Tag: business

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Cloud Education Innovation Network Reading

Latest read: Disruptive Possibilities

There can be no doubt today that Big Data has changed everything. Jeffery Needham has written a great book Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes Everything. Its all about the impact of Hadoop in the cloud as the ultimate computing platform.

Disruptive Possibilities: How Big Data Changes EverythingI was very pleased reading his work when I found his personal story at the end regarding the application of Hadoop in neuroscience as a method to address Sturge-Weber Syndrome. We know it as having a port wine stain on your face.

His story made me appreciate his desire to throw Hadoop at the datasets that may one day reveal a cure for this syndrome. I am amazed at how he described reteaching himself not only how to walk down a hallway, but train his body to hit a baseball after losing vision in his right eye.

My favorite segment of Disruptive Possibilities is chapter five: When Clouds meet Big Data. Needham also makes a very easy read in chapters one to four where he lays the foundation based upon his deep experiences with Hadoop. And yes you can run Hadoop off laptops found in a dumpster.

There is much to learn in university circles about the impact of Disruptive Possibilities and Hadoop.  Worry not its not the computing or research units that I am thinking about but rather HR, Admissions and just about every other campus unit that would benefit from moving their data into a Hadoop cluster in order to data mine their future.

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Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Network Reading Technology

Latest read: Online Payments Risk Management

Online Payments Risk Management is certainly a hot topic. The 2013 holiday data breach at Target and more recently, a new large data breach at Home Depot the need for organizations to understand Online Payments Risk Management is more important today truly than ever before.
online payments risk managementI think there is no better way than for companies and payment card providers to step back and acknowledge many “security” measures are not effective today in combating cyber crime.

Ohad Samet’s book is a great introduction to payment risk management from multiple angles and can be a good base document to build upon in bringing PCI compliance efforts to online payment websites.

It may even be interesting to see how Samet positions of Loss over Fraud.  The implications can be rather surprising.

Samet has organized this book into logical sections regarding approaches and the use of analytics to optimize tracking losses while also addressing the role of the organization and the people implementing secure transactions.  Regardless of its 2013 publication, section 3 on Tools and Methods provides solid, industry tested solutions that should be reviewed annually.

That said its time to roll up your sleeves and begin protecting consumers.

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Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Design Education Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest read: Numbers Rule Your World

I have enjoyed Kaiser Fung‘s blog JunkCharts for some time. He provides insight regarding data visualizations. His book Numbers Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on Everything You Do reveals how statistics and data mining find insights too good to pass up. Numbers make good stories even more compelling.

Numbers Rule Your WorldKaiser Fung takes an excellent approach to confirming that data analysis is now key to improving outcomes and discovering insights.

Fung outlines the use of big data analysis to solve five problems:

1. Fast Passes/Slow Merges: managing traffic patterns by the Minnesota DOT. This chapter reveals how frustrating statisticians can become when confronting politicians who ignore data.

2. Bagged Spinach/Bad Score tracked a deadly E. coli outbreak that caused three deaths across 23 states.

3. Item Bank/Risk Pool is a fascinating chapter about Florida insurance policies. Hurricane seasons come and go and yet an established city mayor and established businessman could not maintain an ongoing insurance business even with years of experience in state government. I found this chapter interesting to discover how the state games the insurance system say for say….Hurricane Wilma. For Higher Education this chapter also reveals Admissions related stories that are most interesting when compared to hospital billing. Fung also brings into focus the Golden Rule lawsuit that successfully charged discrimination against minority applicants in the insurance industry.

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Latest read: The Art of Capacity Planning

The impact of cloud computing on O’Reilly’s 2008 Art of Capacity Planning has shifted quite a bit to say the least. Its still a great resource and well worth the read for any web administrator, manager or director.

The Art of Capacity PlanningMy interest in revisiting is remembering Chapter 4: Predicting Trends. This touches two important factors today: cloud and procurement.

While in 2008 it was possible to ramp up a cloud, today a very high capacity cloud can be deployed in less than 10 minutes.

At the time of the book’s publication (2008) AWS pricing looked competitive. Yet today those prices are considered somewhat excessively high.

The Art of Capacity Planning now is all looking at cloud solutions by Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure has kept Amazon’s EC2 busy in releasing new services and even more aggressive pricing models. Under AWS users get free access to CentOS, LAMP stack, Git and WordPress.

But the Art of Capacity Planning touches on the very important component of Procurement. Procurement and Cloud contract solutions taught by UCLA has been very beneficial to my cloud projects.

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Design Education Innovation Reading

Think like a freak

think like a freakHow many options do soccer players have before a penalty kick?

Think like a Freak, out TODAY from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner is really, really enjoyable. I would stop just about everything (In a perfect world) to read this cover to cover. More to come….