Greater Is He That Is In You Than He That Is In The World.

Yeap Chee Seng Weblog

Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.
1 John 4:4(KJV)

One of the greatest lie propagated by religious people is, God is in full control of everything in this world. To them, there are no accidents. Everything that happened, happened by the will of God. This means if someone is sick, it is the will of God for this person to be sick. Maybe God wants to teach this person a lesson. Maybe God wants him to rest more. Maybe God wants him to spend more time praying. Maybe, maybe, maybe. No matter what the maybes can be, the religious people are sure in one thing, God wanted it to happen. They don’t know for sure why you are sick but they are sure that God is the culprit who caused it…

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Climbing Mountains

Brad Ferguson

I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see his face as we look down from the top of the mountain and he sees the distance he traveled and the height he climbed in a single day. I can’t wait to see him gaze over the horizon and feel like he’s the only person at the top of the world. I can’t wait to hear him state how lucky we are to be surrounded with such beauty, such richness, such freedom amidst a world continuously at war for those things we have right under our feet.  I can’t wait.

The dream of reaching the summit keeps him awake for weeks before – the trail, the wildlife, the journey, the exhaustion … full of mystery and imagination. Open spaces and unbridled curiosity. Our fervent chatter at the start mellows into rich conversation about life; then occasionally into expressions of ambition … followed…

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Mystery man visits Edmonton Tim Hortons, pays $895 to buy coffee for 500 strangers

Machine learning startup Ayasdi raises $30.6M to map your data

Gigaom

Ayasdi, the machine learning startup that creates maps out of complex datasets, has raised a $30.6 million series B round of venture capital. New investor IVP led the round, with Citi Ventures and GE Ventures chipping in, as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures and Floodgate. This makes a total of nearly $41 million in funding for the red-hot Ayasdi, which emerged from stealth mode in January.

The company, founded by Gunnar Carlsson and Gurjeet Singh, uses a technique called topological data analysis to create the visually stunning maps that help set its product apart. A lot goes on under the covers in order to map out the data — hundreds of machine learning algorithms analyzing up to billions of data points — but the result is a map of the data that looks similar to a classic network graph. Only, instead of showing how data points are…

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Tree algorithms for larger-than-memory data sets

Follow the Data

We came across a couple of interesting papers about decision tree algorithms for data sets that don’t fit into memory. In general, we have been thinking a bit lately about this type of approximate data analysis where various tricks can be used to summarize relevant characteristics of a huge data set. The Mining of Massive Datasets book (free PDF) has some nice material to chew over when it comes to approximate “streaming” algorithms (e g chapter 4).

The first of the “streaming decision tree” methods came to our attention via a post on the Revolution Analytics blog, rxDTree(): a new type of tree algorithm for big data. It links to a paper from 2010, A streaming parallel decision tree algorithm (note: PDF link) by Ben-Haim and Yom-Tov, which describes a tree algorithm that addresses the problem of sorting a very large number of values (to determine split…

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These are the times of miracle and wonder

Wrong Side of Memphis

My first computer was a second hand ZX Spectrum+ This says a lot about my age, I guess. I got it from my uncle, who bought himself a more powerful computer. I really loved that computer, and used it for quite a long time. It seemed so magical that you could play a tape, which sounded weird, and load a game. There was also the possibility of program from the command line, which I tried, but I never “got” exactly how to get from very basic stuff to anywhere.

A few years later, and after the Spectrum was broken, I obtain a PC. At first without a sound card, so it was strangely silent compared to the computers of my friends. But the change to a hard drive, where the load times were almost instantaneous was astonishing. Yes, there were disks, but even load something from disk was extremely…

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"Web meets World" – what comes after Web 2.0

End of Business as Usual - Glenn's blog

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle gave their view on how Web 2.0 is evolving at the Web 2.0 Summit in June 2009 – something they’ve name Web Squared, or “Web meets World”. Here’s the presentation video on YouTube.

Here’s a link to the slides on Slideshare.

Dion Hinchcliffe provides his commentary here, as well as provides this great visual summarizing the differences with Web 2.0:

Will investigate this whole Web Squared notion in the next few days, and provide additional comments.

glenn

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