big data - Page number 2

Resistance to open data is much older than the concept of open data itself. Those who control—and/or benefit from the control of—data have traditionally resisted its open dissemination.

This resistance is being steadily eroded by government policy (see open data policies in the US, UK, and a long list of other national, state and local governments), by growing social and political movements in Europe, by technological advances such as the move to “Big Data,” and by the continued work of the broader open source, open content, open access community.

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In Part I, we discussed the Senate Armed Services Committee (SACS)'s attempt to hobble the open source Accumulo project in the DOD. They directed the Department's CIO to jump through a number of reporting hoops before Accumulo would be allowed inside the DOD, and directed the Accumulo team to upstream their work into related open source projects. It appears to be an attempt to dismantle the project on the assumption that it was competing with products and project from the private sector. » Read more

The dozens of software projects launched in the wake of Google's Big Table and Map Reduce papers have changed the way we handle large datasets. Like many organizations, the NSA began experimenting with these "big data" tools and realized that the open source implementations available at the time were not addressing some of their particular needs. » Read more

Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) attendees are not only learning about new trends in open source, but also hearing the results of the Future of Open Source Software Survey. The survey results were announced during a panel discussion of experts led by Michael Skok, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners. Skok lead the discussion of the results and the panel talked about what’s driving industry innovation. » Read more

The Ohio Lottery is now 500+ million. $700 million has already been taken in on this drawing, not a bad for the state. Lotteries work and Vegas was built on this simple notion: we believe we can beat the odds, we all believe we are a little special.

Part of our notion of being special, of our ability to beat the odds comes from our notion of our own narrative, our own story of our life in which we take a starring role. If we can imagine it, » Read more

I finally got around to watching Moneyball this week. Great film. Roger Ebert points out that the film "isn't so much about sports as about the war between intuition and statistics." (I'll let you guess who wins if you haven't seen the movie). The main character was neither Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) nor Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) so much as a set of algorithms the Billy and Peter characters implemented to build a winning baseball team at low cost. I'll go out on a limb and declare it the greatest statistics movie ever. (It's a short list of great statistics movies.)

And it's timely. » Read more