In an earlier post I mentioned my new year’s resolutions. Exercise is one that I have succeeded at keeping more often than I have failed. It is for the very reasons discussed in this post that I find above all others it is the one to keep. And it is to the purpose of satisfying the 1st, 4th, and 5th of my resolutions that I got my TechnoGym Wellness Fob today.

This kind of makes me feel extra good about graduating summa cum laude.

A recent issue of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (12/2013 Vol.56 No.12, Dhar) paraphrases the core engineering dilemma of big data analytics as being one of the transition from retrieving data that matches patterns to discovering patterns that match data. More than anything I believe that intuition will remain a guiding factor in this for some time to come. The nature of unstructured data is one that must be tamed by finding structures that may only apply to a small portion of a big data set, but nonetheless provide more valuable information than those patterns found for pattern’s and not purpose’s sake.

I find it interesting that the short term sales gain doesn’t contribute to brand value. It would seem to me that barring a demographic that responds only to recent campaigns would the exposure lead to long term brand value. I’d imagine the proportion of short term gains to long term growth or leakage mitigation might be an important metric for the valuation of large datasets. The problem that arises from this, from the point of view of may data professional, is one of the valuation of large unstructured datasets. Big data tends to be unstructured and requires processing to extract patterns that can be used for analysis. This processing incurs costs that need to be justified.

As a database administrator I often find the swiftest route to the completion of development work often depends on the consumer of that work and the workflow through the departments. It seems that such an approach could be immensely beneficial as an approach to balancing workflow loads between departments with relatively interchangeable skillsets (at least the entry level). For example, software development, database administration, analytics, reporting, and systems administration will often have team members with skillsets that while more advanced in their specific discipline are sufficient for junior level work in other disciplines. Competing for project tasks with valuations that would presumably climb with the scarcity of the skills required to complete them would enable other departments the opportunity to add value providing lower level work that has the added benefit of strengthening the organization’s resilience as those portable skills grow sharper with use.

So it is a question of monetizing the strategic value of talent acquisition (and retention) and coping with the tactical exposure that sharing such valuations with external facing vectors favors.

How can we demonstrate to a machine that we are complimentary to it?

Criticism can be perceived as an attempt to undermine the self esteem of the criticism. In turn attacks on self esteem can be seen as attempts to manipulate the criticized person to the effect of causing them to believe they are unworthy of the satisfaction of their goals. This is a seed of conflict that it is natural to resist. If we did not such manipulation would act contrary to our long term survival by forcing us into deprivation of necessary resources.