Presentation: Big Data & APIs for PHP Developers /via @lxt @EliW #BigData #SXSW #PHP

Read: Fascinating graphics. Mapping the Nation's Well-Being - Interactive Map #health #wellbeing #community #USA

"Nexalogy recently participated in the 2011 Strata Making Data Work Conference.

Nexalogy's lexical map is a graphical representation of large text data sets. In this case, we have processed 4616 tweets containing the hashtags #strataconf or #stratconf from February 1 to February 7, 2011.

Each of the top 300 words in the dataset is represented here by a node. A node's size is proportional to the number of mentions of that word in the entire dataset. The links between the nodes indicate that they are semantically connected, and the closer they are together, the stronger the connection."

Was @ this talk by @b6n, this is a good summary: Challenges/Trade-offs in Building a Web-scale Realtime Analytics System

"Wrangler is an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation.
Spend less time formatting and more time analyzing your data."

All code, slides and notes in support of "Data Bootcamp" tutorial at O'Reilly's Strata Conference 2011.

Genotyping from short reads using cloud computing

"…The people who are likely to produce breakthroughs--the really smart smarty-pants in the math departments of the world’s universities--don’t have access to large bodies of real-world data. And without real-world data, they can come up with as many hypotheses and new types of math as they like, but they’ll never really know if it actually works in the real world. It’s like trying to learn how to serve without tennis balls. You can swing as much as you like, but until you actually hit a real-live ball, you can never be sure if your swing would actually place a ball in the serve box.

For their part, the people who have real-world data--the Amazons and eBays of the world--can’t share it with the researchers for reasons of customer privacy. “Even if we anonymize it, we’re handcuffed because we can’t give out data that can be reasonably be used to reconstruct who someone really is,” the Chief Scientist, Darren Vengroff, tells Fast Company.

Vengroff, however, has come up with a novel solution: He’s created a “black box” of sorts with real-world data that researchers can use to run experiments on. Researchers won’t be able to look at the data, but they will be able to dump their algorithms in and have the box spit out results, which the researchers can then use to refine their hypotheses.…"

4 Google Analytics Filters You Should Be Using #analytics #google

SwiftRiver is a free and open source platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time. The SwiftRiver platform was born out of the need to understand and act upon a wave of massive amounts of crisis data that tends to overwhelm in the first 24 hours of a disaster. Since then, there has been a great deal of interest in this tool for other industries, such as news rooms and brand monitoring groups.
In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds. This free tool is especially useful for organizations who need to sort their data by authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity. These organizations include the media, emergency response groups, election monitors and more. This might include journalists and other media institutions, emergency response groups, election monitors and more.

"BBC Research & Development has released Zeitgeist, a directory of the most shared BBC links on Twitter.

Tweets and stories are indexed by topic and location and can be filtered by time period to include only the last 24 hours or 7 days."

"Apache Mahout's goal is to build scalable machine learning libraries. "

By now, it's clear that Twitter is not just a site. It's a protocol for asymmetric follow. It's a message bus for human attention. It's able to force every Twitter user to let it know when an interaction happens, simply by changing URLs.

Twitoaster is a Twitter web application that threads and archives your conversations in real time, bringing you all the context and statistics you need to improve the way you communicate with your followers.

Twazzup Launches New Twitter Analytics Service and Web-Based Twitter Client

How to split up the US: what facebook tells us about the shape of the country. More: (via @brady)