these days it is easy not to understand the magnitude of something measured in the trillions.  Here is just something to consider with discussing Trillions of anything:

If you take something that we all deal with, the unit measure of Time, and put that into context I think you will get the picture.  So starting with the basics, 60 seconds = 1 minute; we all know that and it isn't that much time.  So let's scale that up.  What is the amount of time in:

• 1 Million Seconds = 11.57 days
• 1 Billion Seconds = 31.7 years
• 1 Trillion Seconds = 41709 years

41K years, that is a long time ago and allows us have a better understanding what a trillion really means when we start thinking about what the Amazon S3 service is approaching.

The challenge here is the rate at which we are approaching the Trillion object mark.  It is happening very rapidly and almost occurring over the last 2 decades of data, information, and services that are exploding through the Internet.  The question we should start asking ourselves now is how do we handle way beyond the Trillions of anything on the Internet. When a trillion objects are common place.

Today we are all using technologies such as Hadoop, or variants of Hadoop and building massive data centers that deal with complex challenges in cooling and power management and efficiencies.  These are examples of our basic building blocks today.  Evolution in this area will only take us so far.    We as an information society must starting thinking about transformational ideas and completely different technologies if we hope to harness the not so different horizon of 2030.

Sustainability and Human Population Growth

I read a post today from Henry Blodget from the Business Insider.  My Google+ post says it all.

Google+ Post:  Every time I see a chart like this with exponential growth patterns it is always followed by a big dip. +Henry Blodget and the +Business Insider

The article was about sustainability and that we can't keep growing like this and there was some good talking points from economist types about the outlook.  The best quote was this:

It's the mathematical reality of compound growth, in part, that makes Grantham so bearish about the future of humanity (if wildly bullish on commodity prices)

Wildly bullish on commodity prices is the key part of this if you are an investor.  Bearish about the future of humanity is the key part that everyone needs to take away.  Sustainability, Adaptation, and even mitigation strategies all need to be adopted soonest to avoid the dip.  We have at our hands unprecedented  technology to help us develop the strategies for better planning for expansion, growth, and resilience in a sustainable way and to mitigate the effects of the environmental or natural disaster on these strategies. The global community should put aside their partisan differences and should address this head on instead of fighting for ideological positions that poll well back in their national boundaries.

I guess this concludes my rant for today!

Killing Motivation and Productivity

So I recently read a post from the Sloan Management Review discussing how releasing plans can be a detriment to your objectives.  See Announcing Plans May Kill Motivation, Productivity.

One of the areas not addressed in the study is the impact others may take from releasing your intentions and plans.  Leslie Brokaw, author, discusses how when you release your plans you may feel like you have accomplished something and afterward will not pursue the enacting of those plans with fervor.

“Conventional wisdom, of course, would have predicted the opposite result: By making a resolution and telling other people about it, we think we’re putting pressure on ourselves to follow through.” Instead, sharing our goals too often lets us simply “congratulate ourselves just for making the resolution.”

This may certainly be the case, but I would suggest that releasing those plans when others are involved can also lead to reducing motivation and productivity by others.  Take organizational changes in business.  How many times have we seen people react to future planning events by trying to protect their turf or getting upset by leadership changes all before anything happens.  All of this leads to lowering productivity and in some cases loss of valuable employees.

Not that I have a good answer on how to deal with these problems.  Organizational consultants will discuss how you must engage soonest on organizational changes to avoid this conflict.  Employees will be  grateful for the engagements as they walk out of the room disgruntled with changes, whether it effects them or not.   The sheer time spent talking about the changes is a distraction and loss of productivity to the business.

So maybe the take away here is to announce the changes/intentions at the last possible moment when all of your time can be spent in enacting them in the quickly and in a least distracting manner involving constant discussions with the employees that are effected.  Just a thought.