Big Data Transforms Online Education
Online education’s recent success and scale creates unique big data. Together it changes online education and enables personalized, adaptive learning. This development challenges traditional education services.
An educational paradigm shift
The End of Higher Education as We Know It, explains how online education will transform higher education. The fact that (prestigious) universities scramble to be part of this paradigm shift shows how serious the development is. Today, we can take an increasing array of courses online, often of the highest quality, higher than many are privileged to enjoy in brick-and-mortar universities. The change started off as recordings of courses given in a traditional setting. Increasingly, we see online tailored courses by experts in their field like Andrew Ng from Stanford with his Machine Learning course on Coursera. read more…
Hadoop cluster cost of Amazon EC2 vs EMR
What is the price of a small Elastic MapReduce (EMR) vs an EC2 Hadoop cluster? This article explores the price tag of switching to a small, permanent EC2 Cloudera cluster from AWS EMR.
Cloud computing with Hadoop – maybe using AWS EMR or EC2 – makes experiments with temporary clusters and big data crunching easy and affordable. These usually provide use-cases that benefit from a more permanent cluster, i.e., to give business teams access to big data or long-running computations. This raises questions around cost and system management. Which setup is efficient, avoiding upfront capital investment, and achievable with in-house know-how? read more…
Hartals drain Bangladesh’s potential
Over the decades hartals have become commonplace in Bangladesh’s politics. There have been a variety of claims about the economic impact. However, data on hartals is scarce and the long-term impact of decades of hartals is hard to fathom. Moody’s recently warned that the current unrests pose continued economic risk. It too did not quantify the risk due to a lack of solid data on the number, quality, and impact of strikes. This is an ideal candidate to visualize the little data available to help us understand what kind of damage to Bangladesh’s economic development hartals may do. read more…
Democratize Big Data With Hive
You have started to process data with cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Service (AWS)’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR). Now that you use it regularly, other stakeholders are getting curious. You increasingly find yourself firing up an EMR cluster to quickly answer a question or try something out. It may be time to change the way you work — time for a permanent cluster and easy access for other users.
In Get Started: Big Data Crunching in the Cloud, I described one path to get started with big data processing on EMR. We were processing our daily and periodical big data jobs at Rangespan in this manner until recently. Currently, we are transitioning to a permanent cluster utilizing AWS EC2 for the cluster nodes and Cloudera for the cluster installation. read more…
Even if your business case is constantly evolving, you’ll still want to leverage big data, but being tied to a single infrastructure will limit your capital and your options.
Big data is not a starting point but a destination for many startups and teams. It becomes a conversation point as a result of the growing amount of data and the technical challenges in handling it, or perhaps a business requirement to extract value from a large dataset.
For example, at Rangespan, we use SQL and noSQL data stores, one for transactional information and one for storing multifaceted inert facts like product descriptions. Early on, we faced challenges combining the growing data in a timely way into data products and analyzing it for technical and business metrics. We are processing around 100GB every day, and the volume is growing, so we require a scalable solution. At the same time, our business cases are evolving, and we want to embrace the uncertainty. Consequently, we require the flexibility to scale up or down, or to change technologies as needed, without betting our capital on one infrastructure. read more…
Shahbag Outcry
The news is fresh and details are only emerging about the murder of Ahmed Rajib Haider Shuvo, a blogger involved in the Shahbag protest. In today’s world we can view immediately online the outcry this provokes. Last week I wrote about the online echo on Twitter the Shahbag protest had. This time I am taking a snapshot of Twitter just after the news of the murder broke to illustrate how quickly such an event spreads.
Shahbag Online
The protest on the Shahbag square in Dhaka is a remarkable show of an independent, spontaneous, non-partisan movement erupting out of pain silently carried by the people of Bangladesh for decades. It is an admirable non-violent, tenacious, proud and confident protest in the real world. The protest has been partially organised online and echoes across social media. This article visualises the emerged online conversation. This is best done with Twitter since it makes data more readily available to third parties than for example Facebook, and people freely and frequently express themselves in tweets. read more…
In the Internet age many people utilise technology to spread information, make themselves heard, organise demonstrations, or simply click like to show their support for a cause. The latter is sometimes belittled as the equivalent of a couch potato’s self-gratifying response to a pressing issue. It gives you a warm feeling but has no impact. In the last years, though, there has been a development that allows each of us to help. The problem was that for the thousands of people who like and (re)tweet an issue, there are only a few that are willing to put themselves forward and do something about it. Unfortunately, a million likes won’t buy them equipment, pay for materials, or feed them when they spend months of their lives to change something which you, I and so many others agree should be changed. Until now, enter crowd funding. read more…
I prepared an interactive timeline of the Bangladesh Liberation War for Bangladesh’s victory day. It encompasses documents, images, videos, and text about the events leading up to the war and the war itself. To fully enjoy the timeline the linked image below opens a new window or tab to utilise a full screen. You will need Javascript enabled (usually the case for most browsers) and access to Youtube for the videos (apologies if your provider or country has blocked Youtube).
Data Science is a hot topic and there are plenty of courses and resources available for anyone interested. Try out these 9 free resources to get started if you are new to the topic or want to refresh on one of the subjects. read more…
