An article in today's Guardian claims that 220 potential MPs have pledged to attend a workshop on how to interpret statistics in public life. Makes a lot of sense. Politicians' misunderstanding of statistics is illustrated by reference to a test conducted by the Royal Statistical Society, reported (article has since been updated) as: ...97 MPs were asked the maths question: "If you spin a … [Read more...]
Microsoft hiring R developers
Subsequent to their recent purchase of Revolution Analytics, Mircosoft seem to be expanding their investment in R. They are currently hiring for a new team that, amongst other things, will further accelerate & scale R analytics workloads by integrating with modern big data processing frameworks. … [Read more...]
Emotion analytics
Affectiva have an SDK for smartphones that, via the camera, can determine your emotional state from your facial expression. A free trial period is available for those who wish to try the SDK for themselves. … [Read more...]
Happy 5th birthday, Spark
The Apache Spark project was first open-sourced on 31 March 2010. While much has been made of how quickly interest in Spark has grown, it's worth pausing to remember that it's been around for a whole five years. The project has had time to mature and expand into areas where there are the practical requirements (e.g. data frames, ML pipelines). Looking forward to what the team comes up with in … [Read more...]
Big data and narrative
As the amount of data we collect continues to explode, attention needs to shift to making sense of it. Tools like Hadoop and Spark allow us to analyse these huge datasets, but they don't really make sense of it. Senior managers want insights. They want to have their business illuminated by the data. At present, this is done by data scientists analyzing the data and weaving it into a … [Read more...]