The new location for this blog

I've FINALLY gotten my new webpage and blog to a point where I'm reasonably comfortable going live.  Please update your bookmarks and links to http://www.olomon.com/wp  Thanks so much for reading!

Gogo Inflight Wifi is using unsecure clear text passwords?

In the process of researching a paper on the legality of wiresniffing (clif notes version: it's not legal, stop trying to pretend it's not), I found out a really horrifying fact:

Gogo, the inflight wireless company that I researched last semester (here's my paper that I wrote about inflight wifi), transmits their logon passwords as clear text.

No, seriously.

To even use their service, you have to log onto their page, accept their terms, pay for your service, and then mosey around the net.  My guess is that they use a nice secure page for their credit card intake form (can't check on that now since I'm not on a plane), but as far as logging into an existing account, it's giving your username and password out to everyone that's listening in.  People can do this using free software like Wireshark, and it's not hard to do.  I wish I knew if it was a switched network or not...anyone know?  I can't find any info on their site, and I'll probably fire off an inquiry to their customer service without a response.

Well, I guess that discount coupon I had for service this month will go unused, because there's no way on earth I'm logging on now.

Basic Text Mining for Fundraisers

Kevin MacDonell has another great post up on his blog, and this time it's about his experiment with applying text mining to nonprofit fundraising.  What he did was basically this: dig into the free text fields (those ubiquitous "Comments/Notes?" blocks that are used as catch-alls for data that doesn't fit anywhere else, and for observations that were significant enough to note), and see what reoccurring phrases jumped out at him.

He outlines the process he came up with, which from the looks of it, seems to be the things that SPSS automates quite well. That makes me wonder, is the real value of text mining software really in the included libraries?  Or is there honestly some wondrous proprietary algorithm lurking in there?  My experience with it so far has led me to suspect that you can get the basic software from anyone (provided that it's fairly user friendly), and from there its value depends mainly on how you train it.  It's rather like hiring an adorable infant...it's cute, but not really productive until you teach it what it needs to know, and the entire process can be time consuming, frustrating, and expensive.  It's easy for a project like this to take on a life of its own and before you know it, terms like "boondoggle" get whispered.

So, back to Kevin.  His experiment was basic, but that's one of the best things about it.  He didn't sink an ungodly amount of time and resources in it.  It was just a good old fashioned "Hmmm...I wonder would happen if..." and off he went.  I fear that too many people will read about text mining somewhere and want to jump into the deep end, but come out overwhelmed and discouraged.  Maybe in the future when things have caught up, that'd be fine, but the entire field is one big beta version right now.

My recommendation would be to keep collecting that unstructured data, absolutely.  But don't worry just yet about when you'll get around to doing something with it. 

Sentiment Analysis at the Huffington Post

I stumbled onto Stephen Baker's blog, The Numerati, and found a fascinating article on the anaylsis methods of The Huffington Post.  Of particular interest to me was how they're putting sentiment analysis into action, by analyzing the comments made on their site, and using that data to adjust the featured stories.  Wouldn't you just love to take a field trip into their offices and see how it's all being put together?

Looking for good text analytics packages to review

Project 1 for my Text Analytics class is to either find some related article and give a 10-15 presentation on it for the class, or to do a quick demo of some software package other than what we're using for class (which is SPSS Text Analytics for Surveys).  So far, I've downloaded GATE 5.1 and RapidMiner 5.  I can't really do too much puttering around with them yet; I need to learn what I'm doing before I can ever figure out how to properly use them.  Luckily, I was able to sign up for a presentation date late in February, which gives me plenty of time to play around with it and have something constructive to show the class. 

This also helps out my overall interest in nonprofit analytics, especially for smaller organizations.  If we're gathering all this unstructured data, what if there's a wealth of information there that we're not yet putting together?  And what if the excuse for that is, we can't afford the pricey packages out there now?  For that reason, I wanted to make sure that what I demo'd is free, or at least exceedingly inexpensive (well...also because I'm a broke grad student.  Either it's free--and preferably open source--or I keep on looking).

Anyone have experience with any of these packages I mentioned, or have a suggestion to add to the mix?

Also, I found a couple of articles about text analytics in general:

• Unstructured Data and the 80 Percent Rule - How much of our collected data is in unstructured text form?  They estimate 80%, but it could be much higher.  Can you imagine what's waiting for us to discover?
  

• Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom - Describes just the beginning of what we're finding possible.
  

• Taco Bell Takes Heat Over 'Drive-Thru Diet' Menu -The quote from this particularly made me laugh:  "Prior to launch, posts were 73% positive, putting it ahead of beloved chains like Subway, Wendy's and Domino's. Words associated with the brand online were "love," "delicious," and "favorite." Postings are now 67% positive, putting Taco Bell behind White Castle, Blimpie and Arby's, which rank among the category's lower tier. Now three of the words most closely associated with Taco Bell and its campaign have been "fat," "stop," and "joke."

The new semester is going to have me pretty busy

Between my grad assistantship work for 2 different profs, my duties as MSIS rep for the Graduate Business Association, and my classes, I'll be pretty darned busy until May.  My courses are:

Information Systems Analysis and Design
Cyber Security Tech Factors
Java Development
Text Analytics

I'm most interested in the text analytics class, since I'll finally get hands on experience with SPSS, and the whole topic is a favorite of mine.  Should be a fun few months.

Finally have the time to look for a new home

As I mentioned in Not my permanent home I wanted to look around a bit before committing to a CMS.  I tend to see blogger as a great place to throw things together in a fast and temporary way, but if I want to make this blog into something really great, I want to move it to my own server. 

Here's the thing, though--I'm a perfectionist.  And a nerd.  Combined, it's a lethal combination.

So tonight I got sidetracked (which, btw, reminds me of Kevin Macdonell's excellent blog post "There's no such thing as wasted time"), and instead of putting together something for my research summary on the donor management tool we've been working on, I found myself pouring through a report from Idealware called Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone.

Yeah, I'm a real party animal in the off season.

Anyway, it seems as though I'll read a bit about WordPress and be sold on it...then I get swayed to Joomla, and then Drupal starts looking good.  I can feel this tingling sensation of perfectionism kicking in, and I know from experience that I could lose hours or days just combing through reviews, and available add-ins, and...well...overthinking things.

My solution to this is that I've saved the Idealware report, I'll download WordPress first, and test drive a set up.  I'll ask a couple people I know if they're happy with what they use.  But for tonight, I'm tossing this all up here on my blogger account and saving it as evidence of the journey.  It'll all still be right here when I want it, and it'll wait.

And the internship search commences....NOW

With my last final out of the way, it's time to seriously search for a summer internship.  I have a few applications out, but during this holiday break I need to sit down and find more leads.  Ideally, I'd like to find something in the Seattle area, since that's where I plan to settle after my graduation in December 2010.  On a preliminary search, I found a place I'd really like to contact and set something up: NPower Seattle.  I don't know how much (if any) analytics they offer for nonprofits, but I'd also be interested in their CRM project.  I've also applied for a Microsoft internship, since they're pushing a good amount of data mining (especially text mining) with their Bing projects.  However, MS internships are extremely hard to land (seeing as though they apparently compensate their interns quite well).  If I can't find something in Seattle, I'll have to look in the Waco-Austin area.

I believe that if I end up interning in the business analytics field, I can still use that to the benefit of nonprofits.  I just see too many similarities between private sector and nonprofits to say "oh no, I must find an internship in a nonprofit."

I wonder what the updated assumption is nowadays for internship compensation.  Back when I was an undergrad, everyone I spoke to had pretty lucrative internships, and it seemed as though full-time positions were pretty much implied in the package.  I doubt that's the case anymore, since the economy today is vastly different from 1999.  If I have to, I might be able to swing an unpaid internship by taking out the max student loan amount, and if it's a situation where I think the experience is worth it, I'd try to make it work.  Technically, I don't even need an internship for my degree because I'm told that my work experience more than fulfills that requirement...but like I've said before, I'm not doing this for another degree to hang on the wall.  I'm doing it to broaden my knowledge, to get my foot in the door, and to be put in contact with people that know more than me and are willing to mentor an eager person with a unique background.

Helping smaller nonprofits afford the IT help they need

Well, yet another round of papers is done and out of the way.  I did a rather lackluster blurb about Gogo In-flight WiFi Service which, although it wasn't my best work, might come in handy for someone traveling this holiday season (especially if you're flying on American Airlines). 

The paper I enjoyed the most though, was Fundraising Analytics: What Nonprofit Organizations Can Learn from the Private Sector (yeah, I know, sounds thrilling).  This is the one that I'm hoping to refine and turn into something more substantial, and see if I can get it published.  Anyway, my basic premise is that nonprofits are behind the curve on using data mining to it's fullest extent, and text mining might be the next big thing.  I can picture taking all those reactive research reports and dumping them into a data warehouse, and just culling through it all (along with collected news articles and contact reports) for connections.

I'm putting together a quick and dirty powerpoint for my database prof to share some ideas I have about what can do in the future to improve the product we have, and make it more analytic-ready.  Mainly, I'm going to focus on what smaller nonprofits can do to mine the information they already have, without access to the tools that larger organizations have.  For instance, we've been using Tableau to aid visualization, but considering it's limitations, I was shocked when I checked into buying the full version.

(my reaction to their insane pricing)

So, my goal during this break is to look into what options a smaller nonprofit might have to reap the benefits.  I know there are macros for excel already out there that will do regression models, so if I find ones that are free I might start throwing that together with some other basic things (I know the newest version of excel  has a few rudimentary visualization tools for data mining so I'll see if that does what I'm envisioning), and if need be, making my own free tool.  It'll be a far cry from a CRM, but it'll be something.  It needs to be easy enough so that any person without a background in this stuff can just toss in the data, click a button, and get ready-to-use findings back, with possibly some charts to help sell the idea to the management-types.  I'll also check out the offerings already out there for open source things, and see what can be done.  

I have an uncle that runs a battered women's shelter in a fairly rural place.  He needs a quick and easy way to browse grants, to organize contacts, and to find interested donors.  He shouldn't have to spend lots of money to get this done; their funds are better spent on their primary mission.  Uh oh, I'm sensing some scope creep...but honestly, this is the stuff that I'm passionate about, and I'll do what it takes.   

Not my permanent home

Programming note:

No, I don't intend to keep this blog on the Blogger service, it's just a temporary home to store my posts until I have time to set up a more permanent home.  I promise, sometime in the near future I'll sit down and get something better up and running (do I really seem like a premade template kind of person to you?).