Wally and the Wind

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Outsourcing - the new wave !!

First they outsourced their customer service, then their market research analysis, then teaching and then some more.......


Well, if Time is to be believed, the day is not far when we have the US Army outsourcing its 'war on terror' to where else ? - INDIA !! What do these "soldiers" get - US Citizenship. According to "Fast Track" in the August 7, 2006 issue of Time.

"When President Bush visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center last week to witness three U.S. soldiers seriously wounded in Iraq become U.S. citizens, he said that "if somebody's willing to risk their lives for our country, they ought to be full participants in our country." It was an executive order signed by Bush four years ago that allowed this trio, and 35,000 like them, to petition for U.S. citizenship as soon as they donned a U.S. military uniform, instead of waiting the customary three years. So far, 26,000 of them have achieved that goal.

Be it patriotism or the easier pat…
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Adventures with R - Facebook Ads (Part 1)

A new year resolution in 2018 has been trying to learn new data science technologies. 
An attempt over the previous few weeks has been trying to master R. R is an open source programming language supported by the R foundation for statistical computing. Originally used by statisticians, it has now found applications in nearly every field of machine learning. 
One of the interesting applications at work was trying to automate Facebook Ads. Facebook has an advertising platform that uses advanced optimization techniques to serve the ads to the right audience at the right time. The challenge has been getting a daily feed from Facebook about who sees the ad, who interacts with it and who ends up buying your end product on an ecommerce site. 
There have been three main ways I tried extracting data from Facebook
1. Facebook Business Manager Login : Manually logging in and getting the data out. This was a cumbersome approach and not prone to easy automation. 
2. Blendo.co : Blendo is a world class …
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Adventures with R - Facebook Ads (Part 2)

We covered the very high level of automating Facebook Ads via R in Part 1

Before we get started in Part 2, it is essential to download R Studio. There are other R development environments around but R Studio is the best environment that I have come across. Needless to say, you need Base R also. This post does not get into the basics of R (Idea for another post!)

Once you have R Studio in place, it is essential to get the fbRads package. Hat tip to Gergely Daroczi. His package is an excellent package, well documented, well supported and most importantly, fast !!! 


The next requirement is to create a Facebook App and create an oAuth token. 

The package link within GitHub covers the creation of the token but I have modified some of the steps as per my findings

Creating a Facebook App & connect with OAuth tokenTo be able to use this package, you will have to create a Facebook App and authorize it to manage your Facebook ads. Basic steps to create an app with Development access level lettin…
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