Worst Pun Ever: Today, we are talking about Al… Al Gore… Al Gore Rhythms… Algorithms! Definition: a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end especially by a computer1 Inputs: Many algorithms use census data or FICO score as one of their prime inputs Plus any custom information you give a website Plus any information they glean about you from other sites (when you visit a site with a Facebook Share button, Facebook can track that you're there17) W...

History of Data in Politics First off, 538's podcast, What's the Point did a great four part series on the data of politics that covered the history of politics from the late 1800s through the primaries. So please check out the above links for more context behind this. A brief history of data in politics shows the major ways candidates appealed to constituents progressed along this path: Party Elite chose candidates. Direct outreach - Candidates engage voters directly, including thing...

Fun Fact: The main riff in NBC's Olympic them is from Bugler's Dream (1958) by  Leo Arnaud. History Most believe games started in 776 BC as part of a religious festival in Greece to honor Zeus; however, some evidence suggests it could have started as early as the 10th century BC The stadion race was the first event, a 600 foot race. This may have been the only event for the first 13 Olympics They occurred every four years for twelve centuries, until 396 AD; then there was a...

Let me set the stage for you... It's 2003: Chicago just won the Oscar for Best Picture and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is the top selling video game. Apple iPods still have scroll wheels and iTunes just started selling music for the first time. From a tech standpoint, Windows XP is all the rage as the latest Windows OS and folks with a lot of money to spend are buying PCs with a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz processor, 512MB of RAM (or maybe up to 2GB max), and an 80GB hard drive.  Oracle just released v...

Huge thanks to @Deepak90Mittal for hanging out with me on this episode! News Prologue: Gartner's Magic Quadrant for BI is out - overhauled methodology, Oracle is out; Tableau and Microsoft (PowerBI) reign supreme! https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-2XXET8P&ct=160204&st=sb) SQL Server on Linux! = millions of geeks rejoice and it may spell the end of Windows in the data center. http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-server-on-linux/ http://w...