Earlier this week I attended a MDeC organized private meeting with Richard Stirling from the Open Data Institute (ODI).The ODI is an institution that hopes to promote the ‘open data’ culture, and founded by a giant of the Tech world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which you might remember for inventing a small little thing we call the world wide web. The meeting was attended by just a handful...
I’ve updated this post on 31-Mar-2015, to incorporate the latest changes, and to provide more up to data info on the procurement database. Left everything else in tact. Happy birthday Malaysia!! Just how awesome is our country, that we celebrate an Independence Day AND a Malaysia Day, not to mention 2 New years day, (or 3 if you count Awal Muharram). So on that note, I decided to use my IT...
Crime has become a hot-button topic these days, and while a lot of fingerpointing and blame-shifting has been going on in political circles, I think it’s wise we took a step back and try to address the root problem rather than its symptoms. A brilliant piece by Evgeny Morozov from the Slate, points out the following: [box icon=”chat”] Forget terrorism for a moment. Take more...
Nate Silver is currently the internet darling of the big data folks, not only did he accurately predict the correct outcome in all 49 states for the US presidential election, he correctly pointed out that Florida would be a toss up before eventually leaning towards Obama. That’s like predicting a coin-toss would end on it’s side. While all of that may seem remarkable, this isn’t...
IBM have always been on the cutting edge of innovation, they’ve moved more becoming merely a computer company to what is probably the first truly all encompassing technology company, they don’t just make fancy gadgets or shiny tinga-ma-jigs, they make actual solutions for real-world problems. In 1996, IBM introduced the world to Deep Blue. Kasparov met Deep Blue and wasn’t...
Continuing my series on bigdata and Google bigquery, I’ve decided to share a rather interesting snippet of information regarding our very own Malaysian Airlines and their wikipedia page. First, just to illustrate how important Wikipedia is in general, the Malaysian Airlines Wikipedia page gets roughly 30,000 hits per month. That’s just one page of Wikipedia getting more hits than my...
Wikipedia is quite possibly the greatest repository of information mankind has ever seen. It’s built around an amazing concept of allowing anyone the ability to create, document and moderate information in real-time, and so far the concept has proven successful–some may even argue that it’s too successful. For the past two days, I’ve been writing about Bigquery and Big...
It’s obvious that people have gotten bigger these past few decades, what’s less obvious is how data has grown bigger in the past few years. In fact, 90% of the digital data we have today, was created in the last 2 years. Put another way, in 2010 we had just 10% of the digital data we have today. In 2011, an estimated 1.2 TRILLION Gigabytes of data was created. That’s roughly...