8.8 Earthquake & Tsunamy - Japan

A horrible 8.8 earthquake has hit north-eastern Japan with waves of Tsunami across most of the Pacific Ocean, most hardly hit are coastal areas in north-eastern part of Japan.

This graphic shows the energy flow of the Tsunami through the Pacific ocean [note: the coast of chile might be hit surprisingly hard, according to this model's estimation].

• Great resource constantly updated are the wikipedia article
• ...and wikipedia article's discussion pages
• Live pages' on telegraph.co.uk

Lives have been lost, and many people are still missing...

Google has also made available their person finding tool:

Data from the Wolrd Bank

There is a wealth of data-sets pretty much about every country in the world available for free from April 2010 by the World Bank. Data ranges from agricultural use, educational / medical standards to financial development indicators. I discovered this resource while looking for some macroeconomic data for one of my PhD experiments. Weirdly enough I ended up browsing the huge data-set for hours and had a great time discovering the various differences in education, health and economic production between countries. For example I found that people are very keen about education in Kazachstan, in certain years even more so than in France - play around by selecting different countries.

Arable land (% of land area)

Data from World Bank, Martin's Blog :-)

You can even compose cool widgets like the one above!

I personally most enjoy browsing the data by the actual available indicators and getting to know what they mean. I found this to be a great resource and hence had to share it with my readers and btw. there's also an API for any developers out there, looks pretty neat.

Other Institutions have also opened up much of their data-records:

• US Bureau of Labout Statistics
• US Bureau of Economic Analysis (the famous BEA)
• US Data.gov
• EU Eurostat
• OECD
• UK National Statistics

My favourite book on many of these indicators is the book by Richard Yamarone - I read parts of it and it is an enlightening read, Richard provides a complete view of each discussed indicator, it's history, it's derivations, computation and uses. Highly recommended!

Constructing Surveys

Today I was looking at survey construction and survey design, since I have to prepare a survey. I intend to use the results of the survey to support a specific argument in my PhD Thesis. It isn't a large part of my work, and hence I don't want to spend too much time on this, however not surprisingly I found a lot of excellent sources on survey construction (whether offline, online, free form - interview, or closed form, see this link for a wider set of survey definitions).

An excellent introduction to surveys in social sciences, detailing the different types of answer collection (i.e. likert scales, guttman scales, semantic differentials, ranking and filter/contingency questions) can be found here. Some example questions are provided here. Maybe most useful to serious and academic-level research, are these resources: 1-a journal article detailing the stages of interview construction in a systematic manner, 2-a report for the US-Census Buro (2006) on question types and question styles (e.g. mentions academic research that argues against using "Don't know" answers in interviews, and reasons why that is the case).

My Personal Page

I just set-up my personal page (my blog is still here) on the lboro.ac.uk server, feel free to pay it a visit - http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~comds2...

Fuzzy Logic (Building a Fuzzy Inference System)

Boolean Logic has been around for many years now, however "Fuzzy Logic" is a somewhat more recent "beast", Prof. Lofti Zadeh proposed fuzzy set theory back in 1965.

In this post I want to show online resources that will illustrate that Fuzzy Systems can be simple and most of all are very elegant way to solve some problems.

I had fuzzy set theory in one of my data-mining modules during my university time, studying comp science. It was straight forward but then I never had to make much use of it (only a tiny bit in my PhD). So anyway, let's just jump into it!

1. A great way to start is to work through a real illustrative example, in which a Non-Fuzzy solution is explained, and then the Fuzzy solution is introduced and is shown that it actually does work better... <<This page does exactly that>>
2. Get this by looking at many more examples... <<Here>>
3. Try to build a Fuzzy Inference System yourself - based on the idea of "learning by doing"... <<this can be done here>> (note: this is Matlab based, but this doesn't matter at all)
4. Research papers making use of Fuzzy sets might be usefull cheap option to learn more (<<for example>>), check out a book (or two) and play with a relevant code library.

Software Libraries

Python: pyFuzzy, peach || Java: RockOn Fuzzy, Funzy || C#.net: DotFuzzy

Great Books

My New Year's Blog revamp

With the new year I decided to change my blog-up a little bit. Essentially the design template is now different, not so heavy on the eyes I hope. Secondly the direct address changed to http://martinsykora.blogspot.com, alternatively http://www.martinsykora.com is still usable.

On a different note. Each month I receive an email from NBER (The National Bureau of Economic Research) with most recent summary of published/working papers by eminent economic academics. Often I just ignore these emails, this time I saw one article that caught my attention thought and I'd recommend it as a great read to anyone interested into the general research method within science. The paper is entitled "Economics, History and Causation" and the authors suggest that a number of qualitative reserch methods should be more at the centre of an overly statistical approach to economic research (in particular since authors are from that field, however their argument extends equally to the field of, say empirical computer science).

The paper can be downloaded here http://www.nber.org/papers/w16678.pdf

Hstalavista 2010

This is the last post of the year and since it's been another good year full of fun, I would like to finish it on a humorous note.

The following four caricatures are from Shooty, a Slovak political satirist and artist, they were shown in an open air exposition. Funnily enough the event was sponsored by the US consulate.


Anbody following the financial news in Europe, know what this stands for, I found it hillarious.


Good luck Mr. Obama :-)


Cultural norms changed big time!


Industrialised death...

On this note, all the best wishes for new year!

2011 - Obama's 3rd year in Office

I've came across several articles recently about the variation in US Presidential Politics ahead of re-election. The argument is simple; potentially unpopular policies and laws are passed at the beginning of a presiding government term as opposed to more popular laws towards the end of term so that the presiding government will stand better chances of re-election. This simple argument is based on the bias of recent memories, in other words, people tend to remember recent past better than what happened several years ago.

Below is a table summarising the S&P 500 annual changes in %: 1962-2010 (13 election terms):



Of course the amount of data we can rely on is statistically seen, tiny. Yet it provides some indication to a more positive performance, in the second half of the US Presidential term. Especially the 3rd year of a term, has historically seen much growth.

Witty Quotes - part 3

I certainly believe and associate to ideas expressed by some talented people, and I feel that sometimes a whole book gives you less than a dozen great quotes that hit the right spot :-)! So over the month I spontaneously put together a few quotes which I've come accross, and so here they are:

There is one thing stronger than all the armies of the world; an idea whose time has come. Victor Hugo

Everybody wants to right the world. Nobody wants to help their neighbour. Henry Miller

The ultimate measure of a person is not where they stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where they stand at times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does! William James

No one knows what he can do till he tries. Publius Syrus

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. Anne Frank

Action is the antidote to despair. Joan Baez

Beware of half-truths. You may have got hold of the wrong half! Unknown (Anonymous)

One understands people through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect. Mark Twain

Victory belongs to the most persevering! Napoleon Bonaparte

If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of doubt of my own. Wolfgang Goethe

God created the world out of nothing, and as long as we are nothing, he can make something out of us. Martin Luther

A smooth sea never made a skilful mariner. Unknown (Anonymous)

Some people see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?' George Shaw

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Chineese proverb

Learn to obey before you command! Greek proverb

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. Thomas Edison

The further backward you can look, the further forward you are likely to see. Winston Churchill

I quote others only the better to express myself. Michel de Montaigne

Social Media Monitoring

WARNING: This article is critical of the Loughborough University Enterprise Office (an initiative to help commercials ideas & work from academia into viable business oportunities).

Well over a year ago (back in 2009, actually the idea came in 2008) I entertained myself with the idea of starting up a social media monitoring business. I have worked on the topic within my PhD and I have published on the topic and also did some decent work with a student of mine back through 2008/2009 academic year. Our results were great, winning me an IEEE best PhD student paper award at a conference among some encouraging feedback from my paper reviewers.

The idea was to use my student's existing server infrastructure (he runs a web hosting service in Poland) to accumulate web 2.0 datasets and apply data-mining and statistical techniques summarisation, and finally to build a nice and fancy User Interface based on edgy web-design techniques (which I lectured about to my large Introduction to Web Programming undergraduate class last year) and further wrap it all up into ontologies to be usable by semantic web capable agents!

The above sounded like a decent Business Plan to me, with relatively low risk, as I could have done this part time (aligned with the PhD) and we could have just used, as mentioned, my students server infrastructure to a degree. See this article for a very timely overview of Social Media Monitoring tools, and how significant they have become in business (There is much more academic work, looking at many case studies - drop me a line if you want some references to those).

We therefore decided to seek some initial funding or at least support from Loughborough's student enterprise office, in one form or another and depending on their response we wanted to begin development of the initial prototypes! After a few email exchanges and several phone conversations, I was very dissapointed...

The ent. office consultant was obviously overworked, and complained about her high volume of meetings, business trips and other responsibilities. Once I mentioned that we have published and received an award, her reaction shocked me. Apparently since the work was published we could not patent it, and hence without any possibilities of patenting she lost any interest. I was shocked by this reaction, assuming that patents still rule the world of software is something I consider quite ridiculous (just like the once click amazon buy button patent), in my opinion a barrier to innovation that's what my whole experience dealing with the entr. office at loughborough felt like.

It is ironic that reading the BBC article today, I realise that with a little bit support we could have had a finished beta product by today, covering local demand in social media monitoring in the Midlands area. Great way to throw logs under the feet of young university talent, Loughborough Student Enterprise Office, well done ;-)!

Any comments are welcome, at same time, I do know the Office was behind a few interesting projects, however they have a lot of improvement ahead to become worthy for a university of Loughboroughs Profile!