Crime-Solving Website for Mothers Who Kill Their Children

The news tonight (or I guess that it is morning now) is full of news of mothers or step mothers who kill children and dump the bodies.

We have the Casey Anthony case in Florida where 25 year old Casey was tired of having her two year old daughter Caylee as a drag on her life, and killed her child, left it in a car, and then dumped the body in a field near the grandparents home.

Another item in the news is missing Kyron Horman who was supposedly taken to school by his step mother, Terri Horman, on June 4th of last year (a year ago today), and has never been seen since. Police have information that Terri Horman is involved and tried to hire a hit man to off Kyron's father.

And then we have the case of Julianne McCrery who drove from Texas with her six year old gifted boy, Camden Hughes and killed him in the North. He was found under a blanket May 14 alongside a remote road in South Berwick, Maine, near the New Hampshire border, sparking a massive tri-state manhunt.

The last case is different from the first two, where the mother tried to take the body as far away as possible to hide her actions. What ties the cases together, is that none of these women have ever shown any inclination or tendencies to take a human life.

The biggest problem when these children disappear, is finding the body. Searches take a lot of man hours and are expensive when they involve helicopters and mobilization of police units. There should be a way for technology to help. And there is.

With the invention of the internet, we have discovered a new principle of human behavior -- the crowd is always right. The second principle is based on human psychology. Humans when stressed tend to follow predictable patterns. A good example is prostitution. It has been discovered that when men are in search of a prostitute and cruise the roadways, they hate making left hand turns. They always want to turn right as they search out a streetwalker.

Human beings have the concept of querencia embedded in them. It is a bullfighting term. When a bull is in the ring, he finds and always goes to his querencia or safe place where he feels empowered. Casey Anthony dumped her daughter's body near her home, in her querencia, where she felt safe.

So, the website that I propose would be quite radical. And it might be offensive to some. What the website would do, would be to solicit essays from normal people on crime. Much in the manner of the OJ Simpson book entitled "If I Did It", the website would get people to write an essay on where they would stash the body if they killed a child.

Going on the principle that the crowd is always right, one could data mine the essays and determine the common denominators to use technology to help find possible areas to search.

If the idea of soliciting this kind of information from the general public is too offensive, one could use existing crime data, but it would have to be collected and digitized. It would be much easier, and one could get a much more specific mass if it were collected on a pro forma basis from the public when needed. I think that this kind of website would get an incredible amount of traffic. I just checked, and www.IfIDidIt.com is taken, but www.IfIDidIt.info is not.

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SQL Update Needed

We as humans, are manufacturing and storing data at hyper-exponential rates. Most of it gets tucked into a database somewhere and then is available for retrieval using an SQL or structured query language call.

SQL was first created or defined by IBM in the 1970's. There have been enhancements through the years, but the middleware (it is called middleware because it represents the link between the database and the user) hasn't evolved to meet the realities of the modern internet paradigm.

We are storing data, meta-data, graphics, music, and all sorts of digital stuff like we never have before. And what do we do with it? We plunk it into a database and for the most part, there it sits.

Companies have come to realize that static stored data can be monetized and contribute to the bottom line. So they purchase all of these add-on data mining and data warehouse software packages to slice and dice their data. And what do they use? SQL that hasn't changed very much from when it was conceived.

What we need now, is a serious SQL upgrade. We need functions like SELECT REGRESSION(ColumnA, ColumnB) that will help us analyze the data. We need stuff like SELECT WEIGHTED_MOVING_AVERAGE(ColumnA, 100 values). We to know if a table insert is an outrider or a fat tail. We need to know R-SQUARED of column values. We need to be able to read the contents of videos in BLOB columns. None of this has been done.

We still labor on with primitive functions in the middleware with rich client or heavy back end stored procedures to compensate. It is time that someone looked at making intelligent middleware. We need to change it from Structured Query Language to Superb Questioning Language.

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Interesting Problem Requires Algorithm

As a data geek, I get a lot of questions directed at me looking for real-life solutions to data problems. Consider this one that came in my email last night.

A social service runs a drop-in center for people. They provide services free of charge. They cannot take the people's names, because if the people thought that it was not a confidential service or that they were being identified in any fashion, they would stop coming.

They run these services sessions once a week. What they are allowed to record is only whether the person is a newcomer or has attended before. People try to attend weekly, but they come some weeks and skip other weeks. Some drop out forever, and some just for a little while.

The data held by the social service consists of just the following -- 1) the week 2) the number of people who have attended previously and 3) how many newcomers there are each week. They have five years of data.

Now, the government subsidizes this social service, and the government has asked a simple question that they cannot answer. The question is "How many unique individuals have you seen this year?".

It's a fairly complex problem. They don't know if at the start of the data, that it is the start of the records keeping coinciding with the start of the program. If it was, then it would be an easy exercise. They would just take the starting number of attendees and add all of the newcomers on a weekly basis. But this isn't the case.

With the starting number that they have, they don't know if the breakdown includes newcomers as well previous attendees. And if the starting number has previous attendees, how many are there. What they don't know is if the pool of starting individuals is complete, or if there are some individuals missing from the pool because they were drop-outs when the counting started. In other words, there could be any number of individuals who have attended once before the counting started, and then randomly show up throughout the year.

So the question is "How many unique individuals have been provided services since the counting started?" Government grant money rides on having an accurate answer.

How would you solve this? Comments are open.

(I'll put up my solution later)

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Line Formation Elasticity -- RugbyMetrics

A lot of objective information is falling out from the results of my Software tool called RugbyMetrics. While doing extensive statistical data mining on actual professional rugby games in the Aviva Premiership, an incredible statistic fell out of the exercise, and that was line formation elasticity.

Rugby is a game where the defense lines up across the field to defend against a similar line of offence. When a player carrying the egg finds that his forward progress is blocked, he passes left or right down the line to his team mates. If there is a hole in the line somewhere on either the defense or offence, then there is a problem.

So I decided to measure line elasticity -- how quickly the line forms or reforms after it is distorted from a play. This analysis fell out of another analysis where I did a ratio of jersey counts between attackers and defenders at the time of tackle, which had a very interesting result.

What the line elasticity measure showed, was that the more efficient that the line was at reforming, the more successful the play (both in offence and defense). This is especially evident when the team with possession grinds away for a long time with very little field gained. The opposing defensive line is very elastic at reforming and very efficient.

What frame-by-frame video also showed, was the laggards who were late at assuming their position, thus leaving holes in the line. It was very interesting.

From there, when we saw that we could identify the defensive laggards, we saw that we could assign a numeric co-efficient of line efficiency, both at a team level, and at a player level.

From there, it was a short step to rating the roster of a team, and let the results settle into a hierarchy of the best players. There are many developed measures of a players worth coming out of RugbyMetrics. The thought struck me, that if a player is negotiating a raise in his contract, one of the bargaining chips could be a RugbyMetrics analysis to show that he is in the company of the best of the breed in the Premiership. Conversely, a team could use RugbyMetrics to prove that a player asking for a raise tends more to a journeyman than a star.

Its all fascinating stuff, and is opened by the doors of data mining and performance analysis.

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The Future of Online Games

After watching "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold", I have come to the conclusion that everything is and can be a made into a vehicle for advertising. The movie is a movie about making a movie about trying to make a movie about the whole movie being one big advertisement and product placement exercise. It aims at total transparency at the crass world of advertising in movies using as a vehicle, a movie all about product placement in it, replete with commercials.

While watching it, I was struck by the relatively large amounts of money spent on advertising. And then, I was struck with the vision of online browser games of the not-so-distant future.

Playing games for virtual points is so lame. With foursquare.com making life a game, why not have real life prizes for virtual games. This is the way that I see it evolving:

Let's say Pepsi wants to take advertising with online games to a new level. The first thing that they do, is introduce a new product called "Pepsi Shooter". It is an inexpensively packaged slurp of Pepsi, the size of a shooter glass. They are distributed to stores like 7-11, but you can't buy them. You have to go online, and play a game called Pepsi Shooter. When you reach a certain level, the server sends you a bar code that you print out, and the next time that you are at 7-11, you get to collect your Pepsi Shooter prize.

Collect six shooters, and you get a full sized Pepsi. Collect 6 full-sized Pepsi by further game play, and you get a visor or a cap. You can see how this works.

The server keeps track of the players. They must log in and authenticate, and that way you collect the emails, phone numbers and names of the target demographic. From then on, you can keep marketing to them until they reach an age where Coors Light replaces the Pepsi and you sell the data to the Coors folks.

The game could be played on a cell phone, an iPad or an iPod. Getting real stuff for playing virtual games is an idea whose time has come, and I am willing to bet that you will see this concept exploited within 12 months. Race you to the patent office on this one.

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Stuff to think about while squashing ants

On my daily walk on the steam train tracks, I watched a redwing blackbird sitting on the steel rail, picking off a line of ants marching along the track. The bird would wait until a long line of ants formed, and then would jump down and gobble as many as he could. The ants would disperse. The blackbird would then hop away, wait for the line to re-form and then repeat the procedure. The buffet marched up to him.

As I saw this, my mind was on the ants, and what they were thinking and how they did it. An ant is hatched from an egg. It has an Octo-Mom queen for a mother who has a gazillion offspring, and the first ant it sees upon hatching, is a worker drone shoving some food into its face and moving down the assembly line to do the same to its other 480 siblings of the hour. There is no learning curve. There is no time for it to be taught anything. Quicker than you can say "Nike Asian Child-worker Sweatshop", the ant is sent out into the world to beg for spare change and find uneaten McDonald's stuff in the trash bins of the world.

So where does an ant get its "being-consumed avoidance software" from? It's uncaring mummy doesn't teach it -- not with a constant stream of eggs oozing out of her derrière. The logical answer, is that the ant hatches complete with embedded firmware. For you non-techies, firmware is the internal software that makes a computer behave like a computer, and makes smart devices smart.

I've detailed the flow diagram of evaluating ant threats on a high level in the illustration. First of all, the ant sees a big black bulbous body of the blackbird with a pointy yellow beak. That is the first bit of input information. Then it sees its 312th brother twice removed get skewered by the birds beak, and gobbled down into the gaping maw. It's bye bye into the blackbird. The ant brain thinks that this can't be a pleasant experience, and issues the general alarm to run away.

This is innate programming. It is coded into the neural nets of the ant brain and present when the ant is hatched. So, I began to think of how the firmware was transferred to the ant. How did the brain software get transferred to the ant?

Of course, the answer is in the DNA of the ant. That factoid made me stop and think. Not only is DNA the blueprint of how to build the ant, but it is also the memory device for the firmware load. It can "bomb-the-PROMS' so to speak. (Hardware engineers will know that PROMS are Programmable Read - Only Memory arrays that hold the firmware. They have fuses in the transistor arrays that are blown out in programming process. Hence bombing the PROM.)

The polynucleotides that make up DNA are not only a construction pattern, but they are like USB memory sticks that holds data for the finished organism. The complex reasoning path outlined in the above illustration of the non-bye-bye-blackbird algorithm is embedded in the DNA.

Never mind Moores Law and the shrinking transistor, we are talking about a memory dump on the chemical molecular level. That got me to thinking. Is the data stored in bits and bytes? I don't think that the DNA molecule can handle binary data, because DNA itself is quaternary. Instead of zeros and ones like a computer, it has four states.

DNA is made up of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine. These four chemicals arranged in a chain of gazillions, holds the pattern and the data to make an ant, a flower or me. They would be much more efficent at coding information. Take the word "crap". Because binary is two state, the computer sees the word "crap" as "01100011011100100110000101110000". So while a nibble (four zeros) of binary holds up to 16 bits of information, a quaternary system will hold 256 bits. In English, "crap" takes up four units. In binary, it takes up 32 bits. In quaternary, it takes up just two bits.

So, with DNA being a good and efficient type of memory, would it be better if our computers were quaternary instead of binary? You bet. They would run a lot faster, and hold more data in less physical space. That's something to consider for computer design engineers addicted to the binary way of life.

So, back to the firmware embedded in the ants. It's intriguing to think that the brain of a lower life form is populated with a bunch a algorithms, but a human baby's brain is not. The most intriguing concept is that DNA can be altered to carry information as well. Imagine if a baby was born with the neural nets for speech already intact in the brain. Imagine if a baby was born with neural nets to do calculus while lying in the crib staring at the Fisher Price toys.

It would be a challenge to figure out how to transfer firmware with DNA, but I bet you that it could be done. Oh Brave New World.

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Twitter to Web Hits Conversion Statistics

I sometimes treat the Internet like a live organism. A good biologist does subtle experiments on an organism to learn its nature. Sometimes it helps to treat the web as such.

For example, I often wondered what the empirical conversion ratio was of converting Twitter followers into web hits or page views.

It is easy to get Twitter followers. Most people on Twitter do a tit-for-tat, I'll-follow-you-if-you-follow-me thing. Needless to say, these types of followers are not high-quality in the respect that they really aren't interested in your content. All they want of you is to follow their narcissistic tweets and appreciate how important they are in the grand scheme of things.

I have a plethora of life coaches, motivational speakers, stars and celebrities that I have never heard of and other assorted folks following me on Twitter. So, the big question is how many of these can I convert to go and look at a related web page?

I decided to do a test. I put up a blog of lifestyle-specific aphorisms and created a Twitter account to match it. Then I went to work on Twitter. I followed everyone that Twitter suggested. I soon got a respectable following.

I used tools like Tweepi.com to chop out the non-followers and folks who wouldn't play the game. My Twitter account advertises my website. I am not going to give the URLs out, because the experiment is continuing and I don't want to skew the results.

After a few months of experimentation, I have a preliminary answer that is holding fast. The numbers aren't very promising. I can convert only 2.5% of my Twitter followers to become regular followers on my website.

I suppose that it doesn't matter for large numbers. If you have hundreds of thousands of followers, then the 2.5% is significant, and if you can attract that many, then you have content that will boost the percentage that convert from Twitter as well.

But if you are just starting out in social media marketing and need a rough guideline to start, the 2.5% is holding fairly steady for me. And that is my 2.5 cents.

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