The State of the Blog, v.03

If it's December, then it must be time to...

Celebrate. Commemorate. Conjugate...?

Well, maybe not conjugate, but it's the THIRD anniversary of this blog! I'm somewhat e-excited about this. I can honestly say I never expected it to go this long, or have so many entries. Here's the quick recap, from the 1st blog The Final Frontier to the still strangely most popular one Why, 2K to the one that slipped through the proverbial e-cracks A Red Letter Day In History.

The unifying theme of this blog is data. A casual observer might not notice this, but I did say "unifying theme". So, if you're looking for the golden data nuggets of wisdom check out the twitters or websites of my good e-buddies Kirk Borne Ph.D. Lee Baker Ph.D. or Gregory Piatesky Ph.D.

For  those who think my data science is a bit sexist, please check out my good e-buddies Diego Kuonen Ph.D., Carla Gentry and Carol Lynn Curchoe Ph.D.

(In the FWIW column, these folks are some of my followers on Twitter). Not to drop names, of course! :)

In any event, I did drop a few names there, so I should probably clarify things a bit. Some of my more recent posts have been of a somewhat personal nature, and not much data was presented. For the (I'm sure this is a very small percentage of my) readers who were expecting some data in those posts, I apologize.

In actuality, most of my "data" occurs on Twitter, with some on Pinterest. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure what my most impactful social medium is these days... Twitter is the easiest, Blogspot is the deepest, and Pinterest is the broadest. And, most importantly, it's hobby, so I'm not paying for analytics!

I suppose I enjoy blogging the most, as it is the most creative. Pinterest is lots of fun- and easy. However, there's very little original content. Twitter is fun, but once again, not much original content, as I'm generally more of a repeater rather than an original content contributor. Blogger... this is my "original" e-home. To quote AC/DC- "No stop signs, speed limits...." Not that I'm an AC/DC fan.

An update on the SUL (Secret Underground Lair)....

This is my corner of the SUL. If you're curious, the two leftmost PCs are Win7 machines, and the other is an HP workstation running Ubuntu 12.10, I think. There's actually a 4th screen (which is off camera to the right) for Raspberry Pi use and testing), and there are two additional PCs- one of which is another Win7 box, and the last one is an offline XP machine. In fairly big SUL news, we've been getting rid of old tech boxes (those of the cardboard variety, to clarify), and have reclaimed nearly a square meter of floor space.

That's all for now. Oh... still hoping someone in Antarctica will pick this up!

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.

The Rabbit Hole

In my Google+ feed the other day I found a link to a hot-off-the-e-press blog that my e-buddy Lee Baker (that's DR Lee to those of you who are not in our intimate Google+ circle!) had just published. Lee, who is coiffed similarly to Thor, is a data scientist and CEO of Chi-Squared Innovations, and we became connected either through a group in LinkedIn or one or both of our blogs. Lee's latest blog is a delightful romp through data types, and I highly encourage all to read it (*spoiler alert: there's a quiz at the end. If you don't want to take the quiz, don't read this spoiler alert). Yours truly, on the other hand, does not have Thor-like hair, and is also not a data scientist. However, as we're both interested in data....

*Warning: Rabbit hole 2m ahead.

Lee's blogs to date have included very nice infographics, presented at the speed of "Git along, little dogie," rather than, "A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!" He got me on this one, though. Please note: he's the data scientist; I'm just a regular guy trying to build my version of 42.

*Warning: You are standing on the Rabbit Hole, which has a ©Acme Industries tag.

...and down the rabbit hole we go. I'm reading the blog, and it is making sense and is easily digestible. I get to the bottom of the first infographic, and there is a row called "MEANINGFUL ZERO" Now, I may not be a data scientist, or have any training in statistics or quantitative analysis, but I do know a thing or two about Google, Bing, boolean search and the interwebz. I searched for at least fifteen minutes, which as everyone knows is a long time in internet time. My best attempts yielded...

"Nothing." "Result not found." "Term not understood." "Are you kidding?" "Everyone knows that...."

Ha ha- some of those results are quite obviously fabricated, but the lack of results are what prompted me to name this The Rabbit Hole. Being a moderately resourceful dude, I took some stabs in the dark. First, I tried stastics.com; cool site, but my search returned "No results found".Another stab in the dark- data.com. This site is the home of Salesforce, one of the dominant players in CRM software. I tried WolframAlpha, the publishers of Mathematica, and turned up nothing  *ahem* meaningful. Mathwords.com had nothing, but they did have a Google search widget, so I typed in "meaningful+zero". You guessed it- zilch. I tried actuary.org, home to the American Academy of Actuaries- no luck. A stab in the dark... I searched "data analysis vocabulary" in Google and got a hit on quizlet.com, which had twenty-seven DA terms... none of which was meaningfiul zero.  As a last resort, I tried about.com, and got nothing. 

I think I will, at this point, consult with a human or multiple humans.

There are no data updates; this entire blog has been dedicated to data and it's acquisition. I feel very much like Johnny 5 at this point: Need INPUT!"  Well, correction to that: we are M-270 on the Outback!

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and managment so you don't have to.