Microsoft has said that the recent wave of cyber attacks that has hit 150 countries should be treated by governments as a “wake-up” call. Security experts have constantly warned intelligence agencies about the risks of weakening security to make it easier to undertake surveillance. As UK hospitals are plunged into chaos we can see the […]
Social media profiling discussed on TWiT podcast
Leo Laporte and guests discuss social media profiling in the latest TWiT podcast. They describe credit ratings in China that are formed not just from financial data, but also social networking activities. According to the podcast these scores have already been used deny train travel to 7m people. As Laporte says, “It’s out of Black […]
Statistics books to read for pleasure
I’ve read quite a few (really) dry, technical books in my time. But even I was shocked to see an article entitled “Statistics Books to Read for Pleasure”. Isn’t that just a step too far? However, it reminded me of one excellent book that should be required reading after this month’s polling meltdown. “Everydata: The […]
Machine learning at scale on HDInsight using Microsoft R Server at Spark
Microsoft have published an article on how to conduct a decision tree analysis using Microsoft R Server and Spark on Azure HDInsight. Using four 8-core 28Gb RAM (D4) worker nodes they were able to process 170 million rows (37GB) in around 5 minutes. This was 20% faster than using Spark’s own MLLib libraries—although there’s no […]
Building data-driven web applications using R and Shiny
Learning Tree just published my article on using R and Shiny to build data-driven web applications.