R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts – NYTimes.com
OSS SAS alternative: “R is..a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. But R has also quickly found a following because statisticians, engineers and scientists without computer programming skills find it easy to use. “R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.” It is also free. R is an open-source program, and its popularity reflects a shift in the type of software used inside corporations.”
The StreamBase Event Processing Blog: Case Study: BlueCrest Capital Management
Event Processing case study from Streambase: “In 2007, just as the credit crisis was breaking, BlueCrest set up a team..to develop a state-of-the-art market data management system. BlueCrest trades 24 hours a day, six days a week, across multiple markets using a wide range of data feeds. As markets move day to day and week to week, BlueCrest needed to rapidly reconfigure data feed connections and plug the data into real-time models while optimizing management of the necessary data feed licenses. BlueCrest devised a solution that combines the rapid time-to-market event processing capabilities of StreamBase with the instant storage and retrieval functionality of Vertica. It provides a total market data management solution that is able to meet the needs of low-latency trading and the demanding innovation of their quantitative analysts to achieve greater profitability.”
Nine BI Megatrends for 2009 > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions
Event Processing as BI Megatrend…sounds so 80’s, nonetheless…”Event processing opens new analytical possibilities. Before the financial services industry cratered, that was where most of the work in event or stream processing could be found. Now, while algorithmic trading and other processes still consume this technology, the spotlight shines brighter on emergent applications in healthcare, telecommunications, government intelligence, IT management, gaming and Web analytics. Network events, sensor data from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and surveillance data are among the new sources. Capturing events, correlating them and presenting the results of analytics in dashboards can potentially give organizations more actionable insight than traditional BI tools provide. However, to gain full business value, event processing must be deployed in an integrated fashion with not only BI and data warehouse systems but also process management and service-oriented architecture.”
Joseph E. Stiglitz on capitalist fools: vanityfair.com
Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz on 5 key contributing factors to the economic crisis. Easy read, important to understand how we got here. “There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history—a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it’s crucial to get the history straight. What were the critical decisions that led to the crisis? Mistakes were made at every fork in the road—we had what engineers call a “system failure,” when not a single decision but a cascade of decisions produce a tragic result. Let’s look at five key moments.”
The financial crisis: Who’s really to blame? – Dec. 8, 2008
a keep up with cocktail party/coffee shop conversations version of “What happened in 2008? Chances are you can’t succinctly express your views on that complex question. But the American public will settle on one of four catch phrases over the next several months. Whatever bit of conventional wisdom wins out will have an impact on the economy. The contenders are as follows…”
