PharmaNet Development Group has selected SCORR Marketing for a branding initiative. SCORR Marketing will assist with the development and execution of a marketing plan and promotional platform. READ MORE SCORR Marketing has also been named the Agency of Record for...
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[via Adfreak]

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Exact Target asked consumers what motivated them to follow a company, brand or association on Facebook? Here are the results: Note that 40% and 36% are looking for a discount or a freebie. In other words, there's no genuine interest like self-interest. [via Roy Morejon]

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Phenomblue created two experiences to help promote their Halloween season online. Phenomblue created “Trick-or-treat Your Friends” and “Tweet A Spell” to do just that. They also updated “Monster Mashup” with an all new look and animation. VISIT THE SITE Trick-or-treat...
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According to The New York Times, more than one-third of the two billion views of YouTube videos with ads each week are uploaded without the copyright owner's permission but left up by the owner's choice. They are automatically recognized by YouTube, using a system called Content ID that scans videos and compares them to material provided by copyright owners. When someone uploaded a recording of the Eminem song "Not Afraid," for instance, instead of taking down the recording, YouTube ran pop-up ads that let people buy the song or the ring tone and shared the revenue with the copyright owner. YouTube shares advertising revenue with content partners, who may be big entertainment companies like Lions Gate or amateur videographers who have developed a following. Hundreds of these partners make more than $100,000 a year. Some, like Sal Khan, a former hedge fund manager who now makes math and science education videos, have quit their day jobs.

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"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand." - Milton Friedman

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by Tim McMahan, Lazy-i.com Hey everyone… I’m in NYC for a few days. Don’t know if you’ll be getting updates or not (In fact, with Hurricane Earl blowing just off the coast, I don’t know if you’ll get updates ever again.). Have a good weekend, and keep an eye on the sky… * * * Read Tim McMahan’s [...]
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I am honored to present Some Thoughts on Managing Teams at the Fall 24 Hours of PASS event 15 - 16 Sep 2010. Are you a member of a team of database professionals? Are you part of a developer team? Do you manage or lead a team? This presentation is for you! I share experiences, war stories, and lessons learned from years of managing and leading teams. Register today! :{> Andy...(read more)
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Potentially Related Posts (Supposedly):Today's Math FilmHey, Fat Kid!Sorry, NAACP--Not With You On This One (Matter Of Fact, I'm Embarrassed For You)The Best Song Ever MadeCharlie And Squeaky
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When I am asked how I got to where I am in my career, or how to make the transition to being a DBA, I usually have to think about my answer before I respond.  I realize that most people won’t be able to follow the same path that I took to get where I am.  This is not to say that I am special, or I did something extraordinary to get where I am today; I am, as I have admitted a number of times in the past, where I am through a great deal of being in the right place at the right time. ...(read more)
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First my thoughts on some of the open personnel battles:

• At left tackle, I'm leaning towards Jeremiah Sirles over Jermarcus Hardrick. Call it a gut call here, but I would have figured Hardrick would have claimed this spot by now otherwise.
• At wide receiver, I think that freshman Quincy Enunwa and senior Will Henry will be the receivers to watch off the bench. That being said, Niles Paul, Brandon Kinnie, and Mike McNeill ideally will take most of the snaps.
• At linebacker, I think Lavonte David earned a starting job a couple of weeks ago. My gut feel suggested that perhaps Eric Martin might have been close to edging out Will Compton on the field. Now that Compton is out for a while, that's probably a no-brainer at this point.
• I still don't know what to think at safety.  My best bet is P.J. Smith and Anthony West, but that's a wild guess.
• Oh, and that quarterback thing. I'd like to say Zac Lee, but the buzz around Taylor Martinez is just getting too strong. Only one thing is for sure to me, as I don't think we'll truly know who'll start until after kickoff. If you aren't going to name a starter at this point, there's no point in making a formal announcement at all.

Now, as to the games:

• Does anybody really think Nebraska will lose to Western Kentucky, Idaho, or South Dakota State?  Didn't think so.
• As for Washington, I think they are better than I thought last spring...but not as good as others think. I think Nebraska stands a 70% chance of winning this one. For all the hype about Washington's offense, remember that the Huskies only averaged 1 more point a game (26.1) than the Huskers woeful offense (25.1) in 2009.
• Kansas State may have Daniel Thomas and a solid offensive line, but they've got a few questions to answer at receiver. Again, I think this is a game Nebraska should win, even though it's on the road. I give the Huskers a 75% chance of victory in this game.
• Texas? Well, the Huskers were :01 away from victory in Dallas last year. Nebraska loses Suh, yes...but Texas lost McCoy and Shipley. I still believe Nebraska's offense will be much better than last year, and this game is in Lincoln. My prediction: 55% chance of a Husker win.
• Oklahoma State has to break in a new quarterback and a new offensive coordinator, and replace too much on defense.  But this one is a trap game, on the road between the Texas and Missouri games. 60% chance of a Husker victory.
• It's a good thing that Missouri charters their transportation to the game, because the way things are going, very few Tigers will still have a driver's license by the time they need to get to Lincoln. Seriously, Missouri needs to find a playmaker on offense now that Danario Alexander is gone. Blaine Gabbert at times last season could just fling it towards #81 and Alexander would almost always make a big play. My prediction: 65% chance of a Husker victory.
• Iowa State? I love Paul Rhodes...but the Huskers want those eight turnovers back.  85% chance of a Husker victory.
• Kansas has too many holes to fill in 2010.  90% chance of a Husker victory.
• Texas A&M? Mike Sherman.  70% chance of a Husker victory.
• Colorado? Dan Hawkins.  95% chance of a Husker victory.

Right now, I think Nebraska will be favored to win every game this season. But I don't think Nebraska is going to go undefeated; they'll have a hiccup at some point in my opinion. But I don't know where it will happen.  Possibly Texas, but maybe at Kansas State or Oklahoma State. Perhaps Washington or maybe even Texas A&M. I don't think it'll be Missouri.  So my prediction is 11-1 for the first 12 games, which puts Nebraska back in Dallas in December...where they will face the Oklahoma Sooners. And that's a game that I think the Sooners will win in a fitting end to the 12 team Big XII conference.

So that's a 11-2 Husker team who will likely get a BCS bowl berth (probably in the Fiesta Bowl), at least according to my crystal ball. What's your prediction?
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Of course, the one not to miss is the one I’m doing, on Fixing Queries with Advanced T-SQL Techniques , but actually, they’re all excellent. For example, Simon’s just blogged that Buck Woody’s seminar topic has changed . Instead of being on career development, it’s now on DBA skills for the non-DBA . This is a seminar that every .Net developer and Windows admin should be on. I can think of many sysadmins and helpdesk operators who should be sitting in the room listening to Buck explain this material....(read more)
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I’m beginning to believe that I have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). They were really proud of their pun with the acronym, I’m sure. According to Google Health, SAD is described as being “a form of depression that occurs in relation to the seasons, most commonly beginning in winter.” Except in my case, this depression occurs [...]
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We have added a new sample solution to our samples package on CodePlex. This sample uses the StreamInsight extensibility framework to implement a pattern detection application. The solution can be found in Applications\PatternDetector contains - apart from the used adapters - the following projects:

• AugmentedFiniteAutomaton (refers to a project in UserExtensions), which implements a pattern matching user-defined operator.
• PatternDetector, which uses the user-defined operator to look for a V-pattern in a stock ticker stream

Our pattern matching user-defined operator is based on an augmented finite automaton (AFA) - which is basically a non-deterministic finite automaton (NFA) with additional information, called a register, that can be created and maintained as part of the automaton during runtime.

The PatternDetector example uses a sample input stream of stock prices as point events (read from a file with the SimpleTextFileReader input adapter), and defines an AFA that detects a sequence of downticks followed by an equal number of upticks. We detect the pattern over a tumbling window of one hour. The corresponding AFA is shown in the file AFAexample.pptx (included in the solution), and is implemented in AFA_EqualDownticksUpticks.cs. The output is simply dumped on the console.

For more information on pattern matching using AFA, see:

Badrish Chandramouli, Jonathan Goldstein, and David Maier. High-Performance Dynamic Pattern Matching over Disordered Streams. In VLDB 2010.

Regards,
Badrish

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I just watched a new Vern Fonk Insurance commercial on TV, and it led me to search for the spot online. Alas, the new spot (where customers seeking auto insurance get slapped upside the head by non-Fonk agents) is nowhere to be found. But fret not, I found these gems, and they are really something.

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Crowdsourcing agency Victor & Spoils is busy doing spec work for Harley-Davidson on the heels of the company's split with Carmichael Lynch, their agency for 31 years. According to V&S's John Winsor:

We love the Harley-Davidson brand (just like most everyone). And we've talked to a bunch of our creatives and strategists (I dare say some of the best in the world) in our 1,800-strong creative department, and H-D was also at the top of the list of the brands they most loved. So, instead of going through the typical steps of credential decks and pitches, we thought we'd try something different. We're getting to work. Just yesterday, the Victors & Spoils team did some quick strategic research pulled from public sources and went ahead and wrote a very open brief. Today, we launched it on our simple work-creation platform called The Squirrel Fight. And right now, creatives and strategists from all over the world are working against your brief.

I bet you didn't know that V&S had "a creative department" with 1800 people in it. I know I didn't. Of course, it's not a traditional creative department. It's a community of creatives willing to pitch their ideas for free to agency types and their clients in hopes that they might get paid, someday. But let's not get lost in that. Let's think bigger thoughts. Here's one...is Harley's marketing organization--used to working with one of the best ad agencies in the world--ready for something new and different? Here's another thought...is pitching from one's blog or Twitter stream the new three-martini lunch? In my experience, landing new business takes great ideas, but it also takes connections, phone calls, lunches, dinners and lots of cocktails.

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…and watch this video. I’ve seen several of his videos over the years. Production values are low, of course–he’s just talking into his webcam. I’m aware of him, because I’ve been spending 3+ hours per day working on learning languages myself for the last couple of years, in anticipation of a lot of travelling [...]
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Speaking at Apple's annual press conference in California yesterday, chief new product promoter Steve Jobs announced the launch of Ping, a music-centered social network that lets iTunes customers share information about music and concerts, as well as allowing them to see what friends and their favorite artists are listening to and downloading. Ping is built into the latest version of iTunes, which has160 million users worldwide, and can be accessed from Macs, iPhones and iPod Touches. Why is it that I don't care? Maybe it's because I already share my musical interests on Facebook, MySpace and my blog dedicated to the topic. No, that's not it. Maybe it's because I have an external hard drive full of hundreds of albums I BOUGHT from the iTunes store that are unplayable on our new Apple machines, courtesy of Apple's use of DRM and the fact that I changed my identity in the iTunes store. Yep, that's it. Now, I only purchase from iTunes if the song or TV show is not available elsewhere, and Amazon is working hard to make sure it IS available elsewhere. Ergo, my entertainment money goes to Seattle, not Cupertino. Speaking of things that don't work, I've been using Tweetie (a service Twitter purchased some months ago) on my iPhone for a year or more, but no longer. The app won't authorize my ID and password. This pain isn't mine alone, it's being felt around the Twittersphere. Henry Blodget of Business Insider, for one, is pissed.

Well, it happened. A few months ago, when Twitter announced that it was going to kill a boatload of startups that had sprung up around its ecosystem, I wondered whether that meant I would eventually be forced to abandon the app I spend about 18 hours a day using (on desktop, mobile, and laptop) -- TweetDeck. And based on what happened yesterday, it seems the answer to that question is "yes."

Blodget updated his post, saying readers lambasted him for being dumb as a rock because he didn't know that some OAUTH thing was the problem. He admits he doesn't care about OAUTH, he just wants his TweetDeck to work. This morning, Twitter sent an email to users that tried to explain.

Starting August 31, all applications will be required to use "OAuth" to access your Twitter account. What's OAuth? OAuth is a technology that enables applications to access Twitter on your behalf with your approval without asking you directly for your password. Desktop and mobile applications may still ask for your password once, but after that request, they are required to use OAuth in order to access your timeline or allow you to tweet.

Uh huh. WTF does this mean? How do I get Tweetie to work again? There are one million assumptions in Twitter's email and zero steps to take. Oh, and Twitter dropped 99.9% of my @replies from my @bonehok account. They've been missing for a week now, and the company's response to my support ticket said nothing other than they're aware of the problem. Is Twitter understaffed? Underfunded? Or simply lacking what's truly needed--a clue?

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I've been reading a fascinating article about the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC facility. It's a scientific research facility that houses a particle collider, which generates an incredible amount of data. Their original plan was to stream the data to tape, then sending the data to "islands" closer to the users, offloading the network as quickly as possible. But they found that the network could handle the streaming better than they thought - so they now stream the data directly to the users, saturating the network. It's a new way of thinking about moving the data around.

Another interesting data concept is that they filter it before they store it. We're not talking trivial reductions here - they are filtering a petabyte (PB) of data a second to a gigabyte per second! That's incredible. In fact, an overwhelming majority of the CPU power there doesn't go to computing numbers and so on in the scientific exercises - it's used to filter the data.

Most of us concern ourselves with data storage. We fret over space, the cost of drives, and backing up. But the LHC staff deals with that as well - but they are more concerned with network and CPU. To be sure, their data profile is different than yours or mine - but there are still things we can learn from their efforts. You can read the whole article yourself here: http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/lhc-computing-grid-pushes-petabytes-of-data-beats-expectations.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

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Introduction Andy Waren ( Blog | @sqlAndy ), Jack Corbett ( Blog | @unclebiguns ), and Kendall Van Dyke ( Blog | @SQLDBA ) have been busy. They're working on SQLRally - a regional PASS event scheduled for May 2011 in Orlando. Andy does a good job explaining the thinking behind the event in his 31 Aug 2010 post: Positioning SQLRally in the PASS Event Universe . Pre-Cons Andy's 1 Sep 2010 post on the topic ( SQLRally Pre-Con Selection Process – Draft for Comment ) includes a draft document outlining...(read more)
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Potentially Related Posts (Supposedly):(Another) Mashup Of The Week: Bill And Ted's Excellent InceptionMashup Of The Week--Miley Cyrus & Notorious BigMashup Of The Week: Tiger's Cell Phone MessageMashup Of The WeekRudolph/Predator Mashup
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It is common that vendors ask for permission to create databases (or they applications need to create database) on your servers and most of DBAs I have seen immediately grant them dbCreator server role. But they are not aware that members of that role are able to DROP/ALTER any databases on the entire server regardless of whether or not you even have a user account in the database.Did you really want that?

The right approach is to grant CREATE ANY DATABASE permission and then the user is able to DROP/ALTER he/she owns.
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Here's the question for Husker fans... did the Big Ten conference set the 2011 conference schedule, or did ESPN do it? My goodness, but the Huskers got set up with every heavyweight that the Big Ten conference has to offer.  Wisconsin, Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan, and Iowa in one season? This is somewhat akin to what happens to Iowa State two out of every four years, where they have to play both Oklahoma AND Texas in the same season.

Let's compare the original Big XII schedule and the revised Big Ten schedules for 2011.

Big XII 2011 Schedule	Big Ten 2011 Schedule	Advantage
Kansas State	at Wisconsin	Big Ten
at Texas	Ohio State	Push
Oklahoma State	at Minnesota	Big XII
at Missouri	Michigan State	Big XII
Iowa State	Northwestern	Big Ten
at Kansas	at Penn State	Big Ten
Texas A&M	at Michigan	Push for now
at Colorado	Iowa	Big Ten

I see the Texas/Ohio State swap as essentially a wash, though the Texas game would have been in Austin. Both squads have competed for a national championship in recent years, though admittedly Ohio State didn't deserve to be there in 2008.Maybe that should be a slight edge in strength to the Big XII.  Swapping Wisconsin for Kansas State is clearly a major increase in schedule strength. Oklahoma State and Missouri are clearly stronger programs than Minnesota and Michigan State, so those two are the main advantages of the Big XII schedule.  Penn State is clearly a stronger program than Kansas in football, so that's a huge increase in schedule strength. Iowa/Colorado is not even a fair comparison.  A&M/Michigan is one of those comparisons that's tough to make; neither school is playing all that well right now, but each is hoping. Historically, Michigan is a much tougher team than Texas A&M.

Another way of looking at it is that Nebraska's Big Ten schedule has four teams in the AP Top 20 this season, compared to only one Top 20 team on the old Big XII schedule.  With that in mind, plus non-conference games against Washington, Fresno State, and Wyoming, nobody will criticize if the Huskers schedule a 1-AA team to come to Lincoln for Labor Day weekend.

One thing is clear to me is that the Big Ten wanted to match Nebraska up against the big names of the Big Ten for television early on, if only to improve their bargaining position as they renegotiate the contract with ABC/ESPN.  You have to figure that at least half of Nebraska's games are likely to be televised on ABC next season (Washington, at Wisconsin, Ohio State [ABC PrimeTime], at Penn State, at Michigan, Iowa).

You might think that Nebraska's schedule would ease up in 2013 when Ohio State and Wisconsin drop off, replaced by Purdue, Illinois, or Indiana...except that further Big Ten expansion is likely. (Maybe Missouri gets invited when the Big XII inevitably collapses.)  So it could be a while before we see the Hoosiers in Lincoln for a football game, and that's why this schedule was set.  Get these new marquee matchups on TV now, rather than take a chance that these matchups might be further delayed down the line.
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The city of Toronto wants to help residents get rid of electronic waste. Naturally, to promote the effort, the city needed to create an awareness campaign. They got one from Publicis, who wisely veered away from the mundane and expected flatness of municipal advertising and headed in a different direction.

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We chuckled at the latest campaign effort by Mike Meister -- the campaign song. You may remember Ben Nelson’s attempt at singing in “I’m from a Western town”. Well, Meister did not take that tact, instead getting some Irish folk singer (please tell us it’s not the Douglas County Public Defender) to bastardize a classic ballad. You can hear it here, via Meister’s campaign page. But the thing

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