Picture of the day:

A reminder that despite living in our COVID isolation bubbles, despite the very real problems in the world like climate change and it's consequences (extreme weather, wildfires, etc), there is still beauty in the world. So I will post some personal photos, past travels, local pictures, whatever stikes my fancy. Click below to see today's picture.

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Data Alchemy

In  flash of insight, I realized that what we do isn't always data science but rather data alchemy - turning base materials into something of far greater value.

Unlike the medieval alchemist trying to convert lead into gold, we convert raw numbers, divergent data into something of value, something you can base a decision on.

While I'd like to claim originality here, a quick Google search tells me quite a few others have come to the same conclusion and the term is bandied about in several industries.

Oh well, we will make the term our own. Time to get brewing the next batch of gold.

If you are interested  read: "LeCun vs Rahimi: Has Machine Learning Become Alchemy?" Click below for the article link.

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Our core business

Dufferin Research provides cost-effective, reliable services that include superior technical skills, excellent project management and have the sort of robust & secure infrastructure needed to succeed in this business. For further technical details see our capabilities page. But while we love the beauty of automation, and are masters of many programming languages, we still view ourselves first & foremost as a service company.

 We are 100% client focused. Your needs are what drive us. It's what we do. This philosophy has a price; service does not scale like technology. So we have come to terms with, and embraced the fact that we will remain a fairly small company. This is simply because what we do cannot be replicated on a large scale cost effectively. For Dufferin Research, hands on, means hands on.

Over the past few years, Dufferin Research has been moving towards providing additional services. In addition to the traditional quantitative online data collection, Dufferin Research provides the full range of services typical found in full service market research firms. If the area of expertise exists in-house, we will provide beginning to end research from the consultative process up front to define your needs and the project scope, project & questionnaire design, to the analysis and delivery of the results.

Since 2013, we have been offering expert consulting in Canada in the fields of Environmental engineering, risk assessment, water resource management and protection, and all issues related to hydrology and climatology.

Upgraded Data Centre

In March 2019 we brought on new DELL servers with solid state drives and more RAM to increase throughput to replace our trusty but now aging Linux production servers (which will be moved to non-production roles). We are running RHEL 7.8 and multiple virtual hosts running several versions of Linux and Windows machines. In July 2020, the main firewall appliance was replaced by a Cisco Firepower 1010.

Our data centre will remain in Ottawa where it has been for over a decade for the foreseeable future. Time to clean up the cabling in the server room!

We are still committed to locally stored data within Canada. We believe this is a better way of securing proprietary client data than somewhere in the cloud, where we cannot maintain we truly know where the data resides, or how many copies have been made. That being said we are not by any means technological Luddites. The cloud is great for public data and raw CPU processing of real-time data, however we need to have strict knowledge of where all data we manage (original and backups) resides. This certainty we cannot ensure using cloud storage.