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Ted Cuzzillo

Why they resist open source

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In defense of the lively, Mark Madsen observes the nature of resistance to open source BI tools. An excerpt:

Overcoming someone’s resistance to open source in your organization means that you probably need to educate them, given that they use open source every day without thinking about it. It’s in everything from cars to cell phones, as well as almost all the commercial BI tools shipping today. More likely, they are resistant because they (a) are threatened in some way by the change you propose, (b) face organizational obstacles like educating the legal department about licenses or (c) face political consequences you aren’t aware of.

… Read the rest “Why they resist open source”

Craving value: sparks for a new economic engine

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It’s hard to see through the smoke as our financial house burns down, I know. But what I’ve noticed is more interesting: the first signs of rebuilding.

This month, three experts I read—visual analytics expert Stephen Few, Competing on Analytics author Tom Davenport and digital-media economy specialist Umair Haque—all seem to have knit recent blog posts with the same thread: honest value in business and the economy.

Off the charts: “black swan” ahead?

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“Black swans” are the anti-gravity of predictive analytics. These events are so far off the charts that we dismiss the possibility out of hand. But when one occurs, it’s a doozy.

The Panic of ’08 may lead us straight into one of these, says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness among other works. He and his mentor, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, told NewsHour’s Paul Solman last week that what’s coming might make the Great Depression and the Long Depression of the 1870s seem small.

But before you lose sleep, mind this caveat: Taleb himself calls predictions “bullshit.”… Read the rest “Off the charts: “black swan” ahead?”