For the past 18 months, it seems like all I’ve heard about in the digital marketing industry is “big data”, and with that, mentions of using Hadoop and R to solve these sorts of problems.  Why are these tools the … Continue reading →Learning R has really made me appreciate SAS ... [Read more...]

The recent Hack/Reduce hackathon in Montreal was a tonne of fun. Our team tackled a data set of consisting of Bixi (Montreal’s bicycle share system) station states at one minute temporal resolution. We used Hadoop and mapreduce to pull out some features of user behaviours. One of the ... [Read more...]

As I’ve noted here, the Computational Journalism Server “wants to be a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) when it grows up.” In plotting the way forward to that goal, I’ve looked at three options: Remain on openSUSE / SUSE Studio and ... [Read more...]

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JD Long's experimental segue package makes it easy to use Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service to fire up a Hadoop cluster and use it for non-Big Data, computationally-intensive tasks. The package provides a cluster-aware version of lapply() which "just works". [Read more...]

This week I had the opportunity the trek up north to Silicon Valley to attend Yahoo’s Hadoop Summit 2010. I love Silicon Valley. The few times I’ve been there the weather was perfect (often warmer than LA), little to no traffic, no road rage and people overall seem friendly ... [Read more...]

A week or so ago I had my first experience using someone else’s cluster on Amazon EC2. EC2 is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Users set up a virtual computing platform that runs on Amazon’s servers “in the cloud.” Amazon EC2 is not just another cluster. EC2 allows ... [Read more...]

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This is a post about systems, applications, services and architectures for building and deploying analytics. Sometimes this is called analytic infrastructure. In this post, we look at several trends impacting analytic infrastructure. Trend 1. Open source analytics has reached Main Street. R, which was first released in 1996, is now [...] [Read more...]

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