Matthew Campbell - BI, Spatial, Temporal, etc.

I’ll share my exciting news first.  I took the GMAT this past week and scored a 750 (98th percentile) – 50 Quant / 42 Verbal.  To be completely “open kimono”, this was my second time taking the test which I knew to be inevitable immediately after seeing the score on my first test.  Many will say that this is rarely worthwhile, however there are various reasons why you would be crazy not to retest.  In that vein, I’ll share with you some tips that might help you test better the first time or at the very least help you decide whether retaking the GMAT is a good idea.

1) DO – Be Ready For a Computer Adaptive Test

I come from the age when standardized tests came with scantron forms, paper booklets and the ability to skip a question and come back to it later.  Computer Adaptive Tests change the format completely and you must be ready for it.  The best advice I can give on this is to get used to taking the exam itself.  Take as many practice exams in REALISTIC testing conditions as you can.  GMAC puts out its GMATPrep software which simulates the test taking environment and uses the same scoring algorithms as the actual test.  Also, realize that on test day you will have tremendous nervous energy which can work for and against you.  The more you practice dealing with this emotion, the better.

2) DO - Have the Proper Strategy

There are a variety of great resources out there to help you prepare for the GMAT.  So much so that it has become a niche industry.  I’m not going to go into which materials are good or bad.  One of the best questions to consider though is what kind of score you’re targeting.  Not everyone has their sites set on a high score and not all the preparation materials are built for helping you achieve a high score.  The strategy to attain a 650-700 is very different than the strategy to get a 750, and the books won’t tell you what range their strategies target.

The strategy that I employed on my first administration called for paying extra special attention to the first ten questions.  Later questions were considered to be less important because you would be bucketed appropriately by how you did on the first ten.  I do NOT suggest this as a strategy and would warn you away from this.  Certainly you want to do well on all phases of the exam, but you cannot put a premium on any section of the exam like this.  I ended up not finishing the quantitative portion of my first exam due to running out of time.  Other sources will warn you as well that your score drops precipitously when you have long strings of missed questions which often happens when you have 4 questions to go and 2 minutes left.

3) DO – Listen to Your Body

This is actually one of the hardest ones to follow and I certainly didn’t do this on my first test.  You need to get a full night rest before your test and, if you’re targeting a high score, sincerely evaluate whether anything might affect the quality of your thinking on test day.

The context around my first test was really a perfect example of when to reschedule.  The week before my exam, both my oldest and youngest child became ill which included doctor visits and amoxicillin.  Within days, sickness spread through the rest of the family and I knew I was in trouble.  Add on top of this the sleepless night before the test taking care of sick children and you’re describing the recipe for test disaster.  In retrospect, I should have postponed but GMAC does not make this easy.  You have to reschedule 7 days ahead of time or you’ll be hit with a $250 fee which is the cost of taking the exam in the first place.  I can’t imagine how many people reschedule within the 7 day window knowing this.

Massachussetts Institute of Technology, one of the premier technical universities in the world, recently announced a new online learning initiative called MITx.  This new offering looks to extend their already impressive collection of courses and materials which are freely available via OpenCourseware.  The press release is below:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/mitx-education-initiative-1219.html

While MITx is still in the early phases of development, one of the more interesting notes was that users may be able to earn a certificate of completion for their studies.  This is interesting to me because of the experience that I’ve had recently with Linear Algebra which I took at a local university.  While I learned a great amount from the class that I took, there were many topics where, for whatever reason, I just wanted to know more about a concept and develop some better intuition.  Early in the semester I found two universities that were able to fill the gap.  The first was MIT via OpenCourseware.  The lectures were taped back in 2001 and given by the author of one of the more popular books on Linear Algebra, Gilbert Strang.  There is nothing like watching someone who truly lives and breathes the material share their passion for the material.  Students who are interested in the subject matter can’t help but become further stimulated to dig deeper and know more.  The second university was University of Colorado Colorado Springs which offers courses via their MathOnline system.  They’ve impressed me both with the classes that they’ve offered over the years as well as the quality with which they teach it.  They actually offer their classes for credit which has enticed me to register for two courses during the Spring semester.

The face of online education really seems to be changing.  As I think about the future of education where students can truly learn from the very best and not be tied to the region in which they live, I can’t help but wonder what university education will look like when my children get to that stage.

Very exciting news this week around the announcement of the Broad Prize for Urban Education.  Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was chosen as the number one district across the country for its dedication to closing achievement gaps and ensuring that all children receive a chance at a quality education.  As some of my may know, the bulk of my time with Mariner was spent on a project entitled Managing for Performance which was a multi-phase, targeted project within Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools that sought to achieve these very goals through technology.  Much of my work with the project was to build the data warehouse and analytics backbone which would provide the real-time data which is crucial to improving student and teacher performance.  Within the education arena, the project also included some pretty cutting-edge approaches to sharing student data amongst educators, schools and learning communities to support the sharing of teaching approaches that worked.  Sadly, Mariner’s Education Group was facing the strong headwinds of the economy and fierce budget crunches within state and local governments so Charlotte-Mecklenburg was one of the few districts that was able to implement the solution that our group co-authored with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.  However I sincerely hope that the work that was done will continue to grow and flourish as the district moves toward reshaping the concept of what's possible within public education.

If you’re interested in seeing the public portion of Managing for Performance that I worked on, you can go to the following page (just be sure to use Internet Explorer (SharePoint limitation).  The strategic goals of the district are displayed along with the metrics that made up the goal.  Be sure to read the details on how to navigate from the scorecard to the multi-dimensional charting which is really the beauty of the whole thing:

CMS Data Dashboard

If you’re interested in learning more about Broad, see the video below:

I’m shameless in my love for using whiteboards for brainstorming, designing technology and as of late, doing math. So, it should seem fitting that my wife and I decided to install a massive piece of showerboard on our office wall this weekend. See the link below to see what I’m talking about:

How To – Dirt Cheap Wall-Sized Whiteboards

At first I was a bit apprehensive about the quality of the showerboard but I’ve been really pleased. It writes and erases like you’d expect and if you’re like me and you love having oversized whiteboards to explore ideas, this is perfect.  The only downside that I experienced was getting it home.  We pulled up to Home Depot without considering how large a standard piece of showerboard really is.  Turns out that on a windy day, that showerboard really wants to take off and fly on its own.  This led to some pretty crazy screaming in the car from me, my wife and the kids in the back.

Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been able to really see how a number of organizations use data to make decisions. What has gnawed at me quite recently though is how the arithmetic mean seems to have become the de facto standard for telling the story within a dataset. As I’ve become more familiar with the evolution of data science, I’m beginning to think that modern technology, while great for solving a large number of problems, has made many information workers lazy in their approaches. I think we may have lost touch with some of the long-standing, dare I say transcendental, tools that mathematics and science can offer an organization looking to understand what drives business. So, to help myself along in this regard I’ve decided to head back to school. This summer I’ll be hopping back into some Calculus and possibly some Linear Algebra or Statistics. More on this for later.

For those of you who follow my blog, I must apologize for being away for the past few months.  My wife and I gave birth to our fourth child in early November and our world has been a bit upside down every since.  When people find out that we’ve had four children in four years, their reaction is usually one of either respectful amazement or utter bewilderment.  To be honest, we are happy and appreciative to have four beautiful, healthy children…but I completely understand Bill Cosby when he said ‘And the reason we have five children is because we don’t want SIX’.  We are one less, but the message still applies. 

A big Thank You to all of those who live in Charlotte who have helped my wife and I through the last couple of months…be it helping with a meal, dropping by and spending time with the kids, etc.  It has meant a lot to us and we really appreciate it.

It is also the New Year so Happy New Year to everyone out there!  I am looking forward to getting back into my blog again and writing more about spatial and business intelligence.  Sadly, I missed the deadline last month to submit an abstract to SQL Rally.  Not that I thought I could contend with the more seasoned speakers out there at this point, but I would have liked to have given it a shot. I’ll be looking for some other upcoming events to get back into the swing of things.

I presented ‘Going Spatial with SQL Server 2008’ at SQL Saturday #48 in Columbia, SC this past weekend and had a really great time.  Big thanks go out to K. Brian Kelley and the SQL Saturday organizers, speakers, volunteers and attendees for making this such a great opportunity to learn and network.  I understand that any event of this size involves a tremendous amount of hard work…a lot of which goes unnoticed if everything runs smoothly, which it certainly did.

Special thanks also to those who attended my session yesterday.  I wanted to go ahead and post the presentation along with the code which was shared so you can continue to explore using spatial data.  Click here to download the files.

There were a couple of questions which came up at the end of the talk which I wanted to include here.  One was around being able to pull spatial data out of SQL Server and transform them into KML.  I suggested starting with the SQL Server Spatial Tools project which does have some KML processing options included but they may only be for importing of KML data into SQL Server.  For exporting, you may want to look at the SQL Server to KML project.

Another question came up around production-izing the geocoding logic that we covered during the presentation.  One of the challenges that you’ll face as  you start geocoding thousands of addresses at a time is dealing with daily query limits that service providers will enforce.  These are often in the form of X Number of Requests / 24 hours.  So, you’ll need to be sure to only geocode a certain number of addresses per day.  Also, if your requests come in at too fast of a rate (100 in a minute, let’s say), then your requests can also be denied.  Most services have a specific response status that tells you that you’re being denied for this very reason.  As such, if you want to production-ize mass nightly geocoding, you’ll need to build in some throttling logic that will manage this situation.  I haven’t posted any logic around doing something like this but will look to post this soon for anyone who might be interested.

As for the sessions that I attended, I really enjoyed Jessica Moss’s ‘Making Reporting Services Work For You’, Mark Tabladillo’s ‘Data Mining with PowerPivot 2010’ and Andy Warren’s ‘Creating a Professional Development Plan’.  To be honest, I didn’t realize until I went to Andy’s session that he had actually sat in on my presentation and that he liked it.  I had a slight Sally Field moment…’He liked it…he really really liked it.’  I also got some really good feedback on the presentation from the attendees and am really looking forward to expanding on the topic for future events.  Thanks again, everybody, and well done!

I’ll be speaking at SQL Saturday #48 on Going Spatial which will be a Beginner-level class for anyone looking to get started with the spatial features in SQL Server 2008.  The event is taking place on October 2nd at Midlands Technical College - Airport Campus.

There will be a number of great speakers, many of whom are currently or have been colleagues during my time at Mariner.  If you’re within driving distance to Columbia, definitely come check it out.  It’s totally free and you’re bound to learn a ton.  More event details can be found here.

To give you an idea, below is a list of some of the sessions being given by current and former Mariner colleagues at SQL Saturday #48…and this is only a small percentage of the sessions being offered.  Hope to see you there!

Attribute Discretization in Analysis Services
William Pearson
Intermediate

Creating Custom Components for SSIS 
John Welch
Intermediate

Delivering BI Solutions Rapidly using Vulcan 
John Welch
Intermediate

Design and Implement Like Edison
William Pearson
Beginner

Documenting Your Integrated Microsoft BI Solution 
William Pearson
Intermediate

Getting Started with MDX 
William Pearson
Beginner

Information Visualization - Making great Charts 
Wayne Snyder
Intermediate

Managing Database Schemas With VS201 DB projects 
Rafael Salas
Beginner

Planning your ETL architecture with SSIS 
Rafael Salas
Beginner

Processing Flat Files with SSIS 
John Welch
Intermediate

Unit Testing SSIS Packages 
John Welch
Intermediate

It seems that a lot of attention is being paid to the ascendancy of the Android over the last couple of years.  Note the incredible growth trend below in the Android OS market share as it compares to the other Smartphone OS’s out there.  Yes, we know…Windows Mobile is all but dead already (or is it?):

(Credit: NPD Group – click here for original press release)

The Blackberry has never held much of a ‘cool’ or ‘hip’ status like the iPhone but has been the predominant player in the business world.  That may remain constant, but for the time being, Blackberry, while having the largest share, isn’t driving innovation in the mobile market.  So the fact that Android has surpassed the iPhone seems to be speaking to the descendency of the iPhone and the coronation of a new ruler of cool mobile technology…at least when using the democracy of the mobile marketplace as our guide.  This battle will only continue to expand into different channels as the first Android-based tablets hit the streets and then…gasp…when we have an Android desktop OS.  You can only imagine the blood that will run in the streets when both Apple and Microsoft have to defend their territory against Google. 

I can tell you one reason that I’m an Android fan…the ease with which any developer can create an Android application.  This is a particularly important issue if you’re a PC user like me and building spatial applications for the mobile market.  Both iPhone and Android demand that you join their ‘club’ if you want to sell apps to their users.  Understandable, I guess.  For .NET developers, both mobile platforms require that you code in a different language…Java for Android and Objective-C for iPhone (more on this below).  However iPhone takes this one step further and forces all developers to develop on a Mac. 

To be clear, I’m not wild about coding in Java for the Android.  I’ve always felt that .NET tools were better than for any other language.  But I realize that in order to target the Android, I need to code in Java so I just stomach it.  But at least coding for the Android I don’t have to go out and buy new hardware.  Up until recently, there used to be a tradeoff for this….NET developers could code in .NET languages using Mono which would then translate the .NET code into Objective-C for the iPhone and iTouch, but Apple put the kibosh on that with the iPhone Developer Program Agreement released this past Spring stating the following:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

So, from a developer perspective, I start to wonder…is this just one example of how Apple can come out with the epitome of cool only to wreck itself with draconian policy and control structures?  This is a technology-centric view, certainly, but if we look across the spectrum of touchpoints that Apple has had with society at large, is this how they have treated everyone?  Is this how they have treated their suppliers…their partners…their customers?  Is it a fundamentally flawed overarching corporate vision within Apple that pushes it to want to strictly control its connections with the outside world?  Is this what eventually leads to a slide in market share like we’re seeing with the iPhone?

So what is one to do when faced with the rigid structures that Apple pushes down?  One option is to work within what they allow…from my technology-centric view, I can work with what they offer to target the iPhone audience?  I can stick with web-based applications which have limited functionality.  I can pay someone to do it for me if I don’t want to fork out the loot for a Mac.  I can pony up and buy a Mac to start developing. Or, I can wait and see if the iPhone continues to decline in coolness in the hopes that this will drive policy changes.  I’m tempted to choose the last one, honestly, but realize this may be a childish impulse.  Like that hot nightclub spot where the lights slowly dim over time, will Apple start letting in new breeds of clients to stay open…or will they simply change the game completely and revamp? 

The iPhone is certainly not dead but, no doubt, will need to reorient themselves.  I would hope that someone might be TRULY bold within Apple and envision a different model for themselves where revenue is not dependent upon control.  Sadly, I picture the visionaries at Apple in strategy meetings using words like ‘Then they’d have to…’ rather than ‘we could support…’.  In my opinion, if Apple makes it easier, not harder, to target their audience, they will most certainly benefit…moreso than how they would benefit monetarily by forcing me to buy a Mac.