Making Data Easy with Training Wheels? The Nielsen Dust Up
July 31, 2012
In the Honk newsletter, I have been plugging away at some of the flights of fancy that surround big data, next generation analytics, and all things predictive. I am nervous about “training wheels” on complex mathematical processes. Like the fill-in-the-blanks functions in Excel, a person without a foundation in math can fiddle around until the software spits out a number which “looks good.” In one of my jobs, my boss was a master at “the flow.” The idea was that numbers can be shaped to support a particular point. I recall his comment to me in 1974, “Most of our clients are not smart enough to work through the math. We have to generate outputs which flow.” The idea is one that troubled me. I moved on to greener and less slippery pastures and I kept that notion of “flow” squarely in mind. Numbers should not cause the person looking at a chart or a table to say, “Wow, that number looks weird.” Hence, flow allows the reasoning process to be guided.
I just read a story which I hope is not accurate. I want to document my coming across the item, however. I think it will be an interesting touchstone and search and content processing companies race to be come players in big data and analytics. The story appeared in the Hollywood Reporter, a publication about which I know little. The headline caught my attention because it resonates with advertising and advertising automatically evokes the Google logo for me. “Nielsen Sued for Billions over Allegedly Manipulated TV Ratings” carries a hard hitting subtitle too: “In a huge new lawsuit, the business of TV ratings is fingered for rampant corruption by India’s largest TV news network.” I know even less about India than the Hollywood Reporter.
Fancy math underlies the products and services of many analytics firms which offer products and services to licensees that make interacting with data a matter of pointing and clicking. A happy quack for the equation to http://goo.gl/lBlXV
Here’s the passage I noted:
In a 194-page lawsuit filed in New York court late last week, NDTV accuses Nielsen of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by manipulating viewership data in favor of channels that are willing to provide bribes to its officials. According to NDTV, rampant manipulation of viewership data has been going on for eight years, and when presented with evidence earlier this year, top executives at Nielsen pledged to make changes. But the Indian news giant says these promises have been false ones.
Like most litigation, the story will unfold slowly and perhaps not at all. The i2 Group Palantir litigation is a relatively recent example. Based on my experience with the boss who wanted numbers to flow, I can see how the possibility of tweaking could be useful to some companies. However, with the dismal state of math skills, how can I now of the problem was a result of human intent, human error, or a training wheels type system driven over rocky terrain. I can’t and I bet that most people thinking about this situation cannot either.
What is interesting to me, however, are these notions:
- How many other fancy math systems are open to similar allegations from their licensees?
- Will this type of legal action cause some of the vendors pitching fancy math and predictive systems to modify their marketing materials to include more caveats and real world anchors instead of bold assertions?
- How will the legal system deal with fancy math litigation? I don’t know many attorneys. The handful with which I have some experience have been quick to point out that math, engineering, and science were not their strengths. Logic and reasoning were their strong suits.
With many search and content processing companies embracing fancy math, sentiment analysis, smart indexing and other math-based functions, will a search vendor find itself in the hot seat? I hope not but the market wants to buy fancy math. Understanding the fancy math may drive demand for individuals who can figure out if the systems and methods do what the licensee believes they do.
Oh, I like the word “billions.” Big money adds to the drama of analytics risk management in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, July 31, 2012
Maximizing the Value in High-Value Engineering Content
July 31, 2012
I read with interest the article “How Inforbix Extends the Value of PDM/PLM Systems.” For companies which create engineering drawings and other types of rich media, the cost and effort required to convert an idea into a digital object can be considerable. In my experience, most non-technical professionals do not understand the effort required to move from an idea into a digital file which, in turn, makes it possible to manufacture a part or an assembly. Not surprisingly, most enterprise information management systems do not handle engineering diagrams, CAD objects, and 3D data files particularly well. In fact, most findability systems ignore these content objects.
In an increasingly competitive world, ignoring high value engineering content can be an expensive mistake. The Inforbix article asserts:
At Inforbix we’ve been working on ways of giving people easy and simple access to data within their PDM/PLM system. That way, anyone in the company, without any special skills or training can get at the data they need within their PDM/PLM system without using touching the actual system.
Professional systems used to produce a CAD object, for example, require training to use. Unlike a Web page or a mainstream office application like Microsoft Word, the interfaces and methods of performing basic tasks such as opening a project file may not be obvious.
Many non engineers do require access to specialized engineering data, information about a component, and data about suppliers. These types of information may not reside within an enterprise search system. If some of the data are present, those items may not be indexed by the project under which the items are organized.
The article continues:
Inforbix lets anyone in a company with a PDM/PLM system access data therein without touching, moving, or interacting with the actual PDM/PLM system and data. By giving anyone in a company the ability to gather and expose data within PDM/PLM systems.
If your organization wants to maintain and grow the value of its high value content, an easy to use findability system is necessary. In our search work, we know the value of the Inforbix system. You can get more information at www.inforbix.com.
Stephen E Arnold, July 31, 2012
Sponsored by HighGainBlog.com
A View from Mindbreeze Management
July 30, 2012
KM World highlights the leadership of Daniel Fallman as managing director of Austrian based Fabasoft Mindbreeze in, “Mindbreeze, Daniel Fallmann Managing Director: View From the Top.” KM World is a respected authority in content, document, and knowledge management as well as all things enterprise.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze has been making headway in the American enterprise market, having already made a name for itself in European sectors.
Fallman highlights some of his company’s latest news in the above KM World piece:
The aim of Mindbreeze is to ensure the maximum possible reduction of manual effort in delivering pinpoint accurate information to the user-eliminating the search process to be replaced with an instant finding experience. Fabasoft Mindbreeze InSite is a Cloud service that delegates the searching to an invisible dynamic background process-via semantics and information pairing. The user is simply presented with relevant knowledge. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise consolidates data from enterprise and Cloud sources. The aim of providing an unprecedented level of information is fulfilled by hybrid scenarios that combine enterprise and Cloud information stores.
For SharePoint users who are hesitate about the upcoming 2013 migration, consider a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. Instead of spending time on advanced customization, and money on developers to do just that, invest in an efficient and intuitive enterprise option.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 30, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Oracle Text Makes Search Scores Adjustable
July 29, 2012
Oracle Text Search lets you sort search result by score according to IT Newscast’s
article, “Adjusting the Score on Oracle Text search results.”
They explain the process in laymen’s terms as:
“In theory, the more relevant the search term is to the document, the higher ranked Score it should receive. But in practice, the relevancy score can seem somewhat of a mystery. It’s not entirely clear how it ranks the importance of some documents over others based on the search term. And often times, once a word appears a certain number of times within a document, the Score simply maxes out at 100 and the top results can be difficult to discern from one another.”
To index, search and analyze text both in the Oracle database and on the web, Oracle Text uses standard SQL. This software is capable of utilizing keyword search, context queries, Boolean operations, mixed thematic queries, HTML/XML and more.
It can also perform linguistic analysis and support multiple languages with their advanced relevance ranking technology. There are additional features available for those who need even more advanced search methods like clustering and classification.
Oracle has been a leader in database software for more than three and a half decades. Their knowledge on adjusting search results should not come as a shock. Oracle is one company that will probably remain on top with enterprise grade applications and platform services.
Jennifer Shockley, July 29, 2012
Too Many Cooks in the SharePoint Kitchen
July 27, 2012
Bjorn Furuknap brings us another irreverent look at the world of SharePoint, this time focusing on the quantity of SharePoint developers. In Furuknap’s SharePoint Corner, he brings us this entry, “How Many SharePoint Developers Are There Really?”
In its publicity for its purchase of Yammer, Microsoft boasts of how many developers they have building on SharePoint.
Furuknap states:
What’s very odd, though, is that Microsoft claims there are 700,000 ‘developers building on the platform’. With these numbers, that means that for every SharePoint customer, there are over 10 developers. Read that again: For every SharePoint customer, there are more than 10 developers . . . It can mean one of two things: 1) There are far too many developers out there and a lot of them are unemployed. Good for businesses, if true. 2) SharePoint is a platform so complex that you need to pay, on average, ten people to do nothing but develop on SharePoint. Bad for SharePoint, if true.
Let’s go with the idea that SharePoint may be too complex for its own good. What is to be done? Most organizations cannot afford a herd of developers to customize SharePoint into a usable infrastructure. For organizations in that situation we recommend exploring a smart third party solution like Fabasoft Mindbreee Enterprise. Working as a standalone solution, or in conjunction with an existing SharePoint infrastructure, Fabasoft Mindbreeze not only streamlines your enterprise needs, but also integrates the rest of your electronic data repositories via Connectors.
Do not let the complexities of SharePoint bankrupt your IT department. See a high return on your investment by choosing Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 27, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Interesting Reads
July 26, 2012
There is a very enlightening source of reading references to be found in Jeff Huang’s “Best Paper Awards in Computer Science.” He conveniently provided a list of informative papers neatly categorized by area of expertise, like artificial intelligence or human computer interaction.
While scrolling down the list, two interesting papers seemed to jump right out.
The first of which, “Unsupervised Part-of-Speech Tagging with Bilingual Graph-Based Projections,” describes a new approach, as:
“A novel approach for inducing unsupervised part-of-speech taggers for languages that have no labeled training data, but have translated text in a resource-rich language. Our method does not assume any knowledge about the target language (in particular no tagging dictionary is assumed), making it applicable to a wide array of resource-poor languages. We use graph-based label propagation.”
The second paper, “How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?” Describes some research on search and their conclusions, with:
“When having difficulty in finding information, users start to formulate more diverse queries, they use advanced operators more, and they spend a longer time on the search result page as compared to the successful tasks. The results complement the existing body of research focusing on successful search strategies.”
Researchers are consistently developing models to predict and understand changes in text entry. Sadly, most of the models fail to account for varying system parameters and the ever changing human factor, nor their evolving relationship.
The latter explains the dumbing of search…but they were interesting reads.
Jennifer Shockley, July 26, 2012
Sign In as Difference User in SharePoint 2013
July 26, 2012
The “Sign in as a Different User” menu option has been done away with in SharePoint 2013. Microsoft has made it known that they have worked to make SharePoint 2013 a more streamlined, efficient, out-of-the-box solution, and in doing so are discouraging users from customization. However, some of the features that were removed still need to be navigated in some way. The “Sign in as a Different User” command is one example. Nick Grattan’s SharePoint Blog gives us a workaround in, “Sign in as Different User and SharePoint 2013.”
Grattan states:
This ‘Sign in as Different User’ menu item is very useful when testing applications, but it can lead to problems especially when opening documents, say in Microsoft Word. So, it may be for these reasons that the option has been removed in SharePoint 2013. You can add the menu item back in, but I would suggest only doing this on test or development SharePoint servers. To do this, repeat this edit on all servers in your SharePoint farm:
What follows is a step-by-step list of instructions to help you successfully complete the function.
For users who are concerned in general about the lack of customization options in SharePoint 2013, we would encourage the addition of a smart third-party solution. For instance, Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise can stand alone or work alongside an existing SharePoint infrastructure to increase efficiency and intuitiveness. Fabasoft Mindbreeze is a trusted industry leader based in Austria, and consistently wins recognition for by KM World.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 26, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Governance Listed as Top Challenge in Enterprise
July 25, 2012
A new Gartner report shows that more SharePoint users are failing in the category of governance than in any other. SharePoint Joel gives his opinion on governance in, “Governance the #1 Challenge to Managing SharePoint.”
SharePoint Joel begins:
According to Gartner 66% of SharePoint Customers do not believe they have adequate governance. (Based on a recent Gartner survey) Governance can be defined as a set of defined roles, responsibilities, policies, and procedures that will help your company to proactively manage your information technology resources in a way that maximizes business value.
But governance does not have to be an ongoing struggle or an agonizing process. Third party solutions like Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise can work with an existing SharePoint installation to add efficiency and functionality. Fabasoft Folio Connector works with Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise to specifically address the issue of governance.
Fabasoft Folio is the standard software product for Enterprise Content Management, Collaboration, Compliance Management, agile Business Processes and Information Governance. The solution provides uniform, reliable and controlled management of digital content in the enterprise. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise links Fabasoft Folio for uniform enterprise-wide information access.
Do not continue to struggle with governance issues, allow Fabasoft Mindbreeze and their suite of smart solutions to ease your enterprise troubles.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 25, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
How to use Oracle Full Text Search in an Entity Framework
July 25, 2012
Oracle has the solutions, but how do you use Oracle full text search in an entity framework? We are not sure what this means, but the info you need can be found in Devart’s article, “Using Oracle Full-Text Search in Entity Framework.”
Devart began with:
“We decided to meet the needs of our users willing to take advantage of the full-text search in Entity Framework and implemented the basic Oracle Text functionality in our Devart dotConnect for Oracle ADO.NET Entity Framework provider. For working with Oracle Text specific functions in LINQ to Entities queries, the new OracleTextFunctions class is used, which is located in the Devart.Data.Oracle.Entity.dll assembly.”
It enables working with such Oracle Text functions as:
- CONTAINS
- CATSEARCH
- MATCHES
- SCORE
- MATCH_SCORE
Devart presents a very detailed sales pitch for OraDirect, or dotConnect as their calling it now. Whatever name you choose, the gist is the software offers native connectivity to the Oracle database, tools and technology. They also offer a customized set of their own tools to increase Dataset productivity such as Dataset Wizard and Dataset Manager.
If you can decipher their article, than the wisdom of the Oracle is yours. For the most part this article reads like a coder handbook, and I am not a coder. If you happen to speak that very enlightened language, you will probably grasp Devart’s meaning a lot quicker than this gosling. If not, maybe the Oracle will see you some other day.
Jennifer Shockley, July 25, 2012
Streamlining SharePoint at Work
July 24, 2012
On the Microsoft SharePoint Blog, Chirag Patel addresses readers’ questions about what SharePoint can do for them professionally with his entry, “8 Easy Ways to Change SharePoint at Work.”
Before diving into his list of eight tips, Patel gives an introduction to his ideas:
With endless possibilities and boundless optimism, SharePoint obviously has a great deal more to offer and [sic] the manner in which it is implemented and governed. You will also find mountain of articles and how to guides on the Internet but my response almost always touch on the following areas. In this post I will share 8 easy ways that by themselves may not dramatically improve productivity, but combined can result in significant performance gains and hopefully help you leverage SharePoint functionality.
In terms of leveraging SharePoint functionality, not every organization can afford a team of SharePoint developers in-house or contracted out. For these organizations, a smart third party solution may be a good addition to an existing SharePoint infrastructure, or as a standalone piece.
A third party solution with good reviews and user feedback is Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise. With a listed of notable technology partners, Fabasoft Mindbreeze can ensure high functionality with limited additional effort. For users who have to choose between intense customization of SharePoint and adding a third party solution, many will find a third party solution like Mindbreeze to be the least stressful option.
Emily Rae Aldridge, July 24, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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