June | 2013 | Kieran O' Callaghan

Archive | June, 2013

Big data is becoming bigger than Texas!!

I’ve been meaning to write this one for quite some time and maybe by writing about it, i can forget about it.

Let me explain, i was going to write about ‘Big data’ after hearing about it through Craig Rispin’s mentoring group.

In case your not familiar with this term, ‘Big data‘ is all about making sense of data sets so large that before could not be processed with previous technology. And now, not only that, this data can be visualized, its quite amazing stuff, some examples would be.

In America, Target know when women are pregnant before they do, one guy rang Target to tell them his daughter was only sixteen, turns out she was pregnant. Target have a stragety of getting pregnant women into their store three times before they have the baby, so they like to get a jump start on things.

Someone is pregnant in there, can you see it?

But dont believe me, check out David Mc Candless, you might like to check out his ‘The meaning of colours in cultures’ or ‘The consensus of the 10 top top 100 book charts’

Check out the full list here

Big data

Law firms are now mining big data to understand aspects of law they could before never imagined, mining without getting your fingers dirty, nice!

Not the kind of mining i’m on about

James Surowiecki wrote a book about ‘The wisdom of crowds’,

The opening anecdote relates Francis Galton‘s surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged (the average was closer to the ox’s true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts

If you can measure the crowd, your on to something.

In England, they can track crowds from helicopters to understand what people are doing, where to put services and how better to serve the tax payer, big brother is watching and he’s watching what you ‘Like’ on Face book too, but thats another story…

DNA

This is beautiful people, one of the the application for this in medicine

Just think, there are:

19, 599 genes in your body (mine too)

Genes make up your gnome

Proteins in your body make up your proteome (which is called ‘proteomics’)

200,000 types of RNA are produced in your body

Each RNA strand encodes 200,000 proteins

Genes in themselves dont make us who we are, instead they produce proteins, that are dispatched in the body to the genetic will

Its a geometric expansion that gives you 40 billion proteins, and this is why you need big data, there are hundreds of different varieties of proteins in a different cell.

Mapping the gnome consumed terabytes, proteomics will easily reach petabytes (ouch, that a lot of bytes, more than a mosquito in your tent on a summers night!!)

This of this, for hundreds of years, the progress of medicine was restrained by the lack of information. Today, we have so much data, not enough information, the amount of data at the molecular level is beyond the analytical capabilities, and now this data can be turned into knowledge.

And it continues, Epigenetics is the mechanism which the environment alters the behaviour of our genes, it involves a process known as methylation, which occurs when a chemical known as ‘Methyl’ which floats around inside of our cellsattaces to our DNA.

When it does, it turns down the activity of a gene and blocks it from making a particular version of protein in our genes.

All sorts of things can affect DNA methylation in our bodies, such as:

Diet

Illness

Aging

Chemicals in the environment

Smoking

Drugs and medicines

Big data can make sense of it all!!!

And this morning i read how the police are able to use SAP big data analysis of mobile phone tower information in conjunction with reported crimes and come up a list of one or two possible suspects, you wouldn’t need a police force, just one guy to go out and arrest the gulty guy as soon as he did something!

Oh, the savings to the tax payers!

There is no point running criminals, just give up!

The Australian Tax office was using this technology years ago to prove cases of fraud without any proof

And maybe i can forget all about Big data, but i’d seriously doubt it…

Tags: Big data, Craig Rispin, David Mc Candless, Wisdom of crowds, wisom of crowds

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Everything is a remix or is it?

3 Jun

So, i am writing a novel, it’s a side project i started last year, i attended the Sydney writers festival last week and i have been inspired to continue and finish the project.

It’s basically a novel of ideas

Woodie Guthrie once said

“The words are the important thing. Don’t worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you’ve got a new tune.”

Doesn’t sound like plagiarism, now does it?

Woodie had a lot to say

Everything is an idea, ideas are based on previous ideas, the words we say are ideas, they have histories, some words came from other languages, the study of the history of words is called ‘Etymology‘, the letters we use to make up those words have in-depth histories too, the English alphabet is based on previous other alphabets, the letters even have different frequencies.

Everything is depended on the previous idea, like stepping stones, each one is important to traverse the stream.

A bunch of stones in a line or is it?

In China they say

‘You pave the rode your children walk’

A, came before B, and A + B = C, sounds simple enough…

1, comes before 2, 0 comes before both of them and it was invented after 1 and 2, and 0 is the most important number, it enables up to calculate infinitely large and small numbers

0 was independently invented 3 times, firstly by the Babylonians in the 3rd century BC, Mayans in the 4th century, Indians in the 5th century, Cambodia in the 7th century, China, Islamic countries and tally ho and lastly, here we come riding into Europe in the 12th century, ok 0 is an exception to the rule, we are learning something here, the rule and the exception to the rule.

It is said once a problem is solved in the world, it’s also solved somewhere else independently, but it needs to be solved by someone somewhere.

Knowledge is layered, the bottom layers need the top layers, if they didn’t have them they wouldn’t be on top.

Onions have layers too, when you strip all the layers off, all your left with is the universe.

Everything is a remix, but first you have to copy, transform and combine, The Grey album being a famous example where the Beetles ‘White album’ was mixed with Jay-Z’s ‘Black album’ and what happens when you mix white and black, have a listen

I went to a presentation a few weeks ago by Craig Rispin, he was saying a lot of new advice was old advice rehashed, i was introduced to ‘Consultant debunked unit‘, more and more, people are turning to evidence based consulting, question everything, assume little.

Rehash:

to rework, reuse, or make over (old or already used material)

something consisting of old, reworked, or reused material

There is so much borrowing going on, did you ever knock on your neighbours door looking for a cup of sugar, milk or just some good old fashioned free love? No, the 60’s are over, too soon if you ask me!

Every 2 days we create as much content as we did in 2003

A picture is worth a thousand words, once something is printed it fades, but i hope this collection of thoughts and words to print, any font will do!

So saying this, what I’m writing is going to be a hybrid of the previous stuff i have read and written in my life, from this ‘word’ to shopping lists, past and future to sick notes in school, put in such a way as to seem new, and hopefully that means I’ll get paid and i can keep all the money for myself, live on a hill and look down on people, in fact i grew up on a hill or maybe I’ll just go home?

Maybe i will see and think of home and not the home i make for myself in between these moments in a new way and that might make all the difference?

You might be thinking, what happened at the writers festival for my creative revival?

Well i saw these two poets perform and everyone that heard them was blown away, take a look.

Kate Tempest