Apologies to Dr. Seuss!
Quick: What is the average processing speed of the human brain?
Gong!: You took too long!
Technology Review posted a recent article on new ways to measure human brain processing speed which suggest an upper limit of 60 bits per second.
Seem reasonable? I’m not sure. I’ll need to think about it a little longer.
What do predictive analytics, real-time monitoring, in-memory processing, and SaaS have in common? According Doug Henschen at InformationWeek, they’re all a part of next-generation business intelligence.
Next-generation BI has arrived, and three major factors are driving it: the spread of predictive analytics, more real-time performance monitoring, and much faster analysis, thanks to in-memory BI. A fourth factor, software as a service, promises to further alter the BI market by helping companies get these next-generation systems running more quickly.
Interesting article with a number of good points. What’s your take?
Analytical Thinkers typically are searching for the truth and the truth often implies hard, cold facts. The NY Times article Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts might seem hypocritical but speaking from experience, “there’s gold in that ther’ text.” In the mid ’80s I managed a group of employee relations analysts that mined mountains of text in an attempt to quantify employee morale for a 10,000 person company. Out of this work came “ERATS” or the Employee Relations Attitude Tracking System. (We were really tracking morale but couldn’t come up with a good acronym with that pesky “M”. Sentiment analysis is exactly what we were trying to do but completely by hand.
An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.
Two recently devoured books on my shelf explore the web-analytics from a few angles. If you haven’t already, check out:
Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters
I find it interesting that while so many enterprises are trying to reduce the number of Excel spreadsheets that contain different versions of the truth, Microsoft continues to enhance Excel with an emphasis on being the BI front end. From the Microsoft Excel Team Blog:
Business Intelligence continues to be a strong focus area for us, and you will see a number of innovations in this space, perhaps most notably the “slicers” feature visible in all the Excel 2010 demo videos released over the last few days. Excel expands its role as the best BI client by introducing such features as OLAP write-back, support for dynamic sets, fast search in filter dialogs, and more. We also worked with the SQL team in developing project Gemini.
See the full post for the 10,000 foot view of Microsoft Excel 2010.
