Author: admin123

New Interview Material for hiring Data Scientists

Hey Business Insider! any publicity is publicity. Plus you don’t need my publicity.

Though when I start my data analysis and warehousing company, I will use your article in the very first interview. If applicants don’t start laughing during the first 10 sec they are out. Unless they cry, or they get angry. Or they double-check the header thinking they are reading the Onion. Anyhow if they finally but late realized or were convinced that this is crap from every single aspect, they will be treated nicely but no job. And if… If they defended the article I would make sure there is a global black list to ban them lifetime from all activities related to data.

How do they allow themselves to publish this when they know “search results varies based on the searcher’s history, the time and place of search”.
Cause “they do say at least a little bit about how countries are perceived”?

Absolutely not.

vasectomy

They haven’t even checked with a friend next door to see s/he would get completely different results. In Norway I and my colleague asked Google the exact formulation:

How much * does cost in New Zeland

Autocomplete gave me: to live, build a house, abortion and to study. My colleague got food, petrol, university, gas, minecraft for NZ. The author got “vasectomy” possibly not even due to his country of search but relevant to his own search history. Then he labels every single country in the world by a totally random buzzword and gets an article in the Business Insider? Bravo!

Asking an uninteresting question, forming an irrelevant hypothesis, doing an absolutely wrong methodology on someone else’s data, representing it with a naive medium of visualization, and then lying in the title.

I had not seen something nearly careless at this level.

I try to summarize: First it gives an impression that these are top searches performed by the people in any country. That comes from the misleading title that actually changed a couple of times and finally got worse. If you struggle to make sense of this and you think it is about other countries’ perception about that country, you are still wrong. Finally you start to doubt the author and think it’s at least about how Americans perceive the world since he lives in the US. Not even that. It’s the authors search recommendation, apparently influenced bye is very own search history .

It’s like publishing an article on your personal recommendation and suggesting it to others as if the recommendation services with their fancy algorithms couldn’t do it for them.

Business Insider doesn’t need to apologize to the world for the silly stereotyping. That’s widely common and you can forgive or pity it as an effort-saving short cut to conserve mental processing energy. This article is unique in terms of ignorance combined with uncalibrated self-confidence. This is too bad to ignore.

Cheryl’s birthday

This has been shared massively around the social media and is a fairly interesting primary school puzzle. Now I tweak it a bit and retry it on you: Bernard’s birthday is on the 1st of April and on his birthday Bernard and Albert are trying to figure out Cheryl’s birthday (Albert and Bernard must lie in all three sentences or a part each, but Cheryl doesn’t lie!). So when is Cheryl’s birthday?

p.s. This tweak could have been a bit more interesting. The problem here is that at last Albert doesn’t know what kind of Lie Bernard is making. So yes it seems both June 18 as well as May 15/16 could hold them liar. The dates can be updated for both versions to satisfy a unique answer. Can’t think of it more now. Any suggestion?

Revelation

After eating unexceptionally too much food today, as I was rolling in the bed I suddenly got inspired by a load of new material. Just like a revelation with all its meanings it occurred to me; suddenly and without a warning and I couldn’t help it. Then I thought I’ll just sit and deliver it.

And I have so far produced a long snake-like creature and it doesn’t end. So you wanna hear more or shall I cut the crap? #toilet

Islamic Golden Age

I am allergic to the buzzword of Islamic golden age imposed by the western historians when they rediscovered a remote part of the world, so let me reflect upon it:

This is said a lot before, but still. Claims such as Saying Islam brought us a lot of scientific advances:

To paraphrase Monty Python, what has Islam ever done for us? You know, apart from the algebra, the trigonometry, the optics, the astronomy and the many other scientific advances and inventions of the Islamic Golden Age.

is like saying Christianity gave us the Renaissance. They were just co-existing in the same region and were counter-forces most of the time. Many of the scientist of the so-called Islamic golden age were self-claimed atheists or had philosophical agenda or personal life styles quite against the dominant Islamic ideology. One could argue that actually reviving the Islamic faith by scholars like Al-Ghazali and the extermination of reasoning and philosophy eventually put an end to the golden age of the Middle East. An age that owes Islam (as a religion, what it is) nothing, perhaps except its sunset.

The Weakest Link

Ever since I broke my incisor tooth, there has been an unfamiliar empty space between my tongue and the upper lip. Now while some force is voluntarily sucking my lips inwards to fill that gap, the sharp edge of the new tooth keeps leaving scars.

Such self-initiative of a wounded body is known as an “inner-kiss”, when a primate kisses self from inside and is observed in humans, elves, chimps and bonobos. However, the cause of the injury has never been reported to bite a cellphone to find the weakest link between the tooth and the phone. And will never be, as it was only an ironic misuse of a coincidence when facing two already broken objects on which I depended a lot, internally and externally.

Thanks for taking me serious in all situations. Self-inner-kiss smiley.

weakestlink

HappIt! @ TechChrunch Disrupt Hackathon

HappIt!
Make it a happy habbit!

I spent the weekend at the reportedly hottest hack event of the globe, TechChrunch Disrupt Hackathon that came to London. I was just spending my vacation, so no serious intention of disrupting the tech scene, especially that I had a terrible fever. But it was quite stimulating and although I was involved in two hacks, they were both finished. With Sohail we submitted our emotional data platform among 89 hacks done by 750 subscribed hackers and Tanja presented it on the stage since my voice was completely lost.

So what is HappIt? From Tanja’s description:

Ever wondered how emotions change over time and vary in different locations [or weather]? Or wondered how your friends are feeling at the moment?

Happit helps you express your feelings, share them with your friends and store them for later reference.

About the idea: Nima was keeping a feelings diary when he was a child and Sohail knows a lot about emoticons, so we created the web app HappIt that allows users to enter and track their feelings; and us and businesses or the government to analyze emotions globally.

How does it work? The app allows you to self evaluate your emotions by rating 6 basic feelings on a scale from 0 to 1, whenever you want to express yourself like a diary or share it with others.

Based on your historic data you can navigate back in time and surprise yourself by seeing how your feelings have changed throughout different times and events, or based on the places you have been to. You can also see your friend’s happiness diary if it’s shared with you or the public.

Check out the video of pitching the idea here or here:

Think of HappIt as the emotional data collection and analysis platform currently using Grimace frontend, built based on Tanahashi and Kim (1999) comic methods which itself seems to be based on Hexadyad primary emotional model by Bruce E. Morton.

Vacation in London

So as a part of my productive 10 days vacation spent in London I took the chance to take part in a Data Science Meetup at Cambrdige, a Big Data Meet-up In London and the best of all, the hottest hack gathering of the globe TechChrunch Disrupt 2014 Hackathon that had come to London and we submitted our web app among 89 hacks. This is my portfolio on ChallangePost where I will post more products and hacks in the near future. And here is our hack’s profile Happit that I will write a separate post about it.