I know this past weekend is more associated with barbeque than pizza, but I came across an interesting study of pizza that I thought I would whet your appetite this morning. For those of those you have spent time on the site Reddit, you know one of their communities is called “Random Acts of Pizza” or RAOP. On the site, people can submit requests for free pizza and if their story is compelling enough a fellow user might decide to send them one. Why not? Who doesn’t like a free pizza?

Users can only ask for pizza, and only one user can supply the pizza. For example, a request might go something like this: “It’s been a long time since my mother and I have had proper food. I’ve been struggling to find any kind of work so I can supplement my mom’s social security. A real pizza would certainly lift our spirits.” Anybody can then fulfill the order, which is then marked on the site, often with notes of thanks.

It is an interesting community. Because of the way it is structured, a group of data and social scientists used RAOP as the basis for a study that looked more closely at altruism, or what motivates people to give when they do not receive anything tangible in return. Tim Althoff of Stanford University and others wrote the paper published earlier this year in a research journal.

The researchers were able to download the many thousands of requests and eventually analyzed more than 5000 of them where they could track a response, whether it was successful or not, and other variables that they were able to quantify. From the data, they parsed this information and then built a mathematical model that would be used as a predictor of the success of the individual posts.

They found that it helps to ask for pizza earlier in the month, make your request post longer (see the graph above), include an image documenting your request (a copy of a job termination letter or an empty fridge), and show that your request should state that are willing to give back to the RAOP community. This last item bears some further explanation. Most of us would probably be cynical and say, yeah, sure, these folks are trying to game the system and get a free pizza. But the researchers showed that nearly 10% of those that were claiming to pay it forward actually did, which is a pretty high percentage given that many people probably haven’t had an opportunity to reciprocate.

You can also see from the graph above that those stories about jobs, money, or family situations were also more likely to result in pizza deliveries. One item they didn’t find to improve deliveries was that it wasn’t true how the mood of the author was expressed, something that traditional social science research has found in the past.

The days where even social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Dice could be things of the past, thanks to the use of Big Data techniques and analysis. It used to be you were only as good as your networks, but today the saying might be you are only as good as your code, or other footprints that can be discovered through various online analytics.

Forbes earlier this year identified this trend where recruiters can plumb databases to see whether candidates are stuck in the same position for too long or those who are quickly rising to new heights. Indeed, there are analysis firms such as Gild.com, RemarkableHire, Entelo and Talentbin.com that can search through open source projects to find the best developers for major tech companies such as Rackspace, Amazon and Expedia. The New York Times also wrote about Gild earlier this year and described their techniques: whereby one firm recruited and eventually hired a programmer who is still working there today. And this is someone that they would have never found otherwise, and who had no idea of the firm’s existence before they contacted him. These analysis firms can also be used to identify how well a potential recruit could perform in their new job, like the way the SAT test can help predict college performance.

But there are other less obvious methods. Through various Big Data contest sites, posters can claim fame and at least modest fortunes from winning programming challenges. The most notable of these is Kaggle.com, which has run hundreds of contests and awarded thousands in prices. Recruiters often go after these successful entrants.

Security vendor Impermium sponsored a programming contest on Kaggle a few years ago. The prize was $10,000, along with an opportunity to interview for a job at the company. While Impermium ultimately did not hire anyone, “the Kaggle competition was useful and we were able to examine many interesting algorithms,” CEO Mark Risher wrote in an email. Facebook has run several Kaggle contests to find new talent as well.

There are other crowd-sourced methods that I wrote about for Slashdot here that can be very effective at locating talent. These include homespun efforts along with sites such as ProjectEuler.net, HackerRank.com,India-based CrowdAnalytix.com, Innocentive.com (for the life sciences), and TunedIT.org (mainly for education and research projects). But Kaggle has been around since 2010 and has the largest audience. For all of these sites, what is interesting is that you can quickly search for the contest winners: there is no mystery in most cases about who won or what they did.

But while these examples are suitable for finding your next programming superstar, it may be awhile before Big Data techniques can yield candidates for more common positions such as marketing managers or assembly line workers. Still, it is an area worth keeping in mind.

This week at the Amazon developer’s conference in Vegas we got to see the latest supercomputer. I have been fascinated with this genre for many years. In the olden days, these were mammoth beasts, occupying rooms full of gear and burning up electricity like crazy. They cost millions of dollars, and had minions of folks tending to their care and feeding.

Back in 2004, I was fortunate enough to go out to San Francisco where a bunch of random folks were trying to assemble the first “flash mob” computer. You brought your own laptop (or desktop if you were strong enough) and left it for the weekend while they hooked it up to a switching fabric and tried to get every PC in sync.

Both the flash mob and the traditional supercomputer are old style. Today we have supercomputers in the cloud. With a click of a few mouse clicks, you could be running on thousands of virtual cores. It was bound to happen, and this week the folks at CycleComputing showed what they were doing. I have to say I was impressed.

In one case, they managed to put together 30,000 cores, which cost less than $1300 an hour to run for a big pharma company to do molecular modeling. For the Amazon show, they had virtual machines running across the globe on all eight of Amazon’s data centers. They were able to provision150,000 cores to run 264 years of compute time in less than a day’s actual elapsed time for a materials modeling application. Wow!

CycleComputing worked with Amazon to set this all up, so they could get all their virtual machines running in about the same time frame. If you had to create this computer in the real world, it would be $68 million. Cycle had a bill from Amazon of $30,000. While that is a lot of money, for the horsepower that they put together it really isn’t. I remember when some high-end PC servers cost that much for a single core not too long ago.

Think about that for a moment: in the past, you couldn’t get all this hardware set up in a matter of moments, let along months. Most supercomputers take years to build, and then they are almost obsolete, because someone else is building a bigger one. On the Top500.org list of the biggest ones, the current champ is a Chinese computer with more than three million cores. Just on cores alone, the CycleComputing assemblage would rank in the top 20 on this list.

Pretty amazing.  Silicon Angle has this video interview from the show floor with Jason Stowe of the company.

If you doubted that the cloud is just a passing fad, this should convince you otherwise.