Since the relatively recent exodus of users from Facebook and other conventional platforms, there has been a rise in privacy-focused social media. Most of them are blockchain-based, a promising technology linked to financial rewards, usually in crypto, for the more successful content contributors. One such platform is Flote, which I've been testing for the past few weeks. In this article, I'll present some of my thoughts based on my experience with it.

First of all, I'm not affiliated with Flote in any way, while no one invited me to join it either. So, I could have left at any time, especially since I have other platforms that I frequent and where I have established a network of contacts already. Still, I lingered in Flote because of its simplicity, clean user interface, and innovative model. I don't aspire to be an influencer there, but I enjoy the platform, while the fact that one of its founders, Erin Edwards, actively engages with the members of the platform offering help and promoting posts others may find interesting. I've only seen that in a couple of other places.

So, why Flote? Well, it's privacy-oriented, fresh, and big on blockchain tech. That's not to say that it's there yet, though. Also, the engagement you may get on a platform like this is bound to be linked with a very particular set of people. It doesn't feature the diversity of places like MeWe, but it has the potential to do so, perhaps once the beta-testing is over. Some features still don't work well on the mobile app, which is why it's still labeled as beta, while the whole platform seems quite minimalist for a social medium. Perhaps that's why some people view it as a Twitter alternative, even if it doesn't have the silly size limitations the well-known gossiping site features.

I've tried other privacy-focused platforms over the past two years, and although Flote seems quite promising, I don't think I'll drop my other ones any time soon to focus on Flote as my primary online socializing site. Still, I don't think I'll quit any time soon, partly because there is a feeling of authenticity in the users there. If you look past the biases of the user base, Flote is very open-minded and fosters debate, something most social media today have forgotten or even banned. So, if the attention we give to the sites we frequent counts for something, like a vote of sorts for what is worth spending time on, I feel that Flote deserves a chance, at least right now. After all, many places start great (e.g., Voice) and then take a wrong turn somewhere, turning into something undesirable.

If you are interested in platforms like Flote, i.e., it floats your boat, but you're open to other places too, you may want to check out my Privacy Fundamentals course on WintellectNow. There I talk about various privacy-related matters, with lots of practical advice on your online options. This includes but it’s not limited to privacy-oriented social media sites. So, check it out when you have a moment. Cheers!

This topic may seem a bit strange, but I'm running out of ideas here! Still, it's interesting how often this topic comes about in mentoring sessions, especially when dealing with A/B testing. So, if you can't answer the question "when are two numbers equal enough?" in a simple sentence, perhaps you'll have something to learn from this article.

First of all, the rationale of all this. Sometimes, we need to make an executive decision about whether we should apply this or the other function on the data at hand. In A/B testing, this is usually something like “should we go for the equal variances or the unequal variances variant of the T-test?” Of course, when you have two samples, the chances of their variances being exactly equal is minuscule, so why did those old sages of Stats whom we revere so much decide to have two variants of the T-test, based on the equality of the variances involved? Well, there is a different formula used since if the variances are the same, things are much simpler with the underlying math. But then the question becomes "when are these two variances equal?" and keep in mind that we are talking Stats here, so the rigidity of Math as we know it doesn't apply. We are comfortable with approximations, otherwise, we'd have to abandon the whole idea of Statistics altogether!

In engineering, two numbers are equal when their difference is within a tolerance margin. We usually depict this tolerance by a threshold th expressed as a negative power of ten. So, often we have something like th = 10^(-3), which is a fancy way of saying th = 0.001. This kind of approximation, although very handy, may not apply to the problem at hand. Besides, few disciplines have the scientific reasoning and discipline that Engineering exhibits, and Stats is not one of them. Also, let's not forget that traditional Computer Science is akin to Engineering, so the approx() function found in many languages follows a similar motif, making it inapplicable to the problem mentioned previously.

In Physics, things are a bit different, which is why often we talk about orders of magnitude. So, it's often the case that if two quantities A and B are different by at least an order of magnitude, they are much different. This is another way of saying that one is at least ten times bigger than the other. This is something we can apply to our problem since it gives us a relative rule of thumb to work with. Of course, an order of magnitude is quite a bit when we talk about variances, but we can adapt this to something that makes more sense in Analytics work.

So, what about a fixed percentage, maybe one order of magnitude less than 1? This would translate into 10% (since 1 = 100%), something that's not too much but not negligible either. So, if v1 and v2 are the two variances at hand, we can say that if v1 <= (1+10%)v2 and v2 <= (1+10%)v1, we can presume v1 and v2 to be more or less equal. Additionally, this wouldn't work if one of them is 0, in which case the two variances would always be considered different from each other. Then again, this makes intuitive sense since we'd be dealing with a static variable and one that varies at least a bit. Also, as things are made simpler if we use as a reference point the smaller variance, we can just do a single comparison and be done with it. After all, if v2 is the smallest and v1 <= 1.1*v2, we can be sure that the reverse would also hold true.

In other words, we can use a script like the one attached to this article and not have to worry about this matter much (note that this script allows us to use a different threshold too, other than 0.1). Cheers!

The latter has been something I've been looking into for a while now. However, my skill-set hasn't been accommodating for this until recently, when I started working with GUIs for shell scripting. So, if you have a Linux-based OS, you can now use a GUI for a couple of methods in the Thunderstorm system. Well, given I'll release the code for it someday.

Alright, enough with the drama. This blog isn't FB or some other overly sensational platform. However, if you've been following my work since the old days, you may be aware of the fact that I've developed a nifty cipher called Thunderstorm. But that's been around for years, right? Well, yes, but now it's becoming even more intriguing. Let's see how and why this may be relevant to someone in a data-related discipline like ours.

First of all, the code base of Thunderstorm has been refactored significantly since the last time I wrote about it. These days, it features ten script files, some of which are relevant in data science work, too (e.g., ectropy_lite.jl) or even simulation experiments (e.g., random.jl, the script, not the package!). One of the newest additions to this project is a simple key generation stream (keygen) based on a password. Although this is not true randomness, it's relatively robust in the sense that no repeating patterns have emerged in any of the experiments on the files it produced. Some of the key files were several MB in size. So, even though these keys are not as strong as something made using true randomness (a TRNG method), they are still random enough for cryptographic tasks.

What's super interesting (at least to me and maybe some open-minded cryptographers) is a new method I put together that allows you to refresh a given key file. Naturally, the latter would be something employing true randomness, but the particular function would work for any file. This script, which I imaginatively named keys.jl, is one I've developed a GUI for too.

Although I doubt I'll make Thunderstorm open-source in the foreseeable future (partly because most people are still not aware of its value-add in the quantum era we are in), I plan to keep working on it. Maybe even build more GUIs for the various methods it has. The bench-marking I did a couple of months back was very promising for all of its variants (yes, there are variants of the cipher method now), so that's nice.

In any case, it's good to protect your data files in whatever way you can. What better way than a cipher for doing this, especially if PII is involved? The need for protecting sensitive data increases further if you need to share it across insecure channels, like most web-based platforms. Also, even if something is encrypted, lots of metadata from it can spill over since the encrypted file's size is generally the same as that of the original file. Well, that's not the case with the original version of Thunderstorm, which tinkers with that aspect of the data too. So, even metadata mining isn't all that useful if a data file is encrypted with the Thunderstorm cipher.

I could write about this topic until the cows come home, so I’ll stop now. Stay tuned for more updates on this cryptographic system (aka cryptosystem) geared towards confidentiality. In the meantime, feel free to check out my Cybersecurity-related material on WintellectNow, for more background information on this subject. Cheers!

Good documentation is in high demand everywhere, from coding libraries to products and services to even data science projects. The funny thing is that even though many people value communication in data science, not everyone can link good communication and good documentation. Interestingly, even if you are the most charismatic communicator out there, if you don't express your communication skills in your documentation, your data science work will suffer. But why is documentation so valuable? What about visuals? Aren't they worth (at least) 1000 words each? What's the point of dressing up our code notebooks with text too?

First thing's first. You don't need to be a technical writer to write good documentation. Just take a look at the documentation of the most mature packages in Julia. Do you think their creators were technical writers? The same goes for other kinds of documentation available online. As long as the reader can understand what you are doing without having to dig deep into the code (or even worse, run parts of the code), your documentation is a decent first draft. That can later be improved, but first, you need to write it! Even if you are the only person to read this documentation, perhaps on a future iteration of that data science project, it's good to do it properly. This way, you won't scratch your head trying to figure out what you were thinking when you put that notebook together.

Good documentation is not just about the reader, though. It's also about organizing your thoughts and understanding your code better. Perhaps some refactoring needs to take place, simplifying the whole project. Or maybe some examples could help clarify the objective or the value-add of your script. It's easy to lose sight of these matters when you are entrenched in analytics work, especially the coding part.

A well-documented data science project can be a great addition to your portfolio (assuming, of course, that you have the option of exhibiting your work publicly). It's unlikely that someone will go through every line of your code to see what you've done. Still, that person may read at least parts of your documentation, especially the text at the beginning, where you explain the objectives, assumptions, and datasets related to this project. And you can be almost certain that if someone makes it to the end of your code notebook, they'll read your conclusions too.

Documentation in data science may not seem as important a skill as knowledge of machine learning, data visualization, etc., but it's a powerful catalyst for all these. After all, just because you create a fancy visual, it doesn't mean that everything is fully comprehensible in it. Perhaps there is so much to see that you need to point the reader to the key findings, which they can then verify by looking closely at the plot.

Although good code is self-explanatory, because of its structure and naming conventions, it's always useful to add some text around it. I'm not talking about some comments, but also stuff going beyond the code itself. After all, the code you write is not a work of art (even if you may think that at times!) but a means to an end. That end, along with how the code achieves that end, is something the reader of your code notebook shouldn't have to think about too much. It's better to make it easy for him through good documentation, allowing him to ponder on the whole project, rather than him having to spend all his time trying to figure out what you have done and why.

I can go on about this topic until the cows come home. However, an attribute of good documentation is brevity, which is why I'll stop right here. If you find this material of value, you can check out my various books, where I talk about topics like this in more detail. Cheers!

It's a hectic week I have, so I didn't have a chance to post an article this past Monday. Probably I won't be posting anything till next week. You can take the time to check out some of the older articles of mine that you didn't have a chance to read yet. Anyway, I'm working on some cool projects these days, a couple of which I'll be posting about in the weeks to come, so stay tuned. Thank you for your patience!