Big Data and Cloud Computing

In order to write a tutorial about classification, it was necessary to find an example that was broad enough that it would need to be sub-divided. Since I actually care about whether you remember this stuff, it needed to be something that a lot of people like and would relate to. And since I have a lot of international subscribers, it needed to be cross-cultural as well. So what is universal, cross-cultural, and dearly loved? Beer. There’s American beer, Mexican beer, German beer, Belgian beer….hell, even the Japanese make beer. There’s IPA, Lager, Pilsner. Dark, light, stout. There are so many ways to classify beer that we could spend weeks doing it (so naturally, I did). Now, before you can classify anything you have to determine the characteristics that you’re going to use. For beer you could use country of origin, color, alcohol content, type of hops, type of yeast, and calorie count among other things. That way you could sort based on any of those characteristics t...

n today’s world of big data and the internet of things, it is common for a business to find itself sitting atop a mountain of data. Possessing it is one thing, but leveraging it for data driven decision making is a much different ball game. Gut-feelings and institutionalized heuristics have traditionally been used to guide development of protocol and decision making, but the world of artificial intelligence and big disparate data is changing that. Everyone is trying to make sense of, and extract value from, their data. Those that are not will be left behind. This challenge (and opportunity) is not limited to certain industries. For instance, most companies are exploring how they can use data to make better marketing decisions, most retailers are using data to optimize their supply chains, and most manufacturers are using data for quality control of final products.  Almost all business problems (with surrounding data) can be broken down into two categories: supervised and unsu...

Amazon Web Services AWS is primarily Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). AWS has a wide scope of different services allowing you to configure entire complex, powerful, secure, scalable and high-available IT environments consisting of private networks, gateways, load balancers, servers, storage, databases, monitoring etc., all virtual and to be set up through configuration wizards or scripting. Moreover AWS provides advanced services like containers, serverless computing, machine learning, message queuing etc. giving you a headstart with those technologies without the upfront platform investments. The scope of AWS can range from hosting a single simple solution like a web server, to a virtual high available hosting facility, fully replacing physical on-site hosting facilities. Also hybrid solutions where AWS acts as a cloud-extension of on-premises IT are possible. Amazon Web Services is one of the leaders in IaaS/PaaS. AWS has set the standard...

Technology is advancing so rapidly that we will experience radical changes in society not only in our lifetimes but in the coming years. We have already begun to see ways in which computing, sensors, artificial intelligence and genomics are reshaping entire industries and our daily lives. As we undergo this rapid change, many of the old assumptions that we have relied will no longer apply. Technology is creating a new set of rules that will change our very existence. Here are six: 1. Anything that can be digitized will be. Digitization began with words and numbers. Then we moved into games and later into rich media, such as movies, images and music. We also moved complex business functions, medical tools, industrial processes and transportation systems into the digital realm. Now, we are digitizing everything about our daily lives: our actions, words and thoughts. Inexpensive DNA sequencing and machine learning are unlocking the keys to the systems of life. Cheap,...

In my experience, there are two types of companies when it comes to big data: those who don’t want anything to do with it (because they think it’s for somebody else) and those who desperately want to implement, but don’t know where to start.   Regardless of where your company falls on that spectrum, there are several attitudes I encounter regularly that can kill a big data project faster than anything else.  Identifying and neutralizing these attitudes is key to getting a project off the ground and into implementation. We are not a data company. Every company is now a data company, and you’d better wake up to that fact. Data is everywhere and a part of everything, and I cannot think of a single industry or business that couldn’t benefit from understanding more about their customers, their sales cycles, demand for their product or service or their production inefficiencies. Just because you don’t  yet  know how big data could benefit your company, doesn’t mean...

var punycode = new function Punycode() { // This object converts to and from puny-code used in IDN // // punycode.ToASCII ( domain ) // // Returns a puny coded representation of "domain". // It only converts the part of the domain name that // has non ASCII characters. I.e. it dosent matter if // you call it with a domain that already is in ASCII. // // punycode.ToUnicode (domain) // // Converts a puny-coded domain name to unicode. // It only converts the puny-coded parts of the domain name. // I.e. it dosent matter if you call it on a string // that already has been converted to unicode. // // this.utf16 = { // The utf16-class is necessary to convert from javascripts  internal character representation to unicode and back. decode:function(input){ var output = [], i=0, len=input.length,value,extra; while (i < len) { value = input.charCodeAt(i++)...