Presented by Online Education

Hat tip to Vizworld

• The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Second Edition (Amazon or free PDF)
• The open source stats package R
• Some data sets from UCI Machine Learning Repository
• The MIT OpenCourseware machine learning course

Though that’s enough to get you started, the author promises to add on as time goes by.

SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:

• How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
• Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?
• How much good do car seats do?
• What’s the best way to catch a terrorist?
• Did TV cause a rise in crime?
• What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?
• Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?
• Can eating kangaroo save the planet?
• Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?

I’ve ordered my copy. You?

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.

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?

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

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.

From my point of view, blogging’s future will likely flow down one of two paths: either it will evolve and grow into something else (like many species have) or it will succumb to Darwinism and become extinct (like the Dodo). Let’s take a closer look at each.

The key points are represented by my favorite mind mapping tools: MindMeister.  Take a look at the map below and comment on what pops out at you.  Click the map to visit MindMeister to view and interact with the map. 

No need to join but if you are interested, find information on MindMeister here.

Thanks to Mashable.

I “listened” to the audiobook of Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters on my iPod.  This is one of those fasicinating books that makes one think, “How can I get a job like that?”

Bill Tancer mines the gold found in search-engine data.  I imagine him sitting in front of a computer screen with a massive amount of data starting his day by saying, “OK. What can we learn today?” What he learns is fascinating.  From prom dresses to porn to politics, he uses search data to understand and predict consumer behavior.  No need to search for this book — just “Click” on the image and get a copy for yourself!

After I played around it with some, the data wizards at Tableau took
over and created the widget that you see above.  There are a few
things to note about it:

• It is a live exploratory visualization, not a static chart. 
  You can select workout days, highlight across views to see heart rate,
  or filter to different kinds of activities.
• This was done with no custom development. Typically interactive
  visualizations like this take a lot of custom flash work; with Tableau
  anyone can create and publish an interactive visualization with drag
  & drop ease.
• Tableau’s vision with this product is to set data free on the
  web. They want to make real data, no charts, accessible to people so
  they can question conclusions and offer their own analysis.

The visualization above is static but on Feld’s blog, they are interactive.  So check it out and tell him I sent you!