Big Data without good analytics can lead to bad decisions

Big Data does not necessarily mean Good Data. And that, as an increasing number of experts are saying more insistently, means Big Data does not automatically yield good analytics.

If the data is incomplete, out of context or otherwise contaminated, it can lead to decisions that could undermine the competitiveness of an enterprise or damage the personal lives of individuals.

One of the classic stories of how data out of context can lead to distorted conclusions comes from Harvard University professor Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. A Big Data project was attempting to use Twitter feeds and other social media posts to predict the U.S. unemployment rate, by monitoring key words like "jobs," "unemployment," and "classifieds."

Using an analytics technique called sentiment analysis, the group collected tweets and other social media posts that included these words to see if there were correlations between an increase or decrease in them and the monthly unemployment rate.

While monitoring them, the researchers noticed a huge spike in the number of tweets containing one of those key words. But, as King noted, they later discovered it had nothing to do with unemployment. "What they hadn't noticed was Steve Jobs died," he said.

In the telling, it's a somewhat humorous story, outside of the tragedy of Jobs' untimely passing. But the lesson is a deadly serious one for those looking to rely on the magic of Big Data to guide their decisions.

King said the mix-up over the dual meanings of "jobs" is, "just one of many similar anecdotes. Anyone working in this area has had similar experiences."

"Lists of keywords, curated by human beings, work OK for the short run, but tend to fail catastrophically over the long run," he said. "You can fix it up by adding exceptions, but there's a lot of human labor involved."

He said it is easy for anyone to create their own example just by entering a keyword into the Bing Social page.

"You'll see some relevant things and some irrelevant. If you don't change the query and watch over time, you will often find the conversation veering away in some way -- sometimes a little, sometimes not at all for a while, and sometimes dramatically," he said.

But King said that overall there are many examples of big data analytics producing useful things, "so failures tend not to appear in the literature."

Kim Jones, senior vice president and CSO of Vantiv, said this is not a new problem, but one that can be magnified if people think massive amounts of data are magically going to produce good analytics.

"The Jobs example was a classic case of data without context. Data by itself doesnt equal intelligence," he said.

King agrees that context is key. He is co-founder and chief scientist of Crimson Hexagon, a big-data analytics firm that, in the words of Wayne St. Amand, its executive vice president of marketing, seeks to provide, "context, meaning and structure to online conversations."

Yet there are increasing examples of data without context driving decisions. The Wall Street Journal reported in February on health insurance companies using Big Data to create profiles of their members. Among the things the companies tracked was a history of buying plus-sized clothes, which could lead to a mandatory referral to weight-loss programs.

Few people would argue with encouraging people to live healthier lives, but the privacy implications are disturbing. It is possible the person buying those clothes might have been doing so for another family member. And it is not always so benign. Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported in 2008 on individuals being denied health insurance based on a history of prescription drug purchases that suggested even minor mental health conditions.

Adam Frank, writing on the National Public Radio blog, noted that in some cases banks will deny a loan to someone based in part on their contacts on the employment networking site LinkedIn or the social networking behemoth Facebook. If your "friends" are deadbeats, your credit-worthiness may be based on their reliability.

Frank quoted Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, noting on that groups blog that, "Credit card companies sometimes lower a customer's credit limit based on the repayment history of the other customers of stores where a person shops. Such 'behavioral scoring' is a form of economic guilt-by-association based on making statistical inferences about a person that go far beyond anything that person can control or be aware of."

Kim Jones said the tendency to jump to a conclusion from correlations without further analysis could have affected him personally. "During the late '80s and early '90s, data showed that Hispanic and Black males between the ages of 20 and 27 who were driving an entry-level luxury car on the I-95 corridor were likely to be drug runners," he said.

"I fit some of that profile -- I'm African American, I was that age and at that time I was driving a car like that. But if I had been stopped, the police would have seen that I was wearing an Army uniform with Second Lt. bars and had a West Point ring," he said.

The point, he said, is that, "its always bad to rely just on data analytics. When you take the human element out of the equation, you by definition create a higher error rate."

In short, Big Data is a tool, but should not be considered the solution. "It can help you narrow something down from millions to perhaps 150," Jones said, "but the temptation is to let the computer do it all, and that is what is going to get you in trouble."

---

Best comptia A+ Training, Comptia A+ Certification at examkingdom.com

A new owner may not be able to save BlackBerry

A permanent change seems to have taken hold in the mobile market, as BlackBerry explores the possibility of putting itself up for sale.

The company had pinned its hopes on the BlackBerry 10 operating system, but its phones have now slipped into fourth place behind Windows Phone devices, according to IDC and other analyst firms.

That slip seemed to play a key role in BlackBerry's decision, announced earlier this month, to set up a committee to explore options such as selling the company or finding a partner to work with.

IDC last week said that BlackBerry's market share fell to 2.9% in the second quarter -- its lowest point since the firm started tracking BlackBerry devices. Windows Phone was at 3.7%, while Android led with nearly 80% and iOS held 13.2%.

Noting that BlackBerry has lost ground in its traditional stronghold, the enterprise market, Gartner analyst Bill Menezes said even new ownership "[is] not going to address how the company restores itself."

BlackBerry does have some attractive assets, including the core QNX operating system behind BB10, BlackBerry Enterprise Service software, numerous patents and the BlackBerry Messenger brand.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

Get Organized: How to Change Your Mobile Email Signature

Get Organized: How to Change Your Mobile Email Signature
Does your phone always add some obnoxious sendoff line to all your emails? If you've procrastinated fixing it, take two minutes now to learn how to change that auto-signature on iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

Do you hate reading "sent from my iPad" at the end of an email? I sure do. But what if you're the culprit, the lazy person who has procrastinated getting rid of that automatic piece of advertising? It doesn't take much time at all to update or turn off your automated email signature on an iPhone, iPad, or Android device. Here's how to do it.

How to Change the Email Signature on iPhone and iPad

Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar.

Scroll down to Signature.

On the next page, you'll have the option to write whatever you want in your sendoff line, as well as apply it "per account" or all accounts.

If you choose per account, you can customize the signature line for each email account connected to the Mail app.

Bonus: Update Your "From" Name While you're in those settings, you might as well check that the "from" name is what you want it to be. We at PCMag always chuckle when we get an email indicating someone named "Work" or "PCMag account" is running late to a meeting.

So back up a page (i.e., go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar).

At the top during Accounts, you'll see all the accounts you have connected. Pick one by tapping it, and on the next page, pick Account. The page that pops up has a Name field. That's your "from" name. Note that not all accounts contain the same fields (Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are the same, but Hotmail doesn't have all the fields, for example).

I like to make mine just my name, except for the purpose of this image.

Tip: For the description, use the email address name. That way, you'll never be confused about which account you're accessing.

How to Change the Email Signature on Android
As with most instructions for Android phones, the details can vary slightly depending on the phone, service carrier, and email provider. The instructions here were validated using a Samsung Galaxy S III$360.78 at Amazon with MetroPCS.

Go into your Email app and select the account you want.

Tap the menu button and pick Settings.

You'll see a Signature section, most likely turned on by default. On my phone, there's a slider bar to turn the signature on and off. Tap it, and you can customize the sign off.
android email sig

While you're there, you might want to check and update the Account name and Your name fields. I like the Account name to be the exact email address name so that I never get confused about which account I'm using.

For more email tips in the Get Organized series, see:

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

Google, Microsoft play catch up to Amazon, add load balancing, auto-scaling to their clouds

Cloud computing proving to be a piggy-back industry

Google Wednesday rolled out load balancing features to its public cloud service, allowing customers to automatically scale up and down virtual machines to accommodate unexpected spikes in demand.

The rollout comes just a few months after Microsoft improved its Azure cloud service with new auto-scaling features. Both companies are effectively playing catch-up with leading IaaS provider Amazon Web Services, which already offers such features.

Load balancing is a “critical” feature for any highly scalable cloud deployment, Google engineers wrote in announcing the company’s service today. It allows Google Compute Engine (GCE) to automatically and intelligently route traffic across a collection of servers. This replaces a manual process where new virtual machines (VM) would be provisioned by the user. It’s intelligent because the system can automatically check to ensure the VMs are healthy and can accept traffic. The load balancing can be configured either using a command line interface or through APIs.

Earlier this summer Microsoft released new auto-scaling features to its Azure cloud platform. That allowed similar functionality, with the ability to scale compute resources up or down compute resources in its cloud.

Both auto-scaling and load balancing are typically used to handle traffic spikes or large-scale increases or decreases in resources. The difference between the two is that auto-scaling spreads CPU workloads across a predefined cluster of servers, whereas load balancing allows network bandwidth traffic to be distributed across clusters of servers on the fly, according to a forum post on AWS’s website.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com

DroidWhisper: How to make an Android spy phone

DroidWhisper: How to make an Android spy phone
If loaded on a BYOD device the spyware could spell trouble for businesses, Black Hat speaker says

Las Vegas -- Injecting malicious code into legitimate Android mobile applications can turn smartphones into spyphones with little effort, which could pose a problem for businesses that support BYOD programs, a researcher told the Black Hat security conference.

Climbing a very low learning curve, researchers at Kindsight (part of Alcatel-Lucent) with no previous experience with the Android software developers’ kit were able to crank out a custom version of the game Angry Birds that ran on an Android phone, says Kevin McNamee, director of security architecture at Kindsight.

MORE BLACK HAT: Top 20 hack-attack tools

ANDROID WOES: Fixes released for Android 'master key' vulnerability

The altered app gave access to the device’s GPS, microphone, camera, Wi-Fi radio, email, text messages and contact lists, he says. Attackers can record conversations in the vicinity of the phone, record phone calls and take pictures without the user knowing about it and send them to a command and control server.

If such an altered application were loaded on a device that connected to a corporate network it would become a spy node that could scan the network and launch attacks. The malicious code could be updated after it is installed on a phone to customize it to attack specific vulnerabilities it finds in the network, he says.

“It’s a remote-access Trojan in the phone, and I think it’s pretty scary,” McNamee says. The bug that allows this is related to the Android master-key flaw that was discussed at a separate Black Hat briefing.

Called DroidWhisper, the code was dropped into a legitimate version of Angry Birds, taking advantage of characteristics of Android that aren’t very rigorous in checking the certificates used to sign applications, McNamee says.

Getting the app on a phone in the first place is a challenge but it could be met with clever spear phishing, he says. In the case of the Angry Birds app, an email advertising a free version of the game with a link to a site to download it could draw in the target.

The malicious piece of the application runs in the background and boots up when the device is rebooted so it is always available, even when the app itself is turned off. It is then signed with a digital certificate, but it could be self-signed. “Any certificate will do,” he says.

DroidWhisper uses standard Android APIs to gain access to services on the device. The original legitimate app is broken down into its components using the Android application package tool. Then the app is rebuilt, adding DroidWhisper, McNamee says.

Fighting such an espionage application could be done by anti-virus software seeking communications with the command and control server, he says.

A modified legitimate application would have to be downloaded from a phone application store, for example, because it could not be posted to Google Play where the actual legitimate app is available, he says.

---

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com