Posts
Adam DrakeIntroduction When a company wants to make data one of the prime focuses of the business, often the first problem that arises is how to fit a Data Science team into the current organizational structure. Similar problems have risen in the past with Business Intelligence/Business Analytics, and other disciplines, but the reason that Data Science presents a different problem is because it is a superset of previous areas in terms of technical and business scope.
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read more Adam DrakeIntroduction As I was browsing the web and catching up on some sites I visit periodically, I found a cool article from Tom Hayden about using Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) and mrjob in order to compute some statistics on win/loss ratios for chess games he downloaded from the millionbase archive, and generally have fun with EMR. Since the data volume was only about 1.75GB containing around 2 million chess games, I was skeptical of using Hadoop for the task, but I can understand his goal of learning and having fun with mrjob and EMR.
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read more Adam DrakeThere has been some debate recently on AdExchanger about the benefits of first price versus second price auctions. Esco Strong, the Director of Display Marketplace Strategy for Microsoft Advertising wrote an article that basically said second price auctions didn’t work well for single unit RTB auctions and we should get rid of them:
Comparatively, first-price auctions are competitions where there is no reduction in clearing price for the auction winner; instead, the winner simply acquires the good they have won by paying the price of their bid.
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read more Adam DrakeThere has been quite a bit of fuss in the days since Apple started rejecting apps that make use of the UDID. The deprecation was announced months ago, but the rejection started without warning and was a surprise to some. Firms that had been planning for the change typically already had multiple secondary solutions in place, many of which rely on using the Media Access Control (MAC) address from the wireless network interface controller (wireless NIC) on the device.
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read more Adam DrakeThe last week has seen quite a bit of commotion in the mobile world as Apple has started enforcing their long-awaited deprecation of the use of the UDID. Honestly, I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. This change was announced by Apple last summer, so everyone has had nearly a year to prepare for it. The general set of questions I’ve seen on the topic can be reduced to the following.
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