A Big Data Jeremiad and the Moral Health of America

monopolydude2The average of polls were wrong. The past-performance-weighted, hyper-parameterized, stratified-sampled, Monte Carlo-ized collaborative predictions fell as critically short in the general election as they had in the Republican primary. There will be much soul searching to establish why that might have been; from ground game engagement to voter turnout, from pollster bias to sampling defects, the hit list will continue to grow.

Things were less predictable than it seemed. During the 2008 and 2012 elections, the losing party proxies held that the polls were inherently flawed, though they were ultimately predictive. Now, in 2016, they were inherently flawed and not at all predictive.

But what the polls showed was instructive even if their numbers were not quite right. Specifically, there was a remarkable turn-out for Trump among white, less-educated voters who long for radical change to their economic lives. The Democratic candidate was less clearly engaging.

Another difference emerged, however. Despite efforts to paint Hillary Clinton as corrupt or a liar, objective fact checkers concluded that she was, in fact, one of the most honest candidates in recent history, and that Donald Trump was one of the worst, only approximated by Michelle Bachman in utter mendacity. We can couple that with his race-bating, misogyny, hostility, divorces, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and other childish antics. Yet these moral failures did not prevent his supporters from voting for him in numbers.

But his moral failures may be precisely why his supporters found him appealing. Evangelicals decided for him because Clinton was a threat to overturning Roe v. Wade, while he was an unknown who said a few contradictory things in opposition. His other moral issues were less important—even forgivable. In reality, though, this particular divide is an exemplar for a broader division in the moral fabric of America.… Read the rest

Against Superheroes: Cover Art Sample II

Capping off Friday on the Left Coast with work in Big Data analytics (check out my article mildly crucified by editing in Cloud Computing News), segueing to researching Çatalhöyük, Saturn’s link to the Etruscan Satre, and ending listening to Ravel while reviewing a new cover art option:

coverart-v1-2-27-2015Read the rest

Dell Acquires Kitenga

Dell Inc. : Quest Software Expands Its Big Data Solution with New Hadoop-Centric Software Capabilities for Business Analytics

10/23/2012| 08:05am US/Eastern

  • Complete solution includes application development, data replication, and data analysis

Hadoop World 2012-Quest Software, Inc. (now part of Dell) announced three significant product releases today aimed at helping customers more quickly adopt Hadoop and exploit their Big Data. When used together, the three products offer a complete solution that addresses the greatest challenge with Hadoop: the shortage of technical and analytical skills needed to gain meaningful business insight from massive volumes of captured data. Quest builds on its long history in data and database management to open the world of Big Data to more than just the data scientist.

News Facts:

  • Kitenga Analytics: Based on the recent acquisition of Kitenga, Quest Software now enables customers to analyze structured, semi-structured and unstructured data stored in Hadoop. Available immediately, Kitenga Analytics delivers sophisticated capabilities, including text search, machine learning, and advanced visualizations, all from an easy-to-use interface that does not require understanding of complex programming or the Hadoop stack itself. With Kitenga Analytics and the Quest Toad®Business Intelligence Suite, an organization has a complete self-service analysis environment that empowers business and systems analysts across a variety of backgrounds and job roles.
More:

http://www.4-traders.com/DELL-INC-4867/news/Dell-Inc-Quest-Software-Expands-Its-Big-Data-Solution-with-New-Hadoop-Centric-Software-Capabiliti-15415359/Read the rest