text stringlengths 13 81.7k |
|---|
Intellectual snobbery, actually. Secularists see religious people as none too bright. Sorry. |
Honestly, no offence intended, but to a non-believer, the leap of logic required to faithfully invest in the concept of a supernatural being — one that is turned to in times of minor personal crisis but takes a laissez-faire approach to war and genocide — is so great as to appear little short of ridiculous. |
So a person with faith appears ridiculous, too. |
I know this is wrong. I know this is judgmental. I admire a lot of the principles of religious faith. |
I am certainly not intolerant of those who wish to behave charitably towards their fellow man. |
But the logic. I cannot get beyond the logic. |
A black box could be fitted in the cars of young drivers to keep insurance premiums down, it has been suggested. |
Fall for that one, and you really do deserve to have your licence taken away. We can see how this ends: any claim, any renewal, will be checked against the recorded information so that any evidence of 32mph in a built-up area could be used to invalidate the policy and hike premiums — or avoid a pay-out. |
Remember those water meters that were going to save you money but instead sent your bills through the roof? It’s like that. |
It was a tragic scene, the undrained bath tub that was Whitney Houston’s resting place. |
Pictures show a submerged towel, floating hair bands and an ornate silver jug she used to dispense expensive oils to cleanse her skin; or, as it was tactfully described in many newspapers, a gravy boat. |
Perhaps that is how we should remember her, slipping quietly away with a meat and potato pie on the go. |
Better than the reality, anyway. |
John Prescott opposed the policy of elected police commissioners all the way. Having lost the argument in Parliament, he now intends standing for the well-rewarded post in Humberside. Some think this makes Prescott an odious hypocrite, but he obviously has his reasons; 70,000 of them per annum, one might say. |
Tuesday morning, the telephone rang. The caller identified himself as a member of Operation Weeting, the phone-hacking investigation team. I thought it was a joke. I thought a pal was winding me up. |
‘There’s nothing to worry about, Mr Samuel,’ said the policeman. |
‘I know there’s nothing to worry about,’ I replied. |
And there isn’t. I can barely get my own messages, let alone Sienna Miller’s. I’d never heard of private detective Glenn Mulcaire until I read his name in a newspaper. |
Splendid isolation is my working practice. I don’t even go to the office Christmas party if I can help it. It transpired that I was being cold-called from an old newspaper staff list, to see if I had anything to add to the inquiry. |
The policeman clarified where I worked now and asked when I left my previous employer. I told him 2007. Or was it 2006? No, 2007. |
He was very personable and went away satisfied with my best estimate (which was right, by the way). |
Still it’s your money, so enjoy whatever it is they’re doing with it. |
Mr Lim Chee Onn and Mr Stephen Lee Ching Yen were appointed to the council from Apr 1 this year, the President's Office says. |
SINGAPORE: Two new members were appointed to the Council of Presidential Advisers (CPA) with effect from Apr 1, said the President's Office on Thursday (Apr 6). |
Mr Lim Chee Onn was appointed by the President acting in his discretion while Mr Stephen Lee Ching Yen was appointed by the President on the advice of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Both had served as alternate members of the CPA since January 2008, according to the press release. |
In addition, Mr Chua Thian Poh and Mr Bahren Shaari were appointed as alternate members to the CPA, the President's Office said. |
Mr Lim, Mr Lee and Mr Chua were sworn in at the Istana on Apr 6, while Mr Bahren will be sworn in on Apr 13, it added. |
The CPA, which comprises eight members and two alternate members, advises the President in the exercise of his custodial and discretionary powers. |
It is obligatory for the President to consult the CPA before he vetoes the budgets of the Government and key Government-linked bodies as well as the appointments of key personnel in the public service and the key Government-linked bodies. |
The present chairman of the CPA is Mr J Y Pillay. The other members are Mr S Dhanabalan, Mr Po'ad Bin Shaik Abu Bakar Mattar, Mr Goh Joon Seng, Mr Bobby Chin Yoke Choong and Mr Lee Tzu Yang. |
You're about to stumble into 25 worlds. They are inhabited by—among others—a dancer, a diver, a farmer, and a filmmaker. They are places where the urge to make art has overcome the urge for comfort—where the need to make a change has triumphed over the desire to shoot up. They are worlds that seldom warrant a headline,... |
In worlds like these, a small accident—say, a fractured wrist—might circuitously lead from a futureless job to a career of boundless creativity. A painful shyness could indirectly connect you, through Twitter, to someone you truly love. As @aRealLiveGhost knows, you've got to turn everything down to discover what you'r... |
The Reader's staff tuned out a lot of noise to find the Chicagoans we felt belonged in this year's People Issue, a celebration of those who quietly follow their passions. Our only real job in the process was to listen—not just to what these 25 individuals were saying, but to what most everyone else wasn't. |
We listened to people who believe "my past is my best asset," even when it's a past largely spent strung out. We listened to people who "cannot live or work trying to please everybody"—and instead spend their days soaring through the air. We listened to people whose jobs, at their most difficult—behind the wheel of a c... |
While there might not be deviation from it, the past can push you in the different direction you're meant to travel. "Three years ago, I was working at an ad agency and constantly feeling conflicted between not having a lot of expression in my work and wanting to do something for myself," recalled a young gallerist of ... |
Similarly, a middle-aged woman looked back on her early years: "I had gotten a bachelor's degree. I had the boyfriend and the cat and all that stuff. And I wasn't happy. Then the cat disappeared. And the boyfriend and I broke up." So she ventured to find out what was at the bottom of the ocean floor. "We know more abou... |
The Atarot industrial park in Jerusalem on Thursday became the latest location for what has become a spate of terror attacks in recent days when a Palestinian stabbed a man at a slaughter house, wounding him lightly. In a separate incident in the park, two Palestinians attacked a carpenter and stole his pistol before f... |
DC Comics Universe & Shazam! #1 Spoilers & Review: The Shazam Captain Marvel Family, Um, Lightning League Take Center Stage For A New Era! |
DC Comics Universe and Shazam! #1 Spoilers and Review follows. |
The Shazam Captain Marvel Family, Um, Lightning League Take Center Stage For A New Era! |
…of the first Shazam hero, no longer called Captain Marvel, Billy Batson. |
…as do the other kids. Here’s a Who’s Who on the remainder of the Shazam family. |
Looks like they’re in Philadelphia now and not Fawcett City and, seemingly, are at least by the media called the Lightning League. |
They beat the bad guys and kibitz with the police disagreeing about who is the team’s leader. |
Later at the Rock of Eternity, the kids find the Station including the magical subway train that took Billy Batson to the Wizard Shazam in the first place when he first became a hero. |
…Billy and Mary’s biological dad arrive as the kids pulled a magical lever with unknown consequences at the Station?! |
A loaded issue that sets up a lot with kinetic art. Still difficult to follow who’s who though despite the fun read. 7 out of 10. |
Will you be watching the 'LHHNY' alumni on the VH1 series? |
(AllHipHop News) It looks like Joe Budden and Cyn Santana are headed back to reality television. According to Variety, the celebrity couple will join the season nine cast of Love & Hip Hop: New York. |
Both Budden and Santana starred on the series in the past, but they were not part of the same story-line. Since that time, the musician and the vixen started dating and eventually had a child together. |
"'Oh they back on that show.. checks running low' checks running rather high now a days," tweeted Cyn on Thursday. She added, "I see this being brought up a lot. I understand. But my partner and I are super super super solid. On some spiritual sh*t. This won’t break a thing. We family." |
Joe Budden has expanded his media empire over the last several years. The "retired" rapper hosts his own podcast on Spotify, and he leads Revolt's panel discussion show State of the Culture. |
The National Police Commission (NPC) had recommended to promote Policeman-turned-politician Palitha Range Bandara to the rank of Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP). |
A Spokesman of the Commission said the recommendation letter of the retired SI Palitha Range Bandara had been forwarded to the Law and Order and Southern Development Ministry. |
He would receive a pension and possibly a commuted amount too for the period he did not get paid. |
This follows his appeal to the Commission that he had been victimized politically when he was in the Police Service. |
The Commission recommended that he be reinstated in the Police Service from 24 August 2000 and promoted to the ASP rank on the 27th of the same month and sent him on retirement. |
Not ASP, give him the law and order portfolio and send in retirement.. |
Suddenly he won a lottery. what a lucky guy ! |
His pension should be paid by the people who have victimized him politically. |
Is this the only thing this NPC can do? To give promotions and oney to their own government ministers?What about Sumith Prasanna's murder by police in Embilipitiya, the ASP who assaulted hat journalist in Hambantota, the Navy commanders incident, several deaths in police custody.......where is justice for all his from ... |
There has been a backlash lately against big data. From O’Reilly Media to the New Yorker, from Nassim Taleb to Kate Crawford, everyone is treating big data like a piñata. Gartner has dropped it into the “trough of disillusionment.” I call B.S. on all of it. |
It might be provocative to call into question one of the hottest tech movements in generations, but it’s not really fair. That’s because how companies and people benefit from big data, data science or whatever else they choose to call the movement toward a data-centric world is directly related to what they expect goin... |
One of the biggest complaints — or, in some cases, proposed facts — about big data is that is relies more on correlation than causation in order to find its vaunted insights. To the extent that’s true, it’s a fair criticism. Only I’m not certain how often it’s true for things that really matter. |
Honestly, for song or product recommendations, who really cares? |
But in areas like medicine, finance and even marketing, people are becoming much more concerned with finding out “why” once they’ve found out “what.” If you’re a police department trying to figure out a strategy for stopping people on the street, for example, even a strong correlation between race and certain crimes pr... |
Or if you’re a retail store, knowing that Mac users who visit your site tend to buy more-expensive products might make you want to show them more-expensive products. Some deeper digging — perhaps even via direct questions — would show they’re really concerned with craftsmanship. The more you learn beyond what a cluster... |
This is why some people call the process of asking interesting questions of data “exploratory analytics.” Data analysts can send out a virtual Christopher Columbus to see what’s doing inside their data. If they find something potentially valuable, they dig in further. Correlations are just a notice that there might be ... |
And even in the realm of machine learning — where algorithms are tearing through datasets trying to discover complex patterns humans could never spot — very few people are seriously suggesting we take the machines at their word. In case after case after case, the story is the same: machines do the heavy lifting but hum... |
There’s another idea floating around, too, which is that web-derived data — be it from social media, search queries or some other place — is somehow synonymous with big data. Critics are quick to point out that there are biases in this type of data and that we shouldn’t abolish traditional methods of qualitative, non-d... |
But who is really suggesting we do away with traditional forms of research? Social media data shouldn’t usurp traditional customer service or market research data that’s still useful, nor should the Centers for Disease Control start relying on Google Flu Trends at the expense of traditional flu-tracking methodologies. ... |
Even if they’re biased or perhaps even slightly misleading, though, these new data types are still valuable, even for social science research. It is a source of new, large, and arguably unfiltered insights into attitudes and behaviors that were previously difficult to track in the wild. I’m thinking of the researchers ... |
The drawbacks should be pretty easy to overcome. Demographic or other biases might be relatively easy to spot when information is also tagged with geodata and perhaps profile information, for example. And assuming the data is mostly indicative of macro trends, there’s definitely value in being able to track it by the d... |
Which brings me to another point, this one about the idea that big data is all about finding out new things through exploration. Sure, that can be the case if you’re starting to analyze entirely new data sources (like social media data) or using entirely new techniques, and it’s a very compelling reason to get started ... |
Technologies like Hadoop, for example, aren’t designed to write you better models — they’re designed to process a lot more data a lot faster. If your models still work, Hadoop should help you run them better against a much larger dataset. That might lead to more accurate models and faster answers, but it won’t necessar... |
If you’re a law firm, analyzing e-discovery files faster and more accurately might be reward enough in itself. Or maybe you’re just trying to get a better view of customers or products by putting all your data on them, that you’ve collected over years, into one place. The point is these are valuable objectives even if ... |
I think MailChimp is a great example of this. It used big data techniques to discover some interesting things about the characteristics of spam, but the bigger goal was automating the spam-detection process. Those insights don’t directly affect the bottom line, but they did free up resources to help apply data science ... |
Like anything in IT, big data is almost destined to be a money pit if you go into it without a plan. I’ve heard stories of large-enterprise CIOs deploying Hadoop clusters — sometimes numerous flavors of Hadoop clusters — just because they felt obligated to. I assume there are companies trying desperately to hire data s... |
In some ways, this type of thinking ties back to the idea that new digital data sources somehow overtake a company’s legacy data in terms importance. Without any actual plan of attack, proposing “We’ll use social media” as a solution to finding out more about consumers is about as useful as proposing “We’ll use Hadoop”... |
One major takeaway from my recent interview with MetLife, for example, was how fast the company was able to move on a new data-centric project because it approached it with a plan in place about the types of data and technology it needed. I don’t think it’s surprising, either, to hear the team at Infochimps say that wh... |
So, no, new data types, technologies for processing them and techniques for analyzing them aren’t going to change the world through their mere existence. At the worst, they’re just bigger, shinier and arguably better versions of what we already had. At the best, however — and used appropriately — they really could make... |
Big data will never equal perfect data, but it can definitely point us in the right direction. I suggest not throwing the baby away with the bathwater. |
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user alri. |
Yeah, I’ve recently heard a story about an intelligence agency doing much the same. |
That’s the trouble with big data: you often don’t know what you are looking for until you find it, and because of that, you need ALL the source data up front. |
Very interesting article Derrick. I completely concur companies need to understand and plan the strategy around Big Data before jumping to invest in it. If you look closely it has different meaning ,outcome and value for different companies. They need to think thru what they want to achieve and shop for right tool for ... |
I think your article is quite accurate. Everyone who is down on Big Data seems to have no one to blame but themselves for thinking that Big Data was somehow more than Big and Data. As you indicate, it isn’t the data that matters, it is what business insights and goals you want to achieve. Without having specific goals ... |
The problem is not with the word or the data itself, the technology, etc. To leverage the data and the new enablers you need a model to dig into it, and an objective for doing that. I agree with you 100%, it isn´t a magical new approach helping companies to get a new business from the scratch. |
Check out what the finance sector did with Alpha computing algorithms using the huge historical data they handle. And that is nothing new. Those quants are around since several years. AND, indeed they know the models they use are not perfect, but even that they are a competitive advantage those companies have over the ... |
You can arge about my comment with the last bubble in the housing sector, but that´s another story. Nice post! |
Like any new technology, Big Data also has to live through this period of Hype. Only difference being that the millenials and others in the fast changing world expect the results immediately without putting enough effort. |
Big Data or the Big Data attitude is impacting all in various ways. It is about time that Gartner revisits their technology hype cycle model to something more relevant in today’s fast paced world. |
That article lacks perspective, both technologically and historically. “Big data†is little more than a buzzword for a phenomenon that has existed as long as computing: having more data than can be feasibly processed by conventional computational methods. 20 years ago, we solved “big data†problems using PVM on... |
Data is not good or bad. It is just data. The value is in what you make of it. |
Very interesting write up, Derrick that echoes much of what I was thinking but hadn’t figured out how to say. I wrote up something similar this morning based on criticism of Gartner and its Big Data Hype Cycle by someone I think missed the point of Gartner. |
Great minds think alike, even if I took a different tack (I referenced Nassim Taleb as well). |
I have been saying for months that the best analogy for Big Data is Chaos Theory…finding simple structure out of a massively large unstructured dataset. And yes, not perfect, but way beyond traditional data analytics. The “hype” “trough of disillusionment” and “maturity” are amusing analogies to Geoff Moore’s “Crossing... |
Excellent article on Big Data! These are exactly the types of insights into Big Data that decision makers need to see. |
Nice Job Derrick. If one steps back and takes a look at the big picture of big data, of all that it influences and encompasses, and how intertwines with mobile and social, it becomes clear that there should be no “disappointment” in the phenomena. Of course, there are individual projects that go belly-up because, for e... |
Derrick, Agree with most of your comments here. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.