English: Kaggle logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ernest Cline’s science fiction novel “Ready Player One,” is about gamers. They compete in an online simulation for a fortune in prize money. The world watches as contestants leapfrog each other on a leader board, jostling for position. Kaggle, a platform for data science (or big data) competitions, works in a very similar way. Its one-line mission statement reads: “we’re making data science a sport.”

Deloitte, Ford, Facebook and Wikipedia are some of the companies that use Kaggle. In a typical competition, an organisation posts some historical data to the site and asks a question. How many of our clients will switch insurers before the end of their policy? Which posts will a WordPress user like? What is the likelihood that an HIV patient’s infection will become less severe? The challenge is to answer the question with the most accurate predictive model.

Crowdsourcing

Concert Crowd (Osheaga 2009) – 30000 waiting for Coldplay (Photo credit: Anirudh Koul)

Submissions are crowdsourced from among the platform’s more than 40,000 data scientists. Some work in teams, others go it alone. While you might think this sort of work would suit the talents of actuaries, they make up only 1.2% of Kaggle’s members. Contributors come from a range of fields: they can be statisticians, biologists, hobbyists or philosophers. The largest group, 15.6%, are computer scientists.

Usually the host organisation offers a reward, often financial, often significant, for the best forecast, measured against a solution file. The contestants don’t see this file until after the competition deadline and, as always, the judges’ decision is final.

Ready Player One (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While Cline’s “Ready Player One” is set in a dystopian world, Kaggle is aiming for something quite different. The multi-stage Heritage Health Prize, worth $3m, will run until April next year. US health care provider, the Heritage Provider Network (HPN), gave the website’s members anonymised claims data. HPN asked the data scientists to predict which patients would be admitted to hospital within the next year. Its goal is to identify and treat people before they need in-patient treatment.

Participants can submit updated models, as often as every day, while a competition is open. The league table ranks solutions in real time. A competitor might be at the top with a month to go but several places behind a week later – because more accurate solutions have been uploaded. That means the data scientists are motivated to continue to build even better predictive models, right up to the deadline. This is one reason why Kaggle has always crowdsourced better solutions than pre-existing benchmarks.

Big Data

Many people are still not sure what big data is. That’s partly because the term is just misleading. Not all sets of “big data” are actually that big (Kaggle has made significant advances with megabytes of data). It’s much more useful to talk about data science: the process of extracting value from datasets. Kaggle competitions are very effective examples of data science.

Follow @tonygallacher

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Related articles

• How Many Data Scientists Are There? (r-bloggers.com)
• Why becoming a data scientist might be easier than you think (gigaom.com)
• Using R in production: industry experts share their experiences (revolutionanalytics.com)
• Benchmark Solutions Announces Bond Trade Price Challenge via Kaggle Competition (prweb.com)

Andy Miah (Photo credit: Andy Miah)

I’m really excited about a talk I’m organising called “Was London 2012 the First Socialympics?  for Social Media Week Glasgow. It’s on 25th September 2012 at Glasgow Science Centre. Prof. Andy Miah, Director of the Creative Futures Institute at the University of the West of Scotland and co-author of “The Olympics: the Basics” will speak about the impact of Social Media on the London 2012 Olympics. You can register for this great free talk here.

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking a bit about whether or not online networks have broadened our view of the games…

Olympics 2012: this Time it’s Personal

Source: Creative Commons / Flickr / Jon Curnow

Social media has changed the way we experience the Olympics. London 2012 was online and mobile, pinned and blogged, tweeted and re-tweeted, hash-tagged and shared. The BBC broadcast the events on 24 website channels. That meant we could curate a personal view of the games, by choosing the sports and competitors we wanted to follow.

In total, the BBC streamed 2.8 petabytes of Olympic coverage in the UK. In the United States, the NBC television network teamed up with YouTube to deliver live video to US residents from its Olympic site. (Ironically the broadcaster was heavily criticised for not showing the opening ceremony live, in parallel with related Twitter traffic.)

Many athletes, not just the most popular, appreciate their fans and engage with them through services like Twitter. A study, published in the International Journal of Sport Communication in 2010, categorised the nature of a sample of their tweets. The research found that while only 5% of the messages were “promotional in nature”, 34% were direct communication with fans and other competitors.

One of the great things about international sport is that it can absorb you in the progress of an underdog or an outlier. For example, Italian Kayak Sprinter Josefa Idem lives an interesting story. A mother of two, she is forty-eight this September. This is her 8th Olympiad. In total she has won 5 medals, for both West Germany and Italy.

Josefa Idem (Photo credit: Giuseppe Nicoloro)

It wasn’t only those who made the finals that posted good commentary. Andrew Steele, a British 400m runner who competed in China 2008, didn’t make it this year, after suffering from the Epstein-Barr virus. He still wrote and tweeted about the events for some 3,300 followers.

Facebook Explore 2012 was the leading social network’s answer to the question “who should I follow?”. Through the portal, you could find pages for national teams, sports and participants. It wasn’t bad. It was OK but there were links to pages for less than 600 athletes. Over 10,000 participated in the Olympics, another 4,000 competed in the Paralympics. If athletes use social media to the same extent as the general population, quite a few more than 600 must be Facebook users.

Similarly, only around 60 out of more than 200 nations were represented on the Facebook Explore 2012 site. It has 3.7 million users who ‘like’ the Olympic Games. Many of them may have been looking for a more nuanced perspective on the events than they could access through Facebook’s portal.

Olympics on NBC (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

NBC’s Twitter Tracker also provided a way to personalise your view of the events. Its stories were a real-time compilation of tweets that discussed a specific contestant, sport or trending topic. In many respects it was a useful tool. The main page featured a beautiful montage of images to represent (some of) the sports. Below that there was a list of trending topics. The site kept track of the total number of Olympic-related tweets and what NBC called the TPM (Tweets per Minute) rate. On the first day of action, those numbers were 14 million and 1,800 respectively.

Many of us did enjoy a better experience of these Olympic games with social media, but our perception of who to follow was still limited by gatekeepers like the BBC, NBC and Facebook. There’s plenty of scope for social discovery tools to improve, ahead of the Winter Games, Sochi 2014, in Russia.

To find out about the impact of social media on the London 2012 Olympics, register for Prof. Andy Miah’s talk, “Was London 2012 the First Socialympics?” It will be held at Glasgow Science Centre on 25 September at 7.30pm. This article was first posted on the Social Media Week Glasgow site.

Follow @tonygallacher

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Related articles

• A social media Games to remember (bbc.co.uk)
• What will the Olympics do for higher education in the UK? (guardian.co.uk)
• Interview: Andy Miah, professor (scotsman.com)

1. It’s Easy to Use

Nuage really understand gesture-based interaction with touch screens, so Task makes it much easier to organise your to-do list. They have taken the task app genre (of which there are many examples), reduced clutter and made it faster to use.

Each action is triggered by a different gesture:

• Create a new task by pinching two existing tasks apart.
• Mark a task complete by swiping across it to the right.
• Delete a task by swiping across it to the left.
• Press on a task to edit it
• Do a long press on a task to change it’s position in the list

2. It’s Easy to Work With

The app shows today’s items, in chronological order, starting from the bottom of the screen. So, in a way, previous tasks are off screen below the device and future tasks off screen above it. You can scroll up and down through current and planned tasks.

If you pull up from the bottom of your timeline, you can access tasks you completed on previous days. If you pull down from the top, you can scroll through tasks planned for subsequent days. This is another example of Nuage Touch assigning every possible gesture to a different action. It simplifies the display.

Pressing on an item lets you edit its details, including the day its due and the task description. A long press on a task ‘selects’ it and you can move it up or down the list.

3. It Doesn’t Know What Clutter is

There are only four things that define a task. You can enter a description, the day it is due, optionally highlight it as important, and set a reminder if you want. That’s it.

You only have one task list and there are no tags, categories or other clutter.

4. It Has Optional Reminders

You can set a day and time to be reminded of a task, either when you create or edit it, but it’s optional. The calendar appears and disappears with a nice concertina effect.

5. It’s Quick to Learn

When you first use Task there are a few help screens to get you started. This approach works really well. The app also comes with some tasks created. These explain how it works e.g. “pinch apart to create” and “this task is important”. The latter has a little yellow highlight bar, on the right hand side.

It takes about a minute of playing to become a Task power user.

Get Started

You can download Task from Apple’s App Store here for £0.69 ($0.99). The YouTube video below shows Task in action.

Follow @tonygallacher

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Now, if someone asks, you’ll genuinely think you’ve never heard of Some_Obscure_Site_I’ll_Never_Use_Again.com, let alone remember that you created a login for it. Sound familiar?

If it does, your password could be in the hands of hackers and they could be trying to log in to your more important accounts, like your email. Recent breaches at Nvidia (to steal passwords), LinkedIn (to steal 6.5m passwords) and  Yahoo Voices (to steal 450,000 usernames and passwords) are testament to that. Most people are guilty of using the same password on more than one site. It’s a risky practice.

LastPass

LastPass is a web browser add-on that generates secure passwords for all your sites and remembers them for you. There are versions for most browsers on PC, Linux and Mac machines, including Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. You can download it at lastpass.com where, if you click the button highlighted in blue above, LastPass will even recommend the right version to match your computer and browser.

How it Works

After you install LastPass, a red and white icon is added to the top right of your browser. You click that to log into LastPass. From then on, each time you log into a site LastPass will ask if you want it to remember your login details. The next time you visit that site it can automatically log you in.

If LastPass spots that you are registering with a new site, it will offer to generate a secure password. If you accept, it will populate the password and ‘retype password’ fields with the new password for you. It can do this when you change your password on a site it’s already remembering for you as well.

The LastPass Vault

Within a week or two of web browsing, you’ll add most of the sites you use regularly to LastPass. You’ll be amazed how many different logins you are juggling. It’s quite satisfying to collect all of them in one place.

The LastPass Vault, accessed from the LastPass icon at the top right of your browser, maintains a list of all your sites. You can edit the details for a site, view your passwords or delete a site. You can also securely share the login details for a site with other LastPass users.

Security

LastPass uses the AES-256 standard to encrypt and decrypt your data (your usernames, sites, passwords etc). This is often referred to as “government-level” or “military-grade” encryption because it’s used to secure top secret information. Imagine a big paragraph of nonsense characters. That’s what your data looks like once it’s encrypted.

This encryption happens on your computer, before your data is sent to LastPass’s server. You can log into LastPass on other computers and access the login credentials for your various websites because LastPass has a copy of your encrypted data.

Offline Access

Your encrypted data is also stored on your computer; so if the LastPass site ever goes down, or your internet connection fails, you can still log into last pass and access your usernames and passwords.

If you want to make sure you have a backup of all your site and password information offline, download a program called LastPass Pocket. Most people have a few spare USB drives these days. You can install LastPass Pocket on one of those, along with an encrypted copy of your data. The program lets you view your sites and credentials in a similar way to LastPass Vault.

Form Filling

LastPass also has a form filling feature. You can, for example, store your billing address and credit card information. When you need it for an online checkout, LastPass can populate the form fields for you, using your stored billing information.

If you sign up for LastPass premium, you can use LastPass on iOS and Android mobile devices. It costs about £1 a month.

Getting Started

This short YouTube video will help you get started with LastPass:

Follow @tonygallacher

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Related articles

• News: LastPass now supports Photo and Audio attachments (ilounge.com)
• How to Securely Share a Password with Someone Using LastPass [Passwords] (lifehacker.com)
• LastPass Review (pcmag.com)

When you embed a tweet you add it to the code of a web page. It’s very similar to including a YouTube video in your page.

I'm looking forward to a long lie tomorrow morning #leapsecond

—
Tony Gallacher (@tonygallacher) June 29, 2012

When you view the detail of a Tweet, in some Twitter mobile apps or on the Twitter site, you can click on “Embed this Tweet”. That generates some HTML web code. You copy that code into the code for your own web page; then the Tweet is displayed within your page when someone views it. That’s what I’ve done to embed the example above:

What do you get?

Tweets appear in a standard format, with the option to re-tweet, reply or favourite. You’ll probably recognise them: you’ve seen them on blogs and news sites. They’re perfect when you want to quote a specific Tweet within an article. It’s slicker than just quoting the text. It gives your reader an option to join the conversation or follow the person you are quoting.

This contrasts with displaying your last n tweets on a site (where n is a number you specify). The Tech Post has a list of my recent tweets at the bottom right of each page. That mechanism doesn’t show options for re-tweeting etc. so it has a different purpose.

(Thanks to June Fraser of Becaon Law and DABRadioShop who gave me the idea for this post.)

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Follow @tonygallacher

Related articles

• Embedded Tweets (twitter.com)
• Twitter introduces ‘expanded Tweets’ with extra headlines, video and audio embedded (theverge.com)
• How embedding tweets can increase social interactivity (agbeat.com)

Evernote for iOS icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Evernote is a free, award winning, productivity app that promises to help you remember everything. It acts like a personal offline memory store. You can keep your notes, web pages, clippings from web pages, documents, photos and voice recordings, all in one place.

The app has been inducted into the Apple ‘App Hall of Fame’, is one of the New York Times Top 10 Apps and scores 4+ stars in reviews from both Android and iOS users. As well as versions for most of the mobile operating systems, there are desktop versions for Windows 7 and Mac OSX.

Making Notes

You can make notes in any of four formats: text, audio, images and attachments.

Text notes you type in can be in rich text. There’s a good WYSIWYG editor, pictured on the right. It lets you bold, highlight, underline, make titles and use bullets and numbered lists.

Image notes are pictures you take with your mobile device’s camera. You do this from within the app, so it’s straightforward. There are lots of uses for this. You might want to take a snap of a whiteboard in a meeting, a restaurant menu or a series of views when you are hillwalking.

Voice recordings are a good way to make notes on the go, at times when typing might be awkward.

Attachments are how you store images that you already have on your phone or tablet, as notes. These could be, for example, QR Codes, Barcodes, or photographs of business cards.

Notebooks and Searching

Evernote lets you create notebooks to categorise your notes. So you might want to create a notebook for recipes, one for a language you are learning, another to store the web research for a project, and so on.

The app gives you an email address that you can email your notes to. In the subject of the message you can specify a particular notebook where you want a note to be stored.

Any kind of note can be tagged with one or more phrases, whether it’s a text note, an image or a sound file. That means you can use the built in search facility to search through your notes later.

Extra Features

Evernote has a browser add-in it calls the web clipper to help you grab the content of web pages or select a part of a web page to save. This is worth installing because you can use it to keep just the sections of a page that you are interested in.

You can also create to-do lists and store web links with Evernote. But I think this mixes up the ideas of a personal information store – which Evernote does very well – and recording information temporarily that you want to come back to once only.

Image via CrunchBase

There are better to-do list apps, where you can check items off, as you do them: why would you want to keep the lists once they are completed? Instapaper is better for storing links you just want to come back to once to “read later.”

If you’re not using Evernote, I recommend it. It’s ideal as a personal information store.

Related articles

• Evernote becomes world’s most popular note-taking application (wantchinatimes.com)
• App Synergy: How To Synergize Your Evernote Use (appadvice.com)
• Evernote Review (Part 1) (ngnrdgrl.wordpress.com)
• An Introduction to Evernote [Video] (lifehack.org)

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Follow @tonygallacher

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facebook floated on the NASDAQ stock market today. Many believe it’s overvalued and that the whole event is a sure sign that we are gearing up for another dot.com crash.

It might be there’s a bubble and, more likely, that there’s a Facebook bubble. I think Zuckerberg is smart enough to be aware that his company may have reached a plateau and be able to sustain its position as the no.1 social giant, or its reach and influence may soon start to diminish. He will have built a strategy that recognises more than one future.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The timing of this IPO must be the product of long-term and obsessive active user and advertising number monitoring – and not only of Facebook’s engagement.  One thing you can bet on is that this is the right time for this IPO. If Facebook does start to lose its dominance – rather than level out – it will be soon.

In history, Facebook is a unique company, so it may be sustainable for many years. We don’t know. For it to be replaced by something better, someone has to actually come up with something better. That hasn’t happened yet.

Even if we are in a bubble, this is a very different period for the tech industry than the e-commerce boom of the late 90′s and early 2000′s. These days, rarely a week goes by without the launch of a new digital tool or service that is genuinely useful. There are lots of great tools - Player.fm is a recent example - launching all the time.

What’s your take on the Facebook IPO? Is it fated to succeed or destined to fail?

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Follow @tonygallacher

Related articles

• Facebook IPO: Moment of Truth Arrives (mobilemarketingwatch.com)
• Mark Zuckerberg Friends $19 Billion: Facebook Debuts on Wall Street (nymag.com)

Anyone can create electronic tunes using the Figure app for iPhone and iPad from Propellerhead. You don’t need any musical knowledge.

It’s like a really addictive game, except that each time you play you make something tangible – your own song. It can kill time (a lot of time) on the bus, in a queue or while you should be writing a blog post.

To create drum beats, bass and lead lines, you select from pre-programmed rhythms and sounds. There are separate screens for each of the drum, bass and lead parts of your mix. These are colour-coded blue, red and yellow respectively.

Figure screens: drums (blue), bass (red) and lead (yellow)

Tap, swipe the screen or move dials to select your sounds. There’s just enough automation in the app, to make sure your masterpiece is always both in time and on key.

The app only costs £0.69 (or $1) and is well worth it because it’s so much fun. It’s available from the Apple iTunes store.

Saving Tracks from Figure

The GarageBand application icon. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A criticism of the app has been that it doesn’t let you save the tunes you’ve made. That means, to make a new song, you have to ‘erase’ the last one. Figure is currently at v1.0, so hopefully Propellerhead will soon add an export feature.

In the mean time, one thing you can do is connect your iPhone or iPad to a Mac or PC and play your track into some music editing software. I used GarageBand.

I connected my iPhone to my iMac using a cable with a 3.5mm jack (connector) on both ends. Headphones for the iphone and most mp3 players have a 3.5mm jack on one end. You need a cable with one of those on both ends. It’s the same type of cable you would use to plug an mp3 device or a smartphone into a car stereo.

3.5mm jack to 3.5mm jack cable

I played my tracks from Figure, as an external voice source, into GarageBand and exported them to iTunes. I’ve uploaded these below.

Ladytron they are not and, listening back, I must have been channelling some sort of calypso influence when I made them. The first one has a wandering lead line and the second adds the drum, base and lead parts one at a time, the way you would if  you were using the app.

Example Figure Tracks via SoundCloud

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Follow @tonygallacher

Related articles

• Fif-TECH-Teen: Go Figure (tattletech.net)
• Propellerhead Figure (wiretotheear.com)
• Propellerhead Figure for iPhone pares ReBirth for the mainstream (slashgear.com)
• Figure – Powered by Reason (propellerheads.se)
• Youtube Interview about Figure (youtube.com)

(Figure Example Tracks 1 and 2 are the property of Tony Gallacher.)

One reason is that it can boost your search engine rankings. US SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and digital design company Tasty Placement conducted some research into which social media activities boost your search engine rankings more.

The study showed that the number of followers you have on Google+ and the number of +1 votes for your site are both more important factors, when it comes to Google ranking, than the number of: Twitter followers you have, retweets you get or shares of your Facebook posts.

Google+ is great

Another reason Google+ is great is the quality of debate in the comments people make in response to posts to the service. Influential Google+ users are starting to realise that they get much better engagement on their Google+ posts than on their own blogs.

I would like to see Google+ be more successful, by drawing in more active users. I do worry a bit, though. Success could bring with it a lot of unwelcome noise like celebrity gossip, Beliebers and lolcats.

Those all have a place but I’d quite like that place to continue to be somewhere else.

What do you think of Google+?

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…

Follow @tonygallacher

Apple I On display at the Smithsonian (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It seems that our favourite tech companies, like Apple and Google, may have become the soulless corporations that we hoped they never would. A level of arrogance has crept into some of their decisions that is all too familiar.

Apple has been shamelessly marketing its new iPad as a 4G device in the UK, despite the fact that 4G networks are not available to consumers here. Even when they are, the current iPad will never be compatible with 4G networks in this country.

Google seems to be following suit, by obfuscating the circumstances under which it illegally [clarification: depends on your country, so not necessarily 'illegal' if you're reading from the US] gathered data from WiFi routers, while carrying out surveys for Google maps across the globe.

It looks increasingly likely that the data was gathered deliberately and that the collection was sanctioned by Google managers. Google’s story, up to now, has been that this was a ‘mistake’ be a lone, rogue engineer.

Don’t be evil

Apple and Google: each is in danger of becoming just another big business with too many lawyers (at Apple they have their own building).

Apple Inc. New Headquarters (Photo credit: MarkGregory007)

Between legal teams set on covering every possible risk and shareholders’ investments driving decisions, common sense is being shouted down. In reality, brand loyalty and trust are not inexhaustible resources; and they won’t survive too many abuses.

Now, as we look from the ‘don’t be evil’ hippies to the corporate suits and back, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell them apart.

Have the cool, hippy tech companies grown into the kind of amoral corporations to which, once, we hoped they could be the antidote?

Related articles

• Was Google Spy-Fi an accident? (bigbrotherwatch.org.uk)
• ASA forces Apple to withdraw claims new iPad has ’4G capability’ (guardian.co.uk)
• Google faces further UK probe for Street View Wi-Fi data collection (zdnet.com)
• Apple, Google about to join Dow Jones stock index? (news.cnet.com)

If you found this Tech Post article useful, please share it…