https://youtu.be/9nUARk6aFE4?t=1 A National Geographic puzzle (described below) that 80% of children can solve flummoxes most adults. As we get older we develop a whole range of skills that allow us to operate more efficiently. The problem is that these optimizations result in blind spots and lowering of creativity. Now, don't get me wrong---the tradeoff is worthwhile. You really don't want a … [Read more...]
Microsoft speeding up tonight’s Iowa caucus
Microsoft is providing technology for tonight's Iowa caucus that should facilitate [the] accuracy and efficiency of the reporting process It also gives the company, which is seeing strong grow in its cloud services, to showcase its cloud and mobile offerings in a high stakes setting. … [Read more...]
Doug Cutting on the future of Hadoop
Data Informed have published interview with Doug Cutting on the future of Hadoop. He makes a number of observations. On MapReduce... MapReduce is on its way to being legacy. On important Hadoop developments... I think Kudu is very exciting; a new storage engine that offers a lot of low-latency, random-access capabilities that HDFS doesn't while still permitting the fast analytics that … [Read more...]
Worst passwords of 2015
SplashData, a purveyor of password managers, has produced its annual list of the year's worst passwords. The top ten are 123456 password 12345 12345678 qwerty 123456789 1234 baseball dragon football I guess we should all be shocked at how poor these passwords are. However, there's no breakdown of which sites these passwords came from. If they are all from bank accounts then, yes---OMG! … [Read more...]
Don’t trust the polls
2016 is the year of the US presidential election. Prepare to be besieged by polls. The embarrassment of the 2015 UK parliamentary election predictions is a distant memory. We get to start over. However, Mona Chalabi reminds us, via the Guardian's Datablog, of the challenges facing pollsters. She lists five: The media are fallible. They follow fashion and make the news. Journalists are fallible. … [Read more...]