Big Data -- leads to Big "Jew" Tracking?

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

keep in mind... from "J-PR"

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Following Digital Breadcrumbs To 'Big Data' Gold

by Yuki Noguchi

November 29, 2011

First of a two-part report

What do Facebook, Groupon and biotech firm Human Genome Sciences have in common? They all rely on massive amounts of data to design their products. Terabytes and even zettabytes of information about consumers or about genetic sequences can be harnessed and crunched.

The practice is called big data, and as the term suggests, it is huge in both scope and power. Analyzing big data enables anything from predicting prices to catching criminals, and has the potential to impact many industries.
Because of the ability to cheaply process terabytes of information, companies can analyze all kinds of things that weren't possible before, like Decide.com's price prediction tool that exposes the surprising volatility of consumer electronic prices.
Enlarge Courtesy Decide.com

Because of the ability to cheaply process terabytes of information, companies can analyze all kinds of things that weren't possible before, like Decide.com's price prediction tool that exposes the surprising volatility of consumer electronic prices.

One way to understand how big data works is to think about your daily life. You write an email, call your boss, pass a security camera, maybe buy a plane ticket online. Taken alone, this is disjointed, boring information. To Elizabeth Charnock, it makes up your digital character.

"Digital character is this idea that almost everybody these days leaves behind a giant digital breadcrumb trail," she says.

Charnock founded Cataphora, a company that can process huge amounts of this sort of data about employees to determine patterns. She says those patterns can predict everything from a person's mood to their skill as a manager to a person's inclination to commit fraud.

Take rogue trader Jerome Kerviel, who cost his French bank billions of dollars in losses.

"His cellphone bill was literally an order of magnitude larger than any of his coworkers — why?" Charnock asks. "Well, because he wanted to put less things in writing. He almost never took vacation, even though French people love to take vacation."

Charnock says Kerviel also circumvented usual trading and communication protocols.
How One Company Harnesses Big Data

If you have your eye on that brand new camera with all of the features you never imagined you'd need, how do you know whether it's time to buy? Decide.com is a prediction tool that tells you when gadget prices are likely to rise, stay the same or fall — and if you should wait a few weeks to buy the rumored newer model.

Decide collects the prices of more than 100,000 electronic products every day from hundreds of online retailers. It also searches technology blogs for rumors of upcoming new releases, adding up to over 25 GB of data per day.
25 terabytes of data is like reading 150,000 printed books worth of information.

The data are sent to Amazon's cloud storage and processed with the help of Hadoop software, which is used for many big data projects to organize the information and minimize mistakes.

Decide's four computer science Ph.D.'s create algorithms to mine the data and predict whether prices will go up or down, similar to what the finance industry has done for years to forecast stock prices. But now that data storage has become so cheap, other businesses can get in the game.
Cost of GB over years.

In addition to crunching the numbers, Decide analyzes thousands of news articles, blog posts and press releases to see whether any rumors have surfaced. Sources that were reliable in the past are listened to more closely.

All in all, Decide has nearly 100 terabytes of data to analyze and end up with a simple prediction: Should you buy now or wait for prices to drop?
100 terabytes of information is equal to 18 times the printed collection of the Library of Congress.

—Sara Carothers, Stephanie d'Otreppe/NPR

"Any one of those things, you kind of say, 'So what?' But what we look for is a number of them that on the surface perhaps don't seem to be related but all seem to be happening at the same time," she says.

Charnock says had the French bank analyzed that data, it might have flagged the rogue trader earlier.

But big data is not just about connecting dots to detect crime. The ability to process so much information so quickly makes all kinds of things possible that weren't before. So LinkedIn finds jobs or people you might like to know about, and biotech companies can analyze gene sequences in billions of combinations to design drugs.

Data analytics itself is not new. Two decades ago, Wall Street hired teams of physicists to analyze investments. But in the past couple of years, computing, storage and bandwidth capacity have become so cheap that it has altered the scale of what's possible.

Now, with very little money, a gifted student or a small startup can design big-data applications.

"Everywhere you look, there's an opportunity to collect more data and then apply a statistical or mathematical approach to understanding what's happening," says Chris Kemp, chief executive officer of Nebula, a firm that provides storage and computing capacity for other companies to be able to process their big data applications.

Kemp says ultimately big data will give consumers better tools so they can do a better job of predicting things like prices, such as whether an airfare is likely to go up or down. Farmers can do a better job of insuring their crops if they can forecast the weather with greater accuracy.

Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, says this trend is fueling intense demand for mathematics and computing talent.

"We have seen the industrial revolution, and we are witnessing a data revolution," Etzioni says.

He has started three big-data companies. One of them, Decide.com, employs four Ph.D.s to design better programs to forecast prices on consumer electronics.

Etzioni says a good data scientist can write algorithms that filter data, understand what they're telling you, and then graphically represent the information. The end result is like getting a bird's-eye view of a vast territory of information.

Big data can, and occasionally does, go wrong. Comic examples of that include mismatched recommendations, like "My TiVo thinks I'm gay." But think about a company divulging your Web-surfing history with your name attached, and you begin to get a sense of how big data opens the door to new possibilities of security or privacy breaches.

James Slavet, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, says his firm invests in companies that use big data creatively and responsibly. He says data cannot stand in for human judgment.

"They do use it to make the judgment more sound, more objective and to hopefully lead to better decision-making," he says.

Slavet calls big data a tectonic shift, one that will continue to affect many things we do for decades to come.

November 30, 2011

Second in a two-part series

Businesses keep vast troves of data about things like online shopping behavior, or millions of changes in weather patterns, or trillions of financial transactions — information that goes by the generic name of big data.

Now, more companies are trying to make sense of what the data can tell them about how to do business better. That, in turn, is fueling demand for people who can make sense of the information — mathematicians — and creating something of a recruiting war.

DJ Patil, with venture capital firm Greylock Partners, is on a perpetual manhunt, looking for a rare breed: someone with a brain for math, finesse with computers, the eyes of an artist and more.

"There's one common element across all these people that stands out above everything, and that's curiosity," Patil says. "It's an intense curiosity to understand what's behind the data."

He compares raw data to clay: shapeless until molded by a gifted mathematician. A good mathematician can write algorithms that can churn through billions or trillions of data points and show where patterns emerge.

For example, patterns indicated early on that mothers were heavy users of social networks, which in turn led to the creation of social circles. Patil says a good mathematician can figure out what matters and what doesn't in a huge trove of data.

"Everybody's looking for these people, because they know these individuals can move the needle by themselves. They're that impactful," he says.

Firms are going beyond offering piles of cash and equity to get these people. The chief executive officer at TellApart, a company that helps online marketers profile its customers, invited one math recruit to dinner with other tech luminaries to sell him on the company. Another California firm, Cataphora, which helps firms monitor employee behavior, opened a satellite office in Ann Arbor, Mich., so it could recruit from the University of Michigan's math department.

Often, executives say it's not just about money; they have to appeal to an ideal.

David Friedberg says his company does that by touting the power of risk management to change agriculture. Friedberg, chief executive officer of The Climate Corp., says crop insurance is basically nonexistent in large parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. He says the ability to better model changing climate patterns means his company can provide insurance to small farmers who otherwise might not take on the risk of farming more land.

"We can actually encourage agricultural development and provide a sustainable living for them," Friedberg says. "And that's one of the long-term missions of our organization."

The type of people drawn to this work aren't necessarily what you might expect. Greylock Partners' Patil says his successful recruits have included an oceanographer and a neurosurgeon, as well as people who barely graduated from high school but were brilliant at math. He approaches math majors the way baseball scouts look for young stars.

"I have a list that I track. There's one student who I think is phenomenal; I've been tracking him since he was 16," Patil says.

That student is Dylan Field, now 19 and a junior at Brown University. He remembers that the summer of first grade, he found an algebra book and dug into it. Now, he says math and statistics are the sexiest skills around, and his early aptitude and interest in math have become, literally, his meal ticket.

"The joke is that so many companies come to recruit these days, that you don't need to be on the meal plan, you can just go to their recruiting events and get food there," he says.

Field says it's a happy coincidence the market wants what he loves to do.

"You can understand something that is much bigger than yourself, and I think that is the most interesting property of creating a big data application," he says.

Field plans to spend much of next year working at a big data startup called Flipboard. His ultimate goal, he says, is to start his own big data company.


http://www.npr.org/2011/11/30/142893065 ... ta?sc=emaf

Radio Show:

http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2 ... 3.mp3?dl=1

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Some background on Greylock Partners:


Funding

Greylock Partners is organized in a series of thirteen limited partnerships begun in 1965, 1973, 1979, 1983, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2005 and 2009. On 2nd November, 2009 Greylock announced $575 Million Fund and hired Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Co-Founder, as Partner. In 2006, Greylock launched Greylock Israel, a separate fund dedicated to Israel. Committed capital across the Greylock partnerships exceeds $2 billion. Greylock's limited partners include the nation's most prestigious university endowments, major American industrial families and not for profit foundations. Greylock has had all of its limited partners participate in all partnerships subsequent to their original investment.

Significant Investments

Greylock's investments include Ascend Communications, CipherTrust, Data Domain, Digg, Facebook, Farecast, Linkedin, SunEdison, Typesafe, Xircom, Zipcar, Payoneer and AppDynamics.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Stallman: Facebook IS Mass Surveillance

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http://rt.com/news/richard-stallman-free-software-875/

Published: 02 December, 2011, 17:34
Edited: 03 December, 2011, 03:15
Richard Stallman
(89.4Mb) embed video

TAGS: Internet, Information Technology, Media

The father of free software philosophy spoke to RT on evil developers, spying social networks, the almost-legitimacy of Anonymous hacks and the condition under which he would take a proprietary program and a million dollars.

Stallman is the man behind the concept that every computer program must be free for users to study and modify as they want. This is the only way to ensure that by using the software users do not compromise their human rights, he says.

"Free software literally gives you freedom in the area of computing. It means that you can control your computing. It means that the users individually and collectively have control over their computing. And in particular it means they can protect themselves from the malicious features that are likely to be in proprietary software," he told RT.

"This doesn't automatically give you freedom in some other area of life. To get that you have to fight for it. But human rights support each other. In an age when a lot of what we do, we do with computers, if we don't have freedom in our computing, that makes it harder for us to defend or fight for freedom in other areas. You loose one set of rights – and it's harder for you to keep the others."

There are many ways how people can be stripped of their freedom through the software they use. One of the latest examples is the scandal with Carrier IQ's software, which is being accused of logging every keystroke on devices, which run it.

"This is an example of malicious features in non-free software. Those mobile phones are being run by non-free software, so it's no surprise that they have malicious features in them. The most commonly used non-free programs do," Stallman sadly pointed out.

Another example is Facebook's data-mining activities, which includes massive spying on people browsing the internet.

"Facebook does massive surveillance. If there is a 'like' button in a page, Facebook knows who visited that page. And it can get IP address of the computer visiting the page even if the person is not a Facebook user. So you visit several pages that have 'like' button and Facebook knows that you visited all of those, even if it doesn't really know who you are," he said.

But the public awareness of the danger is rising, and they start resisting it. For instance, operations of the Anonymous hacker group are basically an online version of protest demos, Stallman says.

"The Anonymous protests for the most part work by having a lot of people send a lot of commands to a website, that it can't handle so many requests. This is equivalent of a crowd of people going to the door of a building and having a protest on the street. It's basically legitimate. And when people object to this, let's look at who they are and what they do. Usually they are people who are doing much worse things," he believes.

Another vivid example is the rise of pirate parties in Europe, which have started winning seats in elected bodies there.

"I more-or-less agree with their positions and I'm glad to see that these issues are becoming election issues. I don't necessarily endorse pirate parties because to do that I would have to know what all the other parties are and these are not the only issues I think are important. For instance, putting a limit on global heating is extremely important. Many pirate parties don't take a position on that. So I might choose to support a green party instead," he said.
At the same time Stallman points out that many people endorse piracy for absolutely wrong reasons. They want to have a right to use proprietary software free of charge, while they should not to it at all.

"Why is it bad to use an unauthorized copy of a proprietary program? Because it's proprietary! So an unauthorized copy is almost as nasty as an authorized copy of the same program. They are both nasty because they are proprietary. The users don't have control over them. If they pay developer – that makes it worse, because they are rewarding this delinquency. That's why the authorized copy is worse. But they are both bad because they are both proprietary software. If you want freedom, you have to get rid of them both, because they both control you," he explained.

"I don't use that software. If you offered me an authorized copy and you wanted to pay me a million dollars to take it, I still wouldn't take it, unless I could throw it away immediately. Yeah – if I could take the million dollars and throw away the program, then I would say yes," Stallman added.

The visionary says the shrinking of software development industry, should that be caused by wider introduction of free software, would be absolutely irrelevant in the face of the benefit would bring.

"Who cares? What good is a so-called industry that's creating tools to subjugate people? I won't use the non-free software at all! I dedicate my effort to getting away from it! So if they stop making it – that would be great! I wish they would. I hope for the day when they won't make non-free software anymore," he said.

Certainly, such a turn of events may damage innovative industries, but Stallman says the direction where software development heads now harms it more anyway.

"With software patterns the US has become a dangerous place for software development, including innovative software development, because when a program is innovative, that means it has some new ideas in it. But it also has lots of well-known ideas in it. A large program combines thousands of ideas. So if you have some new ideas and you want to use them, in order to use them you have to combine them with a lot of other ideas that are well-known. And if you are not allowed to do that because those other ideas are patented, you can't use your new idea," he explained.

For answers to your questions asked via Twitter and Facebook, watch the full video version of the interview.

Also don't miss RT's Spotlight program on December 17, in which Richard Stallman elaborated on his convictions and activism.

http://rt.com/news/richard-stallman-free-software-875/

http://rt.com/files/news/richard-stallm ... download=1