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• Big Data – Beginning Big Data – Day 1 of 21

  - by Pinal Dave

  What is Big Data? I want to learn Big Data. I have no clue where and how to start learning about it. Does Big Data really means data is big? What are the tools and software I need to know to learn Big Data? I often receive questions which I mentioned above. They are good questions and honestly when we search online, it is hard to find authoritative and authentic answers. I have been working with Big Data and NoSQL for a while and I have decided that I will attempt to discuss this subject over here in the blog. In the next 21 days we will understand what is so big about Big Data. Big Data – Big Thing! Big Data is becoming one of the most talked about technology trends nowadays. The real challenge with the big organization is to get maximum out of the data already available and predict what kind of data to collect in the future. How to take the existing data and make it meaningful that it provides us accurate insight in the past data is one of the key discussion points in many of the executive meetings in organizations. With the explosion of the data the challenge has gone to the next level and now a Big Data is becoming the reality in many organizations. Big Data – A Rubik’s Cube I like to compare big data with the Rubik’s cube. I believe they have many similarities. Just like a Rubik’s cube it has many different solutions. Let us visualize a Rubik’s cube solving challenge where there are many experts participating. If you take five Rubik’s cube and mix up the same way and give it to five different expert to solve it. It is quite possible that all the five people will solve the Rubik’s cube in fractions of the seconds but if you pay attention to the same closely, you will notice that even though the final outcome is the same, the route taken to solve the Rubik’s cube is not the same. Every expert will start at a different place and will try to resolve it with different methods. Some will solve one color first and others will solve another color first. Even though they follow the same kind of algorithm to solve the puzzle they will start and end at a different place and their moves will be different at many occasions. It is  nearly impossible to have a exact same route taken by two experts. Big Market and Multiple Solutions Big Data is exactly like a Rubik’s cube – even though the goal of every organization and expert is same to get maximum out of the data, the route and the starting point are different for each organization and expert. As organizations are evaluating and architecting big data solutions they are also learning the ways and opportunities which are related to Big Data. There is not a single solution to big data as well there is not a single vendor which can claim to know all about Big Data. Honestly, Big Data is too big a concept and there are many players – different architectures, different vendors and different technology. What is Next? In this 31 days series we will be exploring many essential topics related to big data. I do not claim that you will be master of the subject after 31 days but I claim that I will be covering following topics in easy to understand language. Architecture of Big Data Big Data a Management and Implementation Different Technologies – Hadoop, Mapreduce Real World Conversations Best Practices Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will try to answer one of the very essential questions – What is Big Data? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• Developing an Implementation Plan with Iterations by Russ Pitts

  - by user535886

  Developing an Implementation Plan with Iterations by Russ Pitts  Ok, so you have come to grips with understanding that applying the iterative concept, as defined by OUM is simply breaking up the project effort you have estimated for each phase into one or more six week calendar duration blocks of work. Idea being the business user(s) or key recipient(s) of work product(s) being developed never go longer than six weeks without having some sort of review or prototyping of the work results for an iteration…”think-a-little”, “do-a-little”, and “show-a-little” in a six week or less timeframe…ideally the business user(s) or key recipients(s) are involved throughout. You also understand the OUM concept that you only plan for that which you have knowledge of. The concept further defined, a project plan initially is developed at a high-level, and becomes more detailed as project knowledge grows. Agreeing to this concept means you also have to admit to the fallacy that one can plan with precision beyond six weeks into a project…Anything beyond six weeks is a best guess in most cases when dealing with software implementation projects. Project planning, as defined by OUM begins with the Implementation Plan view, which is a very high-level perspective of the effort estimated for each of the five OUM phases, as well as the number of iterations within each phase. You might wonder how can you predict the number of iterations for each phase at this early point in the project. Remember project planning is not an exact science, and initially is high-level and abstract in nature, and then becomes more detailed and precise as the project proceeds. So where do you start in defining iterations for each phase for a project? The following are three easy steps to initially define the number of iterations for each phase: Step 1 => Start with identifying the known factors… …Prior to starting a project you should know: · The agreed upon time-period for an iteration (e.g 6 weeks, or 4 weeks, or…) within a phase (recommend keeping iteration time-period consistent within a phase, if not for the entire project) · The number of resources available for the project · The number of total number of man-day (effort) you have estimated for each of the five OUM phases of the project · The number of work days for a week Step 2 => Calculate the man-days of effort required for an iteration within a phase… Lets assume for the sake of this example there are 10 project resources, and you have estimated 2,536 man-days of work effort which will need to occur for the elaboration phase of the project. Let’s also assume a week for this project is defined as 5 business days, and that each iteration in the elaboration phase will last a calendar duration of 6 weeks. A simple calculation is performed to calculate the daily burn rate for a single iteration, which produces a result of… ((Number of resources * days per week) * duration of iteration) = Number of days required per iteration ((10 resources * 5 days/week) * 6 weeks) = 300 man days of effort required per iteration Step 3 => Calculate the number of iterations that can occur within a phase Next calculate the number of iterations that can occur for the amount of man-days of effort estimated for the phase being considered… (number of man-days of effort estimated / number of man-days required per iteration) = # of iterations for phase (2,536 man-days of estimated effort for phase / 300 man days of effort required per iteration) = 8.45 iterations, which should be rounded to a whole number such as 9 iterations* *Note - It is important to note this is an approximate calculation, not an exact science. This particular example is a simple one, which assumes all resources are utilized throughout the phase, including tech resources, etc. (rounding down or up to a whole number based on project factor considerations). It is also best in many cases to round up to higher number, as this provides some calendar scheduling contingency.

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• F# and the rose-tinted reflection

  - by CliveT

  We're already seeing increasing use of many cores on client desktops. It is a change that has been long predicted. It is not just a change in architecture, but our notions of efficiency in a program. No longer can we focus on the asymptotic complexity of an algorithm by counting the steps that a single core processor would take to execute it. Instead we'll soon be more concerned about the scalability of the algorithm and how well we can increase the performance as we increase the number of cores. This may even lead us to throw away our most efficient algorithms, and switch to less efficient algorithms that scale better. We might even be willing to waste cycles in order to speculatively execute at the algorithm rather than the hardware level. State is the big headache in this parallel world. At the hardware level, main memory doesn't necessarily contain the definitive value corresponding to a particular address. An update to a location might still be held in a CPU's local cache and it might be some time before the value gets propagated. To get the latest value, and the notion of "latest" takes a lot of defining in this world of rapidly mutating state, the CPUs may well need to communicate to decide who has the definitive value of a particular address in order to avoid lost updates. At the user program level, this means programmers will need to lock objects before modifying them, or attempt to avoid the overhead of locking by understanding the memory models at a very deep level. I think it's this need to avoid statefulness that has led to the recent resurgence of interest in functional languages. In the 1980s, functional languages started getting traction when research was carried out into how programs in such languages could be auto-parallelised. Sadly, the impracticality of some of the languages, the overheads of communication during this parallel execution, and rapid improvements in compiler technology on stock hardware meant that the functional languages fell by the wayside. The one thing that these languages were good at was getting rid of implicit state, and this single idea seems like a solution to the problems we are going to face in the coming years. Whether these languages will catch on is hard to predict. The mindset for writing a program in a functional language is really very different from the way that object-oriented problem decomposition happens - one has to focus on the verbs instead of the nouns, which takes some getting used to. There are a number of hybrid functional/object languages that have been becoming more popular in recent times. These half-way houses make it easy to use functional ideas for some parts of the program while still allowing access to the underlying object-focused platform without a great deal of impedance mismatch. One example is F# running on the CLR which, in Visual Studio 2010, has because a first class member of the pack. Inside Visual Studio 2010, the tooling for F# has improved to the point where it is easy to set breakpoints and watch values change while debugging at the source level. In my opinion, it is the tooling support that will enable the widespread adoption of functional languages - without this support, people will put off any transition into the functional world for as long as they possibly can. Without tool support it will make it hard to learn these languages. One tool that doesn't currently support F# is Reflector. The idea of decompiling IL to a functional language is daunting, but F# is potentially so important I couldn't dismiss the idea. As I'm currently developing Reflector 6.5, I thought it wise to take four days just to see how far I could get in doing so, even if it achieved little more than to be clearer on how much was possible, and how long it might take. You can read what happened here, and of the insights it gave us on ways to improve the tool.

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• Yammer, Berkeley DB, and the 3rd Platform

  - by Eric Jensen

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Cambria","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi; mso-bidi-language:EN-US;} If you read the news, you know that the latest high-profile social media acquisition was just confirmed. Microsoft has agreed to acquire Yammer for 1.2 billion. Personally, I believe that Yammer’s amazing success can be mainly attributed to their wise decision to use Berkeley DB Java Edition as their backend data store. :-) I’m only kidding, of course. However, as Ryan Kennedy points out in the video I recently blogged about, BDB JE did provide the right feature set that allowed them to reliably grow their business. Which in turn allowed them to focus on their core value add. As it turns out, their ‘add’ is quite valuable! This actually makes sense to me, a lot more sense than certain other recent social acquisitions, and here’s why. Last year, IDC declared that we are entering a new computing era, the era of the “3rd Platform.” In case you’re curious, the first 2 were terminal computing and client/server computing, IIRC. Anyway, this 3rd one is more complicated. This year, IDC refined the concept further. It now involves 4 distinct buzzwords: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. Yammer is a social media platform that runs in the cloud, designed to be used from mobile devices. Their approach, using Berkeley DB Java Edition with High Availability, qualifies as big data. This means that Yammer is sitting right smack in the center if IDC’s new computing era. Another way to put it is: the folks at Yammer were prescient enough to predict where things were headed, and get there first. They chose Berkeley DB to handle their data. Maybe you should too!

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• Cloud Backup: Getting the Users' Backs Up

  - by Tony Davis

  On Wednesday last week, Microsoft announced that as of July 1, all data transfers into its Microsoft Azure cloud will be free (though you have to pay for transferring data out). On Thursday last week, SQL Azure in Western Europe went down. It was a relatively short outage, but since SQL Azure currently provides no easy way to take a standard backup of a database and store it locally, many people had no recourse but to wait patiently for their cloud-based app to resume. It seems that Microsoft are very keen encourage developers to move their data onto their cloud, but are developers ready to do it, given that such basic backup capabilities are lacking? Recently on Simple-Talk, Mike Mooney described a perfect use case for the Microsoft Cloud. They had a simple web-based application with a SQL Server backend; they could move the application to Windows Azure, and the data into SQL Azure and in the process free themselves from much of the hassle surrounding management and scaling of the hardware, network and so on. It was a great fit and yet it nearly didn't happen; lack of support for the BACKUP command almost proved a show-stopper. Of course, backups of Azure databases are always and have always been taken automatically, for disaster recovery purposes, but these are strictly on-cloud copies and as of now it is not possible to use them to them to restore a database to a particular point in time. It seems that none of those clever Microsoft people managed to predict the need to perform basic backups of Azure databases so that copies could be stored locally, outside the Azure universe. At the very least, as Mike points out, performing a local backup before a new deployment is more or less mandatory. Microsoft did at least note the sound of gnashing teeth and, as a stop-gap measure, offered SQL Azure Database Copy which basically allows you to create an online clone of your database, but this doesn't allow for storing local archives of the data. To that end MS has provided SQL Azure Import/Export, to package up and export a database and its data, using BACPACs. These BACPACs do not guarantee transactional consistency; for example, if a child table is modified after the parent is copied, then the copied database will be in inconsistent state (meaning, to add to the fun, BACPACs need to be created from a database copy). In any event, widespread problems with BACPAC's evil cousin, the DACPAC have been well-documented, and it seems likely that many will also give BACPAC the bum's rush. Finally, in a TechEd 2011 presentation tagged "SQL Azure Advanced Administration", it was announced that "backup and restore" were coming in the next SQL Azure CTP. And yet this still doesn't mean that we'll get simple backups as DBAs know and love them. What it does mean, at least, is the ability to restore any given database to a point in time within a 2-week window. For the time being, if you want a local copy of your data and don't want to brave the BACPAC, one is left with SSIS or BCP, creative use of schema and data comparison tools, or use of SQL Azure Backup (currently in beta) in order to perform this simple but vital task. Cheers, Tony.

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• Going by the eBook

  - by Tony Davis

  The book and magazine publishing world is rapidly going digital, and the industry is faced with making drastic changes to their ways of doing business. The sudden take-up of digital readers by the book-buying public has surprised even the most technological-savvy of the industry. Printed books just aren't selling like they did. In contrast, eBooks are doing well. The ePub file format is the standard around which all publishers are converging. ePub is a standard for formatting book content, so that it can be reflowed for various devices, with their widely differing screen-sizes, and can be read offline. If you unzip an ePub file, you'll find familiar formats such as XML, XHTML and CSS. This is both a blessing and a curse. Whilst it is good to be able to use familiar technologies that have been developed to a level of considerable sophistication, it doesn't get us all the way to producing a viable publication. XHTML is a page-description language, not a book-description language, as we soon found out during our initial experiments, when trying to specify headers, footers, indexes and chaptering. As a result, it is difficult to predict how any particular eBook application will decide to render a book. There isn't even a consensus as to how the cover image is specified. All of this is awkward for the publisher. Each book must be created and revised in a form from which can be generated a whole range of 'printed media', from print books, to Mobi for kindles, ePub for most Tablets and SmartPhones, HTML for excerpted chapters on websites, and a plethora of other formats for other eBook readers, each with its own idiosyncrasies. In theory, if we can get our content into a clean, semantic XML form, such as DOCBOOKS, we can, from there, after every revision, perform a series of relatively simple XSLT transformations to output anything from a HTML article, to an ePub file for reading on an iPad, to an ICML file (an XML-based file format supported by the InDesign tool), ready for print publication. As always, however, the task looks bigger the closer you get to the detail. On the way to the utopian world of an XML-based book format that encompasses all the diverse requirements of the different publication media, ePub looks like a reasonable format to adopt. Its forthcoming support for HTML 5 and CSS 3, with ePub 3.0, means that features, such as widow-and-orphan controls, multi-column flow and multi-media graphics can be incorporated into eBooks. This starts to make it possible to build an "app-like" experience into the eBook and to free publishers to think of putting context before container; to think of what content is required, be it graphical, textual or audio, from the point of view of the user, rather than what's possible in a given, traditional book "Container". In the meantime, there is a gap between what publishers require and what current technology can provide and, of course building this app-like experience is far from plain sailing. Real portability between devices is still a big challenge, and achieving the sort of wizardry seen in the likes of Theodore Grey's "Elements" eBook will require some serious device-specific programming skills. Cheers, Tony.

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• The Healthy Tension That Mobility Creates

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Hernan Capdevila, Vice President, Oracle Fusion Apps In my previous post, I talked about the value of the mobile revolution on businesses and workers. Now let me put on a different hat and view the world from the IT department and the IT leader’s viewpoint. The IT leader has different concerns – around privacy, potential liability of information leakage, and intellectual property protection. These concerns and the leader’s goals create a healthy tension with the users. For example, effective device management becomes a must have for the IT leader, especially if you look at the Android ecosystem as an example. There are benefits to the Android strategy, but there are also drawbacks, such as uniformity – in device management, in operating systems, and in the application taxonomy and capabilities. Whereas, if you compare Android to iOS, Apple's operating system, iOS is more unified, more streamlined, and easier to manage. In either case, this is where mobile device management in the cloud makes good sense. I don't think IT departments should be hosting device management and managing that complexity. It should be a cloud service and I predict it's going to be key for our customers. A New Focus for IT Departments So where does that leave the IT departments? I think their futures are in governance, which is a more strategic play than a tactical one. Device management is tactical and it's the “now” topic. But the mobile phenomenon, if you will, is going to drive significant change in terms of how IT plans, hosts, and deploys enterprise applications. For example, opening up enterprise applications for mobile users presents some challenges unless you deploy more complicated network topologies, such as virtual private networks and threat protection technology. If you really want employees to be mobile you need to remove those kinds of barriers. But I don’t think IT departments want to wrestle with exposing their private enterprise data centers and being responsible for hosted business applications – applications in a sense that they’re making vulnerable to the public world. This opens up a significant need and a significant driver for cloud applications. However, it's not just about taking away the complexity – it's also about taking away the responsibility. Why should every business have to carry the responsibility and figure out all the nuts and bolts of how to protect themselves in this public, mobile world? When you use apps in the cloud, either your vendor or your hosting partner should have figured all that out. They need to assure the business that they are adhering to all sorts of security and compliance regulations so users can be connected and have access to information anywhere anytime. More Ideas and Better Service What’s more interesting is the world of possibilities that the connected, cloud-based world enables. I believe that the one-size-fits-all, uber-best practices, lowest-common denominator-like capabilities will go away. IT will now be able to solve very specific business challenges for the different corporate functions it serves. In this new world, IT will play a key role in enabling different organizations within a company to be best in class and delivering greater value to the line of business managers. IT will actually help to differentiate. Net result is a more agile workforce and business because each department is getting work done its own way.

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• More Stuff less Fluff

  - by brendonpage

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/brendonpage/archive/2013/11/08/more-stuff-less-fluff.aspxYAGNI – "You Aren't Going To Need It". This is an acronym commonly used in software development to remind developers to only write what they need. This acronym exists because software developers have gotten into the habit of writing everything they need to solve a problem and then everything they think they're going to possibly need in the future. Since we can't predict the future this results in a large portion of the code that we write never being used. That extra code causes unnecessary complexity, which makes it harder to understand and harder to modify when we inevitably have to write something that we didn't think of. I've known about YAGNI for some time now but I never really got it. The words made sense and the idea was clear but the concept never sank in. I was one of those devs who'd happily write a ton of code in the anticipation of future needs. In my mind this was an essential part of writing high quality code. I didn't realise that in doing so I was actually writing low quality code. If you are anything like me you are probably thinking "Lies and propaganda! High quality code needs to be future proof." I agree! But what makes code future proof? If we could see into the future the answer would be simple, code that allows for or meets all future requirements. Since we can't see the future the best we can do is write code that can easily adapt to future requirements, this means writing flexible code. Flexible code is: Fast to understand. Fast to add to. Fast to modify. To be flexible code has to be simple, this means only making it as complex as it needs to be to meet those 3 criteria. That is high quality code. YAGNI! The art is in deciding where to place the seams (abstractions) that will give you flexibility without making decisions about future functionality. Robert C Martin explains it very nicely, he says a good architecture allows you to defer decisions because if you can defer a decision then you have the flexibility to change it. I've recently had a YAGNI experience which brought this all into perspective. I was working on a new project which had multiple clients that connect to a server hosted in the cloud. I was tasked with adding a feature to the desktop client that would allow users to capture items that would then be saved to the cloud. My immediate thought was "Hey we have multiple clients so I should build a web service for these items, that way we can access them from other clients", so I went to work and this is what I created.  I stood back and gazed upon what I'd created with a warm fuzzy feeling. It was beautiful! Then the time came for the team to use the design I'd created for another feature with a new entity. Let's just say that they didn't get the same warm fuzzy feeling that I did when they looked at the design. After much discussion they eventually got it through to me that I'd bloated the design based on an assumption of future functionality. After much more discussion we cut the design down to the following. This design gives us future flexibility with no extra work, it is as complex as it needs to be. It has been a couple of months since this incident and we still haven't needed to access either of the entities from other clients. Using the simpler design allowed us to do more stuff with less stuff!

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• Blink-Data vs Instinct?

  - by Samantha.Y. Ma

  In his landmark bestseller Blink, well-known author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell explores how human beings everyday make seemingly instantaneous choices --in the blink of an eye--and how we “think without thinking.”  These situations actually aren’t as simple as they seem, he postulates; and throughout the book, Gladwell seeks answers to questions such as: 1.    What makes some people good at thinking on their feet and making quick spontaneous decisions?2.    Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others consistently seem to stumble into error?3.    Why are some of the best decisions often those that are difficult to explain to others?In Blink, Gladwell introduces us to the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Ultimately, Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who spend the most time deliberating or analyzing information, but those who focus on key factors among an overwhelming number of variables-- i.e., those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing.” In Data vs. Instinct: Perfecting Global Sales Performance, a new report sponsored by Oracle, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) explores the roles data and instinct play in decision-making by sales managers and discusses how sales executives can increase sales performance through more effective  territory planning and incentive/compensation strategies.If you are a sales executive, ask yourself this:  “Do you rely on knowledge (data) when you plan out your sales strategy?  If you rely on data, how do you ensure that your data sources are reliable, up-to-date, and complete?  With the emergence of social media and the proliferation of both structured and unstructured data, how do you know that you are applying your information/data correctly and in-context?  Three key findings in the report are:•    Six out of ten executives say they rely more on data than instinct to drive decisions. •    Nearly one half (48 percent) of incentive compensation plans do not achieve the desired results. •    Senior sales executives rely more on current and historical data than on forecast data. Strikingly similar to what Gladwell concludes in Blink, the report’s authors succinctly sum up their findings: "The best outcome is a combination of timely information, insightful predictions, and support data."Applying this insight is crucial to creating a sound sales plan that drives alignment and results.  In the area of sales performance management, “territory programs and incentive compensation continue to present particularly complex challenges in an increasingly globalized market," say the report’s authors. "It behooves companies to get a better handle on translating that data into actionable and effective plans." To help solve this challenge, CRM Oracle Fusion integrates forecasting, quotas, compensation, and territories into a single system.   For example, Oracle Fusion CRM provides a natural integration between territories, which define the sales targets (e.g., collection of accounts) for the sales force, and quotas, which quantify the sales targets. In fact, territory hierarchy is a core analytic dimension to slice and dice sales results, using sales analytics and alerts to help you identify where problems are occurring. This makes territoriesStart tapping into both data and instinct effectively today with Oracle Fusion CRM.   Here is a short video to provide you with a snapshot of how it can help you optimize your sales performance.  

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• Brazil is Hot for Social Media

  - by Mike Stiles

  Today’s guest blog is from Oracle SVP Product Development Reggie Bradford, fresh off a visit to Sao Paulo, Brazil where he spoke at the Dachis Social Business Summit and spent some time getting a personal taste for the astonishing growth of social in Brazil, both in terms of usage and engagement. I knew it was big, but I now have an all-new appreciation for why the Wall Street Journal branded Brazil the “social media capital of the universe.” Brazil has the world’s 5th largest economy, an expanding middle class, an active younger demo market, a connected & outgoing culture, and an ongoing embrace of the social media platforms. According to comScore's 2012 Brazil Digital Future in Focus report, 97% are using social media, and that’s not even taking mobile-only users into account. There were 65 million Facebook users in 2012, spending an average 535 minutes there, up 208%. It’s one of Twitter’s fastest growing markets and the 2nd biggest market for YouTube. Instagram usage has grown over 300% since last year. That by itself is exciting, but look at the opportunity for social marketing brands. 74% of Brazilian social users follow brands on Facebook, and 59% have praised a company on either Twitter or Facebook. A 2011 Oh! Panel study found 81% of social networkers there used social to research new products and 75% went there looking for discounts. B2C eCommerce sales in Brazil is projected to hit $26.9 billion by 2015. I bet I’m not the only one who sees great things ahead, and I was fortunate enough give a keynote ABRADI, an association of leading digital agencies in Brazil with 53 execs from 35 agencies attending. I was also afforded the opportunity to give my impressions of what’s going on in Brazil to Jornal Propoganda & Marketing, one of the most popular publications in Latin America for marketers. I conveyed that especially in an environment like Brazil, where social users are so willing to connect and engage brands, marketers need to back away from the heavy-handed, one-way messaging of old school advertising and move toward genuine relationships and trust-building. To aide in this, organizational and operation changes must be embraced inside the enterprise. We've talked often about the new, tighter partnership forming between the CIO and CMO. If this partnership is not encouraged, fostered and resourced, the increasing amount of time consumers spend on mobile and digital, and the efficiencies and integrations offered by cloud-based software cannot be exploited. These are the kinds of changes that can yield social data that, when combined with enterprise data, helps you come to know your social audiences intimately and predict their needs. Consumers are always connected and need your brand to be accessible at any time, be it for information or customer service. And, of course, all of this is happening quite publicly. The holistic, socially-enable enterprise connects social to customer service systems and all other customer touch points, facilitating the kind of immediate, real-time, gratifying response customers are coming to expect. Social users in Brazil are highly active and clearly willing to meet us as brands more than halfway. Empowering yourself with a social management technology platform will have you set up to maximize this booming social market…from listening & monitoring to engagement to analytics to workflow & automation to globalization & language support. Brands, it’s time to be as social as the great people of Brazil are. Obrigado! @reggiebradfordPhoto: Gualberto107, freedigitalphotos.net

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• Cleaner ClientID's with ASP.NET 4.0

  - by amaniar

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE HI /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} A common complain we have had when using ASP.NET web forms is the inability to control the ID attributes being rendered in the HTML markup when using server controls. Our Interface Engineers want to be able to predict the ID’s of controls thereby having more control over their client side code for selecting/manipulating elements by ID or using CSS to target them. While playing with the just released VS2010 and .NET 4.0 I discovered some real cool improvements. One of them is the ability to now have full control over the ID being rendered for server controls. ASP.NET 4.0 controls now have a new ClientIDMode property which gives the developer complete control over the ID’s being rendered making it easy to write JavaScript and CSS against the rendered html. By default the ClientIDMode is set to Predictable which results in clean and predictable ID’s by concatenating the ID’s of the Parent and child controls. So the following markup: <asp:Content ID="ParentContainer" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContentPlaceHolder" runat="server">     <asp:Label runat="server" ID="MyLabel">My Label</asp:Label> </asp:Content>                                                                                                                                                             Will render:   <span id="ParentContainer_MyLabel">My Label</span> Instead of something like this: (current) <span id="ct100_ParentContainer_MyLabel">My Label</span> Other modes include AutoID (renders ID’s like it currently does in .NET 3.5), Static (renders the ID exactly as specified in the code) and Inherit (defers the mode to the parent control). So now I can write my jQuery selector as: $(“ParentContainer_MyLabel”).text(“My new Text”); Instead of: $(‘<%=this. MyLabel.ClientID%>’).text(“My new Text”); Scott Mitchell has a great article about this new feature: http://bit.ly/ailEJ2 Am excited about this and some other improvements. Many thanks to the ASP.NET team for Listening!

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• New PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 On Demand Standard Edition provides a complete set of IT services at a low, predictable monthly cost

  - by Robbin Velayedam

  At Oracle Open World last month, Oracle announced that we are extending our On Demand offerings with the general availability of PeopleSoft On Demand Standard Edition. Standard Edition represents Oracle’s commitment to providing customers a choice of solutions, technology, and deployment options commensurate with their business needs and future growth. The Standard Edition offering complements the traditional On Demand offerings (Enterprise and Professional Editions) by focusing on a low, predictable monthly cost model that scales with the size of your business.   As part of Oracle's open cloud strategy, customers can freely move PeopleSoft licensed applications between on premise and the various  on demand options as business needs arise.    In today’s business climate, aggressive and creative business objectives demand more of IT organizations. They are expected to provide technology-based solutions to streamline business processes, enable online collaboration and multi-tasking, facilitate data mining and storage, and enhance worker productivity. As IT budgets remain tight in a recovering economy, the challenge becomes how to meet these demands with limited time and resources. One way is to eliminate the variable costs of projects so that your team can focus on the high priority functions and better predict funding and resource needs two to three years out. Variable costs and changing priorities can derail the best laid project and capacity plans. The prime culprits of variable costs in any IT organization include disaster recovery, security breaches, technical support, and changes in business growth and priorities. Customers have an immediate need for solutions that are cheaper, predictable in cost, and flexible enough for long-term growth or capacity changes. The Standard Edition deployment option fulfills that need by allowing customers to take full advantage of the rich business functionality that is inherent to PeopleSoft HCM, while delegating all application management responsibility – such as future upgrades and product updates – to Oracle technology experts, at an affordable and expected price. Standard Edition provides the advantages of the secure Oracle On Demand hosted environment, the complete set of PeopleSoft HCM configurable business processes, and timely management of regular updates and enhancements to the application functionality and underlying technology. Standard Edition has a convenient monthly fee that is scalable by number of employees, which helps align the customer’s overall cost of ownership with its size and anticipated growth and business needs. In addition to providing PeopleSoft HCM applications' world class business functionality and Oracle On Demand's embassy-grade security, Oracle’s hosted solution distinguishes itself from competitors by offering customers the ability to transition between different deployment and service models at any point in the application ownership lifecycle. As our customers’ business and economic climates change, they are free to transition their applications back to on-premise at any time. HCM On Demand Standard Edition is based on configurability options rather than customizations, requiring no additional code to develop or maintain. This keeps the cost of ownership low and time to production less than a month on average. Oracle On Demand offers the highest standard of security and performance by leveraging a state-of-the-art data center with dedicated databases, servers, and secured URL all within a private cloud. Customers will not share databases, environments, platforms, or access portals with other customers because we value how mission critical your data are to your business. Oracle’s On Demand also provides a full breadth of disaster recovery services to provide customers the peace of mind that their data are secure and that backup operations are in place to keep their businesses up and running in the case of an emergency. Currently we have over 50 PeopleSoft customers delegating us with the management of their applications through Oracle On Demand. If you are a customer interested in learning more about the PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Standard Edition and how it can help your organization minimize your variable IT costs and free up your resources to work on other business initiatives, contact Oracle or your Account Services Representative today.

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• Successfully Deliver on State and Local Capital Projects through Project Portfolio Management

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} While the debate continues on Capitol Hill about which federal programs to cut and which to keep, communities and towns across America are feeling the budget crunch closer to home. State and local governments are trying to save as many projects as they can without promising too much to constituents – and they, in turn, want to know where their tax dollars are going. Fortunately, with the right planning and management, you can deliver successful projects and portfolios on a limited budget. Watch the replay of our recent webcast with Oracle Primavera and Industry Product Manager Garrett Harley that will demonstrate how state and local governments can get the most out of their capital projects and learn how two Oracle Primavera customers have implemented project portfolio management practices to: Predict the cost of long-term capital programs and projects Assess risk and mitigation strategies Collaborate and track performance across government agencies Speakers: Garrett Harley, Industry and Product Manager, Oracle Primavera Cory Davis, Director of Capital Renovation and New Construction, Chicago Public Schools Julie Owen, PSP™, CCC™, Sr. Project Controls Manager,LA Metro Transit Authority With the right planning and management, state and local governments can deliver successful projects on a limited budget. 1024x768 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Crystal Ball Live Webcast: Expert insight from EpiX Analytics

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Register today for the November 2nd live Crystal Ball webcast- Expert insight from EpiX Analytics: Techniques for Improved Risk Management and Decision-Making Join our speaker Dr Huybert Groenendaal, PhD, MSc, MBA, EpiX Analytics LLC and learn how to realize the full value of decision-making techniques, and: • Gain insight into risks and uncertainties • Account for risk in quantitative analysis and decision making • Generate a range of possible outcomes and the probabilities they will occur for any choice of action • Learn best practice for the use of Crystal Ball to support decision making in your own environment • Learn how to avoid common mistakes when using Monte Carlo simulations • Maximize your existing investment in spreadsheet technology Register now for this November 2nd live webcast and don't miss this opportunity to learn how you can model, predict and forecast with better results. For more information view the evite.

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• How to use drag and drop within a UIScrollView

  - by user249488

  I am trying to drag and drop UIViews within a UIScrollView. I'd like the UIScrollView to scroll if I drag a UIView so that it intersects the top or bottom of the ScrollView. If it touches the top, it should scroll up. If it touches the bottom, it should scroll down. Once the UIView is moved such that it is no longer intersecting the top or bottom, the scrolling should stop. The first approach I tried was to start an NSTimer whenever I detected that the UIView intersected with the top or bottom of the scrollview. The timer would scroll the UIScrollView bit by bit until it was invalidated. This resulted in very jerky scrolling, since there is no way to predict when the timers will fire. My current approach is to simply scroll all the way to the top or bottom of the ScrollView, like this: [UIView beginAnimations:nil context:NULL]; [UIView setAnimationCurve:UIViewAnimationCurveEaseInOut]; [UIView setAnimationDuration:1.0]; [self.parentScrollview setContentOffset:newOffset animated:NO]; [UIView commitAnimations]; In order to stop scrolling, I try to determine the position of the touch in the touchesMoved: delegate, and use that to calculate the contentOffset to use for the scrollView. The problem is, when I try to get the location in the view via [[touches anyObject] locationInView:self], I get the final end location, rather than the current location. I'm guessing that's because the contentOffset on the scrollView is set immediately. Is there a way to get the actual location of a touch in a situation like this? Or any other way to set the contentOffset when I interrupt the scrolling animation?

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• How to find cause and of the SocketException with message that an established connection was aborted

  - by cdpnet

  Hi All, I know the similar question may have been asked many times, but I want to represent the behavior I'm seeing and find if somebody can help predict the cause of this. I am writing a windows service which connects to other windows service over TCP. There are 100 user entities of this, and 5 connections per each. These users perform their tasks using their individual connections. The application goes on withough seeing this problem for 1 or 2 days. Or sometimes show the problem right after starting (-rarely). The best run I had was like 4 to 5 days without showing this exception. And after that application died or I had to stop it for various reasons. I want to know what can be causing this? Here is the stacktrace. System.IO.IOException: Unable to write data to the transport connection: An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine. ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.Send(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size, SocketFlags socketFlags) at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Write(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream.Write(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 size) at System.Net.Security._SslStream.StartWriting(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest) at System.Net.Security._SslStream.ProcessWrite(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count, AsyncProtocolRequest asyncRequest) at System.Net.Security.SslStream.Write(Byte[] buffer, Int32 offset, Int32 count)

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• Advice for Windows XP Scripting, WSH versus PowerShell

  - by Greg Graham

  After much experience scripting in the Unix/Linux open-source world, using languages such as Bourne Shell, Perl, Python, and Ruby, I now find myself needing to do some Windows XP admin scripting. It appears that the legacy environment is Windows Script Host (WSH), which can use various scripting languages, but the primary language is VBScript, and is based on COM objects. However, the future appears to be Windows PowerShell, which is based on .NET. I haven't done Basic since Applesoft in the 70s, so I'm not keen on learning VBScript, although I did learn enough to write a small script to mount network drives. If I'm going to spend time to really learn this, I'm leaning towards investing my time in the .NET PowerShell environment, if it truly is the future. I did some C# Windows Forms programming a couple of years ago, so I have some exposure to .NET, which also makes PowerShell attractive. Understanding that no one has a crystal ball to predict the future of Microsoft, I would like hear from anyone who is a PowerShell user and thinks it's worthwhile, or if there is anyone that knows of serious drawbacks to PowerShell, and recommends that I stay away from it. Update: I ended up using WSH/VBScript for a particular script that I am installing as a startup script on user's Windows XP workstations. All I have to do is copy it to their Startup folder, and I'm done. However, I only learned enough WSH to accomplish this one job. I am glad to see that PowerShell is the future, and when I have more complicated scripting tasks, I'll to turn PowerShell.

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• Machine Learning Algorithm for Predicting Order of Events?

  - by user213060

  Simple machine learning question. Probably numerous ways to solve this: There is an infinite stream of 4 possible events: 'event_1', 'event_2', 'event_4', 'event_4' The events do not come in in completely random order. We will assume that there are some complex patterns to the order that most events come in, and the rest of the events are just random. We do not know the patterns ahead of time though. After each event is received, I want to predict what the next event will be based on the order that events have come in in the past. The predictor will then be told what the next event actually was: Predictor=new_predictor() prev_event=False while True: event=get_event() if prev_event is not False: Predictor.last_event_was(prev_event) predicted_event=Predictor.predict_next_event(event) The question arises of how long of a history that the predictor should maintain, since maintaining infinite history will not be possible. I'll leave this up to you to answer. The answer can't be infinte though for practicality. So I believe that the predictions will have to be done with some kind of rolling history. Adding a new event and expiring an old event should therefore be rather efficient, and not require rebuilding the entire predictor model, for example. Specific code, instead of research papers, would add for me immense value to your responses. Python or C libraries are nice, but anything will do. Thanks! Update: And what if more than one event can happen simultaneously on each round. Does that change the solution?

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• How to mmap the stack for the clone() system call on linux?

  - by Joseph Garvin

  The clone() system call on Linux takes a parameter pointing to the stack for the new created thread to use. The obvious way to do this is to simply malloc some space and pass that, but then you have to be sure you've malloc'd as much stack space as that thread will ever use (hard to predict). I remembered that when using pthreads I didn't have to do this, so I was curious what it did instead. I came across this site which explains, "The best solution, used by the Linux pthreads implementation, is to use mmap to allocate memory, with flags specifying a region of memory which is allocated as it is used. This way, memory is allocated for the stack as it is needed, and a segmentation violation will occur if the system is unable to allocate additional memory." The only context I've ever heard mmap used in is for mapping files into memory, and indeed reading the mmap man page it takes a file descriptor. How can this be used for allocating a stack of dynamic length to give to clone()? Is that site just crazy? ;) In either case, doesn't the kernel need to know how to find a free bunch of memory for a new stack anyway, since that's something it has to do all the time as the user launches new processes? Why does a stack pointer even need to be specified in the first place if the kernel can already figure this out?

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• Best approach to storing image pixels in bottom-up order in Java

  - by finnw

  I have an array of bytes representing an image in Windows BMP format and I would like my library to present it to the Java application as a BufferedImage, without copying the pixel data. The main problem is that all implementations of Raster in the JDK store image pixels in top-down, left-to-right order whereas BMP pixel data is stored bottom-up, left-to-right. If this is not compensated for, the resulting image will be flipped vertically. The most obvious "solution" is to set the SampleModel's scanlineStride property to a negative value and change the band offsets (or the DataBuffer's array offset) to point to the top-left pixel, i.e. the first pixel of the last line in the array. Unfortunately this does not work because all of the SampleModel constructors throw an exception if given a negative scanlineStride argument. I am currently working around it by forcing the scanlineStride field to a negative value using reflection, but I would like to do it in a cleaner and more portable way if possible. e.g. is there another way to fool the Raster or SampleModel into arranging the pixels in bottom-up order but without breaking encapsulation? Or is there a library somewhere that will wrap the Raster and SampleModel, presenting the pixel rows in reverse order? I would prefer to avoid the following approaches: Copying the whole image (for performance reasons. The code must process hundreds of large (= 1Mpixels) images per second and although the whole image must be available to the application, it will normally access only a tiny (but hard-to-predict) portion of the image.) Modifying the DataBuffer to perform coordinate transformation (this actually works but is another "dirty" solution because the buffer should not need to know about the scanline/pixel layout.) Re-implementing the Raster and/or SampleModel interfaces from scratch (but I have a hunch that I will be unable to avoid this.)

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• Big-O of PHP functions?

  - by Kendall Hopkins

  After using PHP for a while now, I've noticed that not all PHP built in functions as fast as expected. Consider the below two possible implementations of a function that finds if a number is prime using a cached array of primes. //very slow for large $prime_array $prime_array = array( 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, .... 104729, ... ); $result_array = array(); foreach( $array_of_number => $number ) { $result_array[$number] = in_array( $number, $large_prime_array ); } //still decent performance for large $prime_array $prime_array => array( 2 => NULL, 3 => NULL, 5 => NULL, 7 => NULL, 11 => NULL, 13 => NULL, .... 104729 => NULL, ... ); foreach( $array_of_number => $number ) { $result_array[$number] = array_key_exists( $number, $large_prime_array ); } This is because in_array is implemented with a linear search O(n) which will linearly slow down as $prime_array grows. Where the array_key_exists function is implemented with a hash lookup O(1) which will not slow down unless the hash table gets extremely populated (in which case it's only O(logn)). So far I've had to discover the big-O's via trial and error, and occasionally looking at the source code. Now for the question... I was wondering if there was a list of the theoretical (or practical) big O times for all* the PHP built in functions. *or at least the interesting ones For example find it very hard to predict what the big O of functions listed because the possible implementation depends on unknown core data structures of PHP: array_merge, array_merge_recursive, array_reverse, array_intersect, array_combine, str_replace (with array inputs), etc.

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• Time complexity of a certain program

  - by HokageSama

  In a discussion with my friend i am not able to predict correct and tight time complexity of a program. Program is as below. /* This Function reads input array "input" and update array "output" in such a way that B[i] = index value of nearest greater value from A[i], A[i+1] ... A[n], for all i belongs to [1, n] Time Complexity: ?? **/ void createNearestRightSidedLargestArr(int* input, int size, int* output){ if(!input || size < 1) return; //last element of output will always be zero, since no element is present on its right. output[size-1] = -1; int curr = size - 2; int trav; while(curr >= 0){ if(input[curr] < input[curr + 1]){ output[curr] = curr + 1; curr--; continue; } trav = curr + 1; while( input[ output [trav] ] < input[curr] && output [trav] != -1) trav = output[trav]; output[curr--] = output[trav]; } } I said time complexity is O(n^2) but my friend insists that this is not correct. What is the actual time complexity?

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• R plot- SGAM plot counts vs. time - how do I get dates on the x-axis?

  - by Nate

  I'd like to plot this vs. time, with the actual dates (years actually, 1997,1998...2010). The dates are in a raw format, ala SAS, days since 1960 (hence as.date conversion). If I convert the dates using as.date to variable x, and do the GAM plot, I get an error. It works fine with the raw day numbers. But I want the plot to display the years (data are not equally spaced). structure(list(site = c(928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L, 928L), date = c(13493L, 13534L, 13566L, 13611L, 13723L, 13752L, 13804L, 13837L, 13927L, 14028L, 14082L, 14122L, 14150L, 14182L, 14199L, 16198L, 16279L, 16607L, 16945L, 17545L, 17650L, 17743L, 17868L, 17941L, 18017L, 18092L), y = c(7L, 7L, 17L, 18L, 17L, 17L, 10L, 3L, 17L, 24L, 11L, 5L, 5L, 3L, 5L, 14L, 2L, 9L, 9L, 4L, 7L, 6L, 1L, 0L, 5L, 0L)), .Names = c("site", "date", "y"), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -26L)) sgam1 <- gam(sites$y ~ s(sites$date)) sgam <- predict(sgam1, se=TRUE) plot(sites$date,sites$y,xaxt="n", xlab='Time', ylab='Counts') x<-as.Date(sites$date, origin="1960-01-01") axis(1, at=1:26,labels=x) lines(sites$date,sgam$fit, lty = 1) lines(sites$date,sgam$fit + 1.96* sgam$se, lty = 2) lines(sites$date,sgam$fit - 1.96* sgam$se, lty = 2) ggplot2 has a solution (it doesn't mind the as.date thing) but it gives me other problems...

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• Foosball result prediction

  - by Wolf

  In our office, we regularly enjoy some rounds of foosball / table football after work. I have put together a small java program that generates random 2vs2 lineups from the available players and stores the match results in a database afterwards. The current prediction of the outcome uses a simple average of all previous match results from the 4 involved players. This gives a very rough estimation, but I'd like to replace it with something more sophisticated, taking into account things like: players may be good playing as attacker but bad as defender (or vice versa) players do well against a specific opponent / bad against others some teams work well together, others don't skills change over time What would be the best algorithm to predict the game outcome as accurately as possible? Someone suggested using a neural network for this, which sounds quite interesting... but I do not have enough knowledge on the topic to say if that could work, and I also suspect it might take too many games to be reasonably trained. EDIT: Had to take a longer break from this due to some project deadlines. To make the question more specific: Given the following mysql table containing all matches played so far: table match_result match_id int pk match_start datetime duration int (match length in seconds) blue_defense int fk to table player blue_attack int fk to table player red_defense int fk to table player red_attack int fk to table player score_blue int score_red int How would you write a function predictResult(blueDef, blueAtk, redDef, redAtk) {...} to estimate the outcome as closely as possible, executing any sql, doing calculations or using external libraries?

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• Using ARIMA to model and forecast stock prices using user-friendly stats program

  - by Brian

  Hi people, Can anyone please offer some insight into this for me? I'm coming from a functional magnetic resonance imaging research background where I analyzed a lot of time series data, and I'd like to analyze the time series of stock prices (or returns) by: 1) modeling a successful stock in a particular market sector and then cross-correlating the time series of this historically successful stock with that of other newer stocks to look for significant relationships; 2) model a stock's price time series and use forecasting (e.g., exponential smoothing) to predict future values of it. I'd like to use non-linear modeling methods (ARIMA and ARCH) to do this. Several questions: How often do ARIMA and ARCH modeling methods (given that the individual who implements them does so accurately) actually fit the stock time series data they target, and what is the optimal fit I can expect? Is the extent to which this model fits the data commensurate with the extent to which it predicts this stock time series' future values? Rather than randomly selecting stocks to compare or model, if profit is my goal, what is an efficient approach, if any, to selecting the stocks I'm going to analyze? Which stats program is the most user-friendly for this? Any thoughts on this would be great and would go a long way for me. Thanks, Brian

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