analysis

The pile of digital data is growing, doubling every 18 months or less. That pile is the new gold, drawing data miners hoping to strike it rich by finding patterns and uncovering insights that can lead to more efficient markets, higher productivity, safer streets, and the much loved increased profits.

Stephen Baker's new book, The Numerati (Houghton Mifflin), introduces some of the data miners, or numerati, who are leading efforts to probe the depths of the global data dump.

He profiles several numerati, focusing more on the personalities and potential use cases than the arcane details of the computer … Read more

RoofRay is a tool that helps you figure out whether it's worth plunking down on money to put solar panels on your roof. If you've long been contemplating going solar to stick it to the man, this tool will give you a fairly rough estimate of how much efficiency you can expect and how it will affect your monthly bills based on past weather conditions, monthly power bills, the slope of your house, and how much paneling you can cram onto your roof.

It does most all of this with the help of Google Maps. It's one … Read more

Taking a cue from Google, Aster Data Systems has come up with an massively parallel processing analytical engine and cluster of commodity hardware for extracting insight from hundreds of terabytes of data. MySpace has deployed 100 nodes of the Aster "nCluster" to load millions of rows per second to surface trends that can help the company fine-tune its services.

Aster nCluster nodes consist of 16GB of RAM, four 250GB SATA disks, and dual-processor quad-core Intel Xeon systems interconnected via 24-port 1Gb Ethernet switches. It works with the popular business intelligence and ETL tools, and it can talk to … Read more

Belarc Advisor is one of those tools for Windows users that you didn't know you were missing until you started using it. It's hard to understate how important this program can be, as it provides a free analysis of your machine's security weak points.

By looking at elements such as whether antivirus software and definitions are up to date, or whether all the security flaws in Windows have been patched, Belarc works quickly to inform you of what you're missing and provide links to how you can fix it. It uses the Center for Internet Security (… Read more

Sorting out the overload of e-mail is one of the mostly unsolved problems of computing. The first step is analyzing your in-box, which is what Google developer Mihai Parparita has done with Mail Trends, a program that lets users analyze and visualize their inbox.

Mail Trends, which is similar to Google Reader Trends, extracts data from IMAP servers and displays statistics such as distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week, and time of day; distribution by message size; a breakdown of top senders, recipients, and mailing lists; distribution of senders, recipients, and mailing lists over time; and … Read more

On Monday, Cryptography Research Inc. (CRI) opened a three-day workshop in San Francisco on the security of embedded system cryptography. The workshop is intended for developers and architects of secure embedded systems. Participants will be given smart cards and challenged to crack passwords using various demonstrated techniques.

"These are not theoretical attacks," Benjamin Jun, vice president of technology at CRI, noting that his company published the first white paper on monitoring attacks during the 1990s.

The workshop's primary focus will be on attacks to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), a cryptographic algorithm that is now used to protect … Read more

Dow Jones Insight is applying text analysis to thousands of documents to measure trends, such as favorability and issue coverage of the presidential candidates over time. In the first example below, Dow Jones Insight parsed 26,435 documents, including English language newspapers, magazine, transcripts from broadcasts and news wire services.

Dow Jones is pitching the service as a generalized tool for analyzing the impact of media coverage, and targeting corporations, as well as political candidates, who need competitive insight. Other services, such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics and BuzzLogic, provide similar kinds of media analysis based on parsing a variety of document … Read more

Inbound links control PageRank, which in turn has a deep impact on Google rankings. Other search engines work similarly, rating the quality and number of links a given website receives as if they were votes for that site. So, how does one get a good take on inbound links for a site? There are many advanced linking softwares out there, like Advanced Link Manager, that can perform complex and deep analyses. But many webmasters or site owners may not need that much power, or would prefer to invest software dollars elsewhere. In most cases, simple link queries can offer a … Read more

NPD and Current Analysis, two of the more well-known analyst firms covering the PC and electronics industry, are teaming up.

NPD has acquired Current Analysis' PC, imaging and consumer electronics businesses, it announced in a press release Thursday. For now, those groups will be called Current Analysis West and maintain their home base in San Diego.

Both firms track the retail electronics industry, providing data on which PCs or flat-screen televisions are selling the most, and why, during critical periods like Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Current Analysis will maintain its own research groups on the East Coast specializing … Read more