Pythian Group

Gentlemen (and no Ladies),

Let’s go hairy!!

The 60s are NOT back but during the month of November , some gents , including myself, will grow a stache to raise the awareness of prostate cancer, an insidious disease that afflicts one in seven males.

Movember

Movember (a slang word “Mo” for moustache and “November”) is a worldwide movement in which men, known as Mo Bros, start November clean-shaven and then grow a mustache to bring awareness to prostate and testicular cancer.

The goal is to get family , friends and others to donate money to your Movember cause, which is then donated to the Prostate Cancer Foundation, LiveStrong and other men’s health research and awareness programs.

According to the American Cancer Society, one in every six men will get prostate cancer during his lifetime, and one in every 36 will die from the disease. Behind lung cancer, prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in men.

There are around 14 countries participating and you can participate through your region or country website.

It’s rather simple: register online as either an individual or a team, start inviting others to participate and maybe create a team then ask others “SHOW ME THE MONEY” . There are prizes for those who raise the most funds.

Grooming is the key

Initially ,the registered participant must start November 1 clean-shaven. Second, maintain your mustache: Grooming is key.

You don’t want to look ridiculous for an entire month or anything, you can do Mexican, Dali, Imperial, Fu Manchu, Pancho Villa, Handlebar, Pencil, Chevron, Walrus…etc.

Here’s a summary of some moustache styles and you can pick one, one of them is NO longer wearable though (You can get arrested in some countries for it)!!

You can go further and even get a copy of The Moustache Grower’s Guide for $9.95

MO Sistas are in too

Although,some say not necessarily, the gents are the ones who grow the MOs but the women play a role too. Some become team captains ; they recruit the “Bros” , endorse them and encourage them grow moustaches.

Statistics shows that lots of donors , up to 60%, of donors are women so ladies you are TOTALLY IN.

Where donations go

The money is used to fund great research projects around the world to fight prostate cancer and other male diseases.

In USA ,$7.5 million were raised for Movember. Worldwide, $174 million were raised and, according to Movember, this makes the group the largest non-government funder of prostate cancer research in the world.

A geeky Movember

I was just looking around for something to welcome Movember and then came something in mind that SQL server 2008/2008 R2 made possible (2005 doesn’t).

SQL server folks, could you please run the attached query in any 2008/2008 R2 SSMS and see what you get in the “Spatial result” tab? you may need to zoom in a bit to get something like this

Now, can you tell me who’s that famous Stache ??!!

Link to Code

Happy Movember,

(Mo)hamed

There has been quite a bit written about Oracle Mix Voting (let me refer to it as OMV for short) this year and I don’t think I should waste your time restating any of this. What I wanted to do is to take a step back and try to list “stakeholders” of OMV.

Before I continue, here is some of the relevant blog posts on this topic:
Oracle Mix: OOW11 voting, a race against time – Australia speaks up through votes
Data Science Fun with the OOW Mix Session Voting Data
Has Oracle MIX “Suggest-A-Session” Jumped the Shark???
Suggest-a-Session 2011 follow-up: What worked, what didn’t, and how can we improve?

Let’s see who the imaginable stakeholders are and what their primary needs are from the Oracle Mix Suggest-A-Session project. I hope I don’t sound too cynical but I think it’s a reasonable objective…

1. Oracle Corp

Primary need — attract as much attention as possible to OOW, positive media splash around OOW.

Was it successful? Of course, twittersphere and blogosphere were boiling around OMV. You could argue that there were some other needs but for the company as business — marketing was number one reason to support OMV, IMHO.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

subtitle: Monetizing Social Media

Why is social media and social networking essential to you and your business? (because it will drive sales, but there’s very few analytics for ROI on social networking and social media)

Relying on advertising is no longer working for print newspapers and television. So why do we think it will work on internet media?
Read the rest of this entry . . .