From CIO To Chief Digital Officer – Chuck’s Blog “In the new digital information economy, who leads the transformation from the previous business model to the new one?” PiCloud | Cloud Computing. Simplified. Looks interesting: “Re-inventing the Cloud: Leverage the power of the cloud with only 3 lines of [Python] code. Leave the load balancing, auto scaling, and server management to us.” IBM’s Watson is changing careers – Big Tech – Fortune Tech Watson must’ve blown through his winnings. He’s getting a job: “IBM plans to sell Watson as a cloud-based service companies can tap to find answers in disparate data sets. For example, a financial services firm could use it to sift through news reports and market research to find likely acquisition targets. Or a healthcare company could utilize Watson to process medical articles, prior cases and even a patient’s own medical history and identify the most likely diagnosis and best course of treatment.” Fungi Discovered In The Amazon Will Eat Your Plastic | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation “The mission was to allow “students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way.” The group searched for plants, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue. As it turns out, they brought back a fungus new to science with a voracious appetite for a global waste problem: polyurethane.”
My latest posts on Active Information. It’d be fair to say I’m more focused on raising ideas than hit counts.
Software Architect Lessons from Amazon’s DynamoDB
I took a bit of a tangent (shocking!) on the DynamoDB announcement, pulling lessons from Werner Vogels’ recounting of the DynamoDB genesis that every software architect should embrace.
More data, more collaboration, more power.
In another showing of me being me, I ferret out a counter intuitive idea on the human change of data-driven decision-making.
The official excerpt:
“When you think about the human resistance in adopting data-driven decision-making, or really any change, at the root is the me question. What is the impact on my job, my span of control, my future opportunities?”
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The Rise of the New Groupthink – NYTimes.com
“Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
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The Synergist | Matthew E. May
“Sounds like a Marvel Comics action hero, right? But having launched countless creative teams, I know from experience that when they’re in the throes of team hell, they in fact need a hero: someone with a special talent for being at once the glue and the grease that keeps the machine working at peak effectiveness. Someone who can lead them to predictable success.
That’s where the “Synergist” comes in.”
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The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the
The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Enterprise Hadoop: Big data processing made easier | Business Intelligence – InfoWorld
Review of test drive: Amazon, Cloudera, Hortonworks, IBM and MapR
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Martin Fowler on need to mix and match db persistence models and programming models. Follow the link for PolyglotPersistence.
“This is part of the argument for PolyglotPersistence – use aggregate-oriented databases when you are manipulating clear aggregates (especially if you are running on a cluster) and use relational databases (or a graph database) when you want to manipulate that data in different ways.”
This week on Active Information, I expanded on a random thought that popped into my head while watching the Patriots-Broncos game. Go Pats!
Football and Weekend Data Warriors
This week on Active Information I riffed on a WSJ article that riffed on Daniel Kahneman‘s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which led me into the data scientist shortage and analytics-as-a-service.
Alas, as I didn’t lead with any of those buzzwords in the title, the post is sadly under-read. Anyway, the link and blurb follow. I’m off to hone my buzzword skills.
Quite possibly, we will find ourselves in a “there’s an algorithm to decide that” world. But, until the talent shortage is stemmed, we’ll need to get our rationality delivered.
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Event Processing at the Large Hadron Collider | Complex Event Processing (CEP) Blog
Paul Vincent on events and Higgs boson:
“Earlier this month Dr Neil Geddes gave a fascinating presentation at the BCS on “Data Processing at the Large Hadron Collider”, describing how LHC experiments create 1 Billion events per sec of which they can record in detail 100 events per sec.”
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Predicts 2012: Information Infrastructure and Big Data
I would edit this to be: “Make event-driven architecture and complex event processing first-class citizens”, but I can live with the following from Gartner:
“Make event-driven architecture and complex event processing first-class citizens in data modeling work and metadata repositories.”
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Disruptions: Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone – NYTimes.com
I get my best ideas during dog walks… not to mention, some really out there ideas as well.
“Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and the author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” said in a phone interview that our brains often needed to become inattentive to figure out complex issues. He said his book discussed an area of the brain scientists call “the default network” that was active only when the rest of the brain was inactive — in other words, when we were daydreaming.
Letting the mind wander activates the default network, he said, and allows our brains to solve problems that most likely can’t be solved during a game of Angry Birds.”

