David Sousa-Rodrigues
I'm a professor of Computer Science, Complexity and Design at the ESAD.cr - Arts and Design School in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal and researcher at the Centre for Complexity and Design of the OU.
Location Portugal
Activity
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Hi @EvagelosGkirdas , in all technical aspects a blog is just a website. They use the same three basic technologies of all web: HTML + CSS + JavaScript. The main difference is how content is organised in a blog. Typically the articles follow a reverse chronological order and are centered around this notion of article. A website can be anything. It can be an...
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Hi @adrianomuccioli , You shouldn't be worried about learning computer programming. There are many tools for Data Analytics that don't need the user to know programming at all, like those used in EDA (exploratory data analysis). In any case it would be good to learn a bit of programming because then you can expand into the field. I wouldn't say that knowing...
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David Sousa-Rodrigues replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
@JoãoPedroContente There isn't an answer to this question that can reduced to a single number. It is clearly a problem dependent issue. If you are working for Amazon it will require different Data from data needed for a personal blog or from the data required for a Netflix download server. And in many cases quality of data is better than quantity of data.
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David Sousa-Rodrigues replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
@LauraCardoso Hi, I agree with you. Companies should only look into Google Analytics if they need the kind of data GA provides and can't get it from any other source. Some companies can be happy by analysing server logs and infer user behaviour from them. Others will not be happy with sharing their user data with google and will roll their own versions of some...
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@TessaMcIntosh We hope that at the end this course was helpful in understanding this topic a little bit better. Obviously, further studies will be required to make you a professional, but we believe that this course can point some directions for future studies.
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@SrikantMahapatra The website has been kept very minimal and with straight forward interaction so it is clear for all students to understand the mechanisms in the pair Visitor--Google Analytics. From past instalments of this course we have been able to get very interesting data, that reveal a strong student engagement with the topics taught. We hope that as...
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@JoãoPedroContente Anyone with access to the HTML file can insert the code. But typically there is an IT department that handles that and the permissions to write the files of the website are limited to very few persons inside companies. Otherwise companies websites would be exposed to rogue hackers. If you own a website then you can do whatever you want with...
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@YuOgata Thank you!
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Hi @JulianPorter, typical bots wont register in GA stats. That's mainly because they don't render the page and execute the Javascript code needed. They usually just download the page and do a static analysis of the contents for indexing. For GA to get an 'hit', the bot would need to fetch the google code from their servers (usually they are smart enough not to...
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@LauraCardoso Hi, It always depends on the particular case, but as a principle if you are developing an internal tool, it is protected behind a firewall and the company policy will probably prohibit any leaking of data that GA can expose the internal tool to. In any case it is always best to talk to your systems administrators about that particular situation.
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hi @HenryTorres , I think you might be talking about systems where you generate static HTML webpages from a Markdown system. eg Hexo or jekyll use this approach. The thing one must realize is that independently of the source of data (Markdown, Database, etc... ) the server serves html pages to the client that have been rendered to html by some set of rules....
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@AsepRopiudin If it is a Wordpress then you can just add the code to the head of the templates in the theme you are using. Even better is to use a Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress that will insert the code automatically without forcing you to manually update the template. About performance, the impact will be minimum. There is a one time download of the...
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Hi Sophia,
The answer is "it depends". If GA can track your visits as coming from the same computer, same browser and same account — and they can do this via cookies, among other techniques — then they will count you as returning visitor. On the other hand if you logout of all google accounts, deleted all cookies and took anonymity measures then probably GA... -
@ThierryWillemsens Yes, it should go onto the head of every page. I'm not an expert on Prestashop but I think that you can even automate the insertion of GA code by using a Perstashop addon - https://addons.prestashop.com/en/analytics-statistics/4168-ganalytics.html This might simplify and automate the process for you.
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Hi Asep, Google Analytics only tracks pages with the GA code. This means that if you have many pages you'll have to insert the same code in every one.
If your system is run by a content management system (CMS) you'll be able to just insert the code in the template and all pages would be automatically updated.
If the pages were created manually then a... -
@SOPHIAZAIDI Hi Sophia, we hope that you enjoy this course and can understand and take part of this learning community.
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Google doesn't use the information from the session corresponding to the visit. It cross combines information from other sessions. For example, if you have a google gmail account google might be tracking you across your web surfing. As long has websites have Google Analytics installed they will be able to combine information about your surfing habits from...
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@BryanGuess Exactly. In relation to automation, usually large websites work based on templates and therefore the snippet of code could be inserted into the templates and all pages would reflect the change. When there are many pages and no templates it is still possible to automate the process with some low level operating system scripting but that is outside...
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Hi Eleanor, typically they are organised in these three sections. And it is possible to validate the code against standards to see if it complies eg https://validator.w3.org/ . What happens is that many times browsers will accept code that is not completely valid and will still render the page correctly (eventually assuming some defaults). But it is always a...
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Hi @HeidiRoss It might be a problem with multiple accounts being used simultaneously. Do you have multiple Google accounts? Try accessing in Incognito mode to see if the message still appears.
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@HeidiRoss The GA code runs on the user browser, this means that the page has already been downloaded and is rendered in the client. Then only after the page is renderer is the GA code going to run. It therefore knows about the user environment, the screen resolution, its ip address, etc... it basically has information after the page request has been fulfilled...
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Hi Sanjiv, whenever a user visits your website, GA considers that a session. A session can consist of one pageview or many pageviews. The bounce rate reflects the percentage of visitors (sessions) that landing on one page, immediately left (meaning that the landing page and the exit page are the same and that there was only one pageview). Otherwise, the exit...
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Hi Leon, A VPN is good at hiding your location. It doesn't hide other things that your browser will tell. eg if you have a cookie that identifies your login with google, the only thing that the VPN will do is make Google believe that you are travelling. Complete anonymity is difficult and might involve not accepting cookies at all, using private browsing...
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@StephanieC. Google owns a blogging platform https://www.blogger.com where you can try what you've learned for free.
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Hi Zeynep, thank you for the feedback. We'll update the figure during the next iteration.
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If you use other website tracking ID all the traffic coming to your website would count as traffic for the owner of the other tracking ID. And in fact your dashboard would tell you that you had zero traffic.
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David Sousa-Rodrigues replied to Michael Rossall
Hi Michael, we are glad that you enjoyed the course!
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Hi Leon, This script is specific to Google Analytics and shouldn't even interfere with other scripts from other companies. Each company writes its own software so with great probability any two scripts will be very different.
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Hi @StephanieC. I think that to apply what you are learning here on a company website you must first talk to the management to see if they approve you adding GA code to the website or is they already have GA (or other similar service) installed. If they don't and approve because they realise the potential information they'll get back then the next step will...
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Hi Michael, let me quote the last sentence of this page:
"Having studied this course you have taken a first step in Data Science and Google Analytics. Of course, after just four hours study you have just scratched the surface. Even so, by now you will know if data science and becoming a bridge person remain interesting and the right career path for...
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Hi Karil, you are correct in assuming that GA must know a lot about the students that visited the test pages. I don't imagine that all students used anonymising tools to access this course and the test website. This means that Google is going to be able to correlate many aspects of each visitor to give you their best view of the In-market and affinity...
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Hi Raymond, we hope this experience is fruitful. If you don't have a website were to apply what you learn here, you can try it in other forms. For example if you open a free blog (eg. blogger.com) you'll be able to integrate Google Analytics with it. Obviously you won't get much traffic in the beginning but you'll be able to experiment with Google Analytics.
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Hi Karil, the entire snippet of code that is generated by Google Analytics has to be inserted into your HTML file. They are all very similar, but the "gtag('config' , 'UA-117260220-1') " line will surely change for your case. That is the unique identification number used for each property you setup.
If you already have a statistics provider this code will...
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Hi Sarah, google analytics doesn't give you directly the organisation people are accessing from. Obviously google has this information as it is easily obtained from the user's IP -- The process is called 'reverse DNS'. In any case there's an option to see the origin of traffic (at least at the ISP level used by the company). If you go to "Audience ->...
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Hi Phil, Google Analytics will give you a "user perspective", Log files on the server will give you a "Server Perspective". Both can provide more information than Mailchimp that can only can give you clicks on the email sent. In any case analysis of all these data sources is fundamental for optimising websites.
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Thank you so much.
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@WilliamHodgkinson Try to be sure so use HTTPS everywhere, if possible use a proxy or a VPN. But remember that even in those cases, you'll always leave some sort of metadata that companies will try to explore.
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Hi. The site is static for now and is illustrative of what is possible. We are considering adding live updates in future installments. Thank you.
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Thank you. We hope you'll find this course useful.
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The greatest advantage is the ability of the robot to learn how to solve problems not thought by humans.
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David Sousa-Rodrigues made a comment
Great content, but could be a bit faster. sometimes you feel that your are just being shown things that are more advertisement to the Reading lab than real learning material.
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David Sousa-Rodrigues made a comment
63s.
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David Sousa-Rodrigues made a comment
A constructed system that has the ability to process external signals from the environment has the ability to compute some action dependent on those inputs and perform those actions in the environment according to the objective it was programmed for.
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David Sousa-Rodrigues made a comment
I am interested in electronics and Robotics in particular and I'm curious about the potential to use swarm robotics in real life applications with the idea of having simple robots doing simples tasks but with the possibility of adaptation and evolution to different tasks and problems.
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David Sousa-Rodrigues made a comment
My opinion is that they should be called swarm of robots, but then the mere physical presence in one location doesn't make them a collective. There must be some sort of relation between them.
