Category: Tech

Technology

Harvard’s Mechling on Technology

I love Professor Jerry Mechling.  He’s a legend at the Harvard Kennedy School, which I still think of as the John F. Kennedy School of Government.  I studied under Professor Mechling in Boston in few years ago, in the E-Government program, and it was a remarkable experience.  Professor Mechling has a razor-sharp insight into macro trends in technology and its use in government and its interaction with business.  He’s a one-man catalyst to technology innovation the world today, in my opinion.

A lot of such innovation starts at the grass roots, in bits and bytes and in ways that end-users don’t see coming.  We’ve all witnessed the results of such events over the last several decades  Who saw the coming of the Internet, of social networking, of mobile devices?  Not many. But a few did. You’ll find them among a select few science fiction writers, and of course the visionaries who made it happen.  These people are gems.

And you’ll find one of those gems in the person of Jerry Mechling.  He’s adept at bringing together movers and shakers, both as students and as supplemental presenters to his courses, as he fosters fascinating exchanges and debate, triggering everyone to think in new ways they probably wouldn’t have done otherwise.  By integrating a carefully selected cross-section of movers and shakers in his workshop format, he uniquely positions himself to generate creative thinking, and captures current thought from across the most amazing spectrum of fascinating people, which he funnels right back into the discussions he orchestrates.  He’s a force in technical innovation and implementation in the world today, in a way that we who have been fortunate enough to invest some time in his world have witnessed.  But I don’t think these truths are well known beyond those circles.

His methods are part of the overall Harvard tradition, and Professor Mechling is one of the reasons that Harvard continues to be at the forefront of innovative thought and groundbreaking trends.

Don’t forget:  Bill Gates invented the concept of Microsoft while a student at Harvard.  And the Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook while there as well.  The fact that these and other worldwide trends originated at Harvard is not a coincidence.  It’s a reflection of what goes on there.

So it was fun for me to see this recent video, featuring an interview of Professor Mechling with John O’Leary, executive editor of Better, Faster, Cheaper.  It’s about five minutes long.  It’s quick and insightful – with some key nuggets of wisdom from Professor Mechling.  See below.

 

I Beat Obama

In a battle between the President of the United States and me, I win.

At issue is the measurement of a given Twitter account’s percentage of “real” Twitter followers, as determined by StatusPeople, a British site that analyzes a Twitter account’s followers, and uses a simple formula for determining how many of those followers are “fake” or “inactive”.  The formula: followers with few to no followers of their own are flagged as “fake”, and followers with no recent tweets are deemed “inactive”.

According to StatusPeople, my list of authentic Twitter followers (@SteveOHearn), as of August 25, 2012, about 10 AM – is 97 percent, of which 88 percent are active, and nine percent are currently inactive.  Only 3 percent were identified by StatusPeople as fake.

I ran the same analysis at the same time on the account of the President of the United States.  He’s showing up as 70 percent “real”, of which StatusPeople says 39 percent are currently inactive, leaving 31 percent authentic and active.  StatusPeoples says POTUS has 30 percent “fake” followers.

I win.

Just sayin’.

Here’s the screenshot for my own metric, see below.

StatusPeople score for @SteveOHearn, August 25, 2012

And here’s the score for POTUS, aka President Barack Obama:

StatusPeople assessment of the Twitter account of Barack Obama, August 25, 2012

There you go.

One note:  there are a lot of news reports going around claiming that the President’s percentage of “fake” followers is much higher.  One national paper puts the “fake” number at 70 percent. Presumably they are lumping together the “fake” with the “inactive”, and calling them all “fake”.  But that’s obviously inaccurate.  “Inactive” might be fake, but also may have been bonafide users who got bored with Twitter.  Maybe this is more of a statement about Twitter’s product life cycle than the authenticity of the President’s Twitter followers.  We don’t really know, I don’t anyway, not yet.  But one thing is for sure, the graphic above is authentic – StatusPeople declared 30 percent of the president’s Twitter followers to be “fake”, not 70 percent.   The “inactive” 39 percent is subject to interpretation and further analysis.  I don’t care what your politics are, but whatever you do, don’t misrepresent data.  Although … we could probably launch an entire new media organization on the subject of statistics that are misused and abused, accidentally or otherwise.

Want to check your own percentage of fake Twitter followers? Click here to use the same Web app I used to create the reports shown above.

 

Social Networking, Security, and Michael Dell’s Teenage Daughter

Michael Dell’s daughter is in the news this week.

I first got a chance to meet Michael Dell in June of 2000 when he spoke at the National Press Club.  The event was coordinated by a friend, the ever so sweet and very hip Gayela Bynum, and moderated by Jack Cushman, who was the Club’s president that year, and who I was able to work with on some tech projects at the Club – Jack was one of the key club leaders at the Club who recognized the power of the World Wide Web early on.

The entire event is still online at C-Span’s online video archives:

Michael Dell at the National Press Club - June 8, 2000

I was in the audience, right up front:

June 8, 2000 - Michael Dell at the National Press Club

I remember clearly that the introduction for Michael Dell was stunning, even to me, and I thought I’d known Dell Computers fairly well already.  Michael Dell, at 35 years old, was announced by Jack as “the youngest CEO of any Fortune 500 company”.  Dell Computers had already become the top seller of personal computers worldwide at the time, selling $40M per day online.  Jack went on to say that Dell stock had risen 79,000 percent in the prior ten years, and in 1999 the Wall Street Journal named Dell Computers as the number 1 company in terms of total return to investors in the previous 3-year, 5-year, and 10-year periods.  You can hear all of this in the video link above.

Michael Dell was already a rather wealthy man that day in 2000.  He’s even more so now.  And he reportedly spends about $3 million on private security.

But that didn’t stop his daughter from taking to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to do what pretty much most teenagers do nowadays:  announce their every move and constant whereabouts to the world through social apps.

Unfornately for the very typical teenager, her parents aren’t so typical.  And apparently somebody in the mix didn’t like that she published a detailed invitation to a graduation dinner, two weeks in advance, with the exact whereabouts of everyone involved out there for the world to see.  (“Dell CEO’s Daughter Booted From Twitter For Security Reasons”, Mashable.com, August 14, 2012)

So her Twitter account has been shut down.  Alas.

Security is an issue when you’re a gazillionnaire.  But for that matter – it’s an issue for all of us.  Just because you weren’t the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 in June of 2000 doesn’t mean you should ignore your own personal security today.

Something to consider.

Going back to that June 2000 speech I attended … if you watch that video, you’ll near Jack close the event with a great line.  The Club always gives an official National Press Club coffee mug to each speaker at the end of their talk, as one of a few tokens of appreciation for the speaker’s efforts and time.  Jack presented the mug to Michael as the “world renowned and highly coveted National Press Club coffee mug”, adding: “I recommend you install java in this before you use it”.  HA!  Such a geek thing to say, I love it.  For those of you aren’t software developers, Java is a great software development language. Obviously it is also a reference to coffee. Excellent pun.

But you probably already knew all of that!

More Praise for “Oracle SQL Expert” – Trent See

OCA Oracle Database SQL Certified Expert by Steve O'Hearn from Oracle PressI’ve been exchanging emails with a great Oracle professional named Trent See.  Trent originally emailed me back in October of 2010, but stupid me was so busy I never got around to writing back to most of the email I received on the book until recently.  So I only recently asked Trent for permission to quote him, and he just granted me that permission this week.

Here’s an excerpt of Trent’s outstanding original email:

“Thank you for writing the OCA Oracle Database SQL Certified Expert Exam Guide (Exam 1Z0-047) … I’m so glad I bought the book!  There is no way I would have been prepared to take THAT exam with my working knowledge … Thank you Steve!  I have learned more new SQL techniques reading your book in the past month and a half than I have over the past 9+ years!”- Oct. 12, 2010

I’ve added his quote to the praise page for the book.  Trent also provided a few items that I’ve included in the book’s Errata sheet, and I’m crediting him for the those.

Thank you Trent!  And welcome to the distinguished ranks of certified Oracle SQL experts!

Hadoop and the Oracle RDBMS

Hadoop LogoI love Hadoop for what it does.  One advantage to it: it enables the repositioning of common data manipulation tasks to distributed points on a network, opening up the ability to perform analysis across multiple data sources across various web-enabled sources and leveraging multiple data resources as though they were integrated into a single autonomous data store.   That’s one of its advantages.

But Hadoop is still relatively new.  So it amazes me that end-users today are shocked, shocked I tell you that infrastructure capabilities such as robust security and multi-user access haven’t been fully implemented.

Information Week magazine published a great piece in which Robert Bird of Red Lambda commented that Hadoop “really isn’t designed to be a secure processing environment, which is a little scary considering how many people are trying to use it” that way, adding “[w]e see Hadoop being used to solve one problem here and two problems there … [w]hat we don’t see is 75 or 100 people in the environment all writing different programs and using it for this big cluster. We don’t see it providing the real economies of scale that it should at the data-center level.” [1]

It took Oracle and other vendors years to get those capabilities to the point of maturity.  I think a lot of modern users expect to snap two fingers and viola, instant mature complex data analysis tool.   Open source and crowd-based collaboration are certainly helping to speed the development cycle.  But complex systems like Hadoop still need time to develop, at least – in the current environment.

Be patient, Hadoop-ians.  It’ll happen.

Footnotes

[1] Hadoop Security: Some Enterprises Miss Risks. Information Week, August 8, 2012.  http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/news/software-platforms/240005132/hadoop-security-some-enterprises-miss-risks1

In-Store Facebook Cameras Can “Recognize” You. A Good Thing?

In the last few days, I’ve seen reports about a startup project that uses in-store cameras to recognize you visually when you walk in by scanning your face, looking you up in their database, and then sending you “deals” to you based on your “likes” you’ve registered in your Facebook account.

Creepy?  Yes, I think so too.  And inevitable.

The project is called “Facedeals”, and they say they’re not affiliated with Facebook, which is to say that they aren’t owned by Facebook, but they are clearly integrating with the Facebook platform somehow, and borrow their logo coloring and imagery from Facebook. Here’s a bit online about them: http://redpepperland.com/lab/details/facedeals

They’re so creepy that someone’s already created a “Some Ecard” about them:

Right now they’re test-marketing in Nashville, Tennessee.  And they’re generating a lot of buzz.  I first read about them in the Daily Mail, a UK paper.

Here’s a good 60-second report about them from Buzz:60:

So what do they mean for the future?  Well …

  • As a data professional, I say – the more data, the better, as long as we have the ability to process it, make sense of it, and turn it into actionable knowledge – and that appears to be the case here.
  • As a private citizen, I say – it’s the same old story.  More information in benevolent hands is fine.  “Benevolent” is the key word here.  History shows that governments and other large or influential organizations are not always so benevolent.   But before continuing with that particular train of thought, the next logical question is … does our opinion about such things matter?  If society concludes that it doesn’t like this sort of thing, can anything be done about it?  Can this sort of technical development be stopped?  I say – no, I doubt it.  So the “benevolent” discussion becomes irrelevant.

So … next topics:  how else can this sort of technology integration be leveraged for good?  Improved?  Thwarted?  Those are the kind of questions that I believe matter most at this point.

The Def Con Prize, Wal Mart, Computer Security, and Con Games

The legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick wasn’t necessarily the technical wizard that a lot of people think he is.  But most of Mitnick’s hacks were simple classic con games, nothing more.  Many assume he managed to “guess” passwords or had some other super secret technical ability to navigate around firewalls and login systems.  Not the case.  In one instance, he literally just walked into a supposedly secure facility, walked right into the computer room and physically grabbed a huge notebook of system user names and passwords, and then – simply walked right out, unchallenged.  I heard he was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans in a coat-and-tie office, and nobody confronted him.

A typical approach he used was to phone a system administrator, pretending to be an authority figure of some sort, and demand access to a particular system to support a presentation he was supposedly giving at the time, and “it won’t be my hide when General so-and-so finds out this thing didn’t happen because somebody changed a stupid login password, do YOU want to explain why we couldn’t give this demonstration?  Do YOU want to be fired?”

It often worked.

And apparently it still does.  The buzz going around network security circles now is about the recent Def-Con contest where the winner phoned a system admininstrator at Wal Mart.  (Canadian hacker dupes Walmart to Win Def Con prize, theStar.com, August 8, 2012). Using classic con-man techniques, the contest winner finagled 75 pre-determined data points out of the guy within 20 minutes.  He did it all over the phone, through simple conversation, while sitting in a glass cage, as part of the observed competition.

The process of extracting secure data from human beings through direct interpersonal interaction (that’s “talking to people” for the layman) is apparently now called “social engineering”, which has a nice ring to it.  I used to call it “that stuff Paul Newman and Robert Redford did in the movie The Sting“.  “Social Engineering” sounds so much more impressive.

But here’s my question:  did anyone at Def Con check to confirm that the Wal Mart guy provided actual secure information?  After all, a typical response to a suspected incoming hack attack – technical or conventional – is to distribute bogus information to see how and where it turns up.  Disinformation, in other words.

Did the Def Con folks confirm that the hack was truly successful?

Or was the hacker merely walking into a trap?

The Olympics Medal Count – Data Analysis

Medal CountI’ve always thought it was silly that we tally Olympic gold medals by country, with no adjustment to account for each nation’s population.  Is it fair to compare the more than 300 million people who live in the United States of America with, for example, tiny little Grenada, with a population barely over 100,000?  It stands to reason that larger countries, on average, will produce more gold medal contenders than smaller countries, it’s just the simple law of probability.

So I was about to do the research and compile a “medals per capita by country” chart, when I found that someone else beat me to it.  Here’s the URL: http://simon.forsyth.net/olympics.html

That’s the website of Simon Forsyth.  Simon’s nice enough to include links on his webpage to the websites of other people also named Simon Forsyth, which is cool in and of itself.  But I digress.

Simon has compiled a list of medal results, current as of August 7 (it says August 8 at 4:30 AM, and at the time I’m writing this, it’s 2:30 PM of August 7 on the U.S. east coast, so I have no idea how he did this in the future.)

Here’s a highlight of Simon’s chart listing at the time of this writing, listing nations according to their medal-count PER CAPITA:

1. Grenada
2. New Zealand
3. Jamaica
4. Slovenia
5. Croatia
…
8. Great Britain
…
24. United States of America
…
34. People’s Republic of China

That’s a very different story than the typical chart we’re currently seeing in the news, a chart that shows China and the U.S. battling it out for first place.  Both China and the U.S. have enormous populations, one should expect that these nations would top the medal counts.  But in reality, for its population – China is doing terribly, the U.S. is faring a bit better.  And smaller nations like Croatia and Slovenia have a lot to be proud of.  And Grenada should be absolutely giddy – and reportedly is.

See the rest at Simon Forsyth’s website.

The Woz, the Cloud, and Control

The Woz

It’s about time somebody said it: “I really worry about everything going to the cloud.”  Steve Wozniak, creator of the earliest widely used personal computer – the Apple II – spoke to a group recently in Washington, DC, and warned that cloud computing will be “horrendous”.

Personally, as a lifelong data professional and uber geek, I would say – it could be horrendous.  The potential is certainly there.  The shift to cloud computing puts the onus on the cloud providers to ensure safety and availability of the information contained in the cloud.  Does that guarantee a horrendous outcome?  I don’t think so.  But it’s certainly possible.  There’s unquestionably an element of risk involved.  That’s why I only put certain digital assets in the cloud, and not others.

Wozniak, I believe, is speaking to the notion that most people and organizations are moving to shift larger amounts of information to the cloud, and therefore he’s convinced that it will ultimately be “horrendous”.

The key concept in cloud computing is the element of “control”.  Who controls your digital assets?  By “digital assets”, I mean – the software you’ve purchased, the eBooks you bought, your own personal data that you’ve developed,  collected, and stored?  Your documents you’ve written, your emails you wrote, sent, and received?  Your family photos?  Your scanned bills and bank statements?

Even your votes you’ve cast on official ballots in your local polling station – those are subject to the cloud as well.  Everything that has been digitized is now subject to the major paradigm shift of moving the storage of such digital assets to the cloud.

The term “cloud” is intended to emphasize the nebulous nature of the storage of this information.  You’re not supposed to be concerned with it’s location, it’s just “out there”.  Somewhere.  On some computer, connected to someplace on the Internet.

It could be the down the street.  Or Siberia.  Theoretically, it could be physically located in a satellite in outer space, literally.

You’re not supposed to be worried about it.

Wozniak apparently is worried about it.

Are you?