“Statistics is the New Grammar”

In the latest issue of WIRED, Clive Thompson pens a great piece which echoes a sentiment I’ve touched on before: in a data-driven world it is critical that all citizens have at least a basic literacy in statistics. Now and in the future, we will have unprecedented access to voluminous amounts of data.  The analysis of this [...]

The Era of Big Data: IBM Gets It

I’ve written before about how IBM dove headfirst into the world of Big Data.  They’ve made a big bet on the revolutionary possibilities available to business, governments, and individuals given the revolution in data capture and analytics we are entering.  At this point you’ve all seen this point made in various ways through IBM’s Smarter Planet [...]

Cloud Analytics from Big Blue

Music to analytically-driven ears: [...] IBM is unveiling a new internal analytics product that the company is touting as the “largest private cloud computing environment for business analytics in the world,” which launches internally with more than a petabyte of information. Along with this internal product, IBM will launch a companion product for clients to [...]

We are all creatives now (or, at least, will be by 2013)

SEED published an article the other day that discussed the coming impact of near total authorship.  The gist of the article is that at some point, nearly everyone will be able to publish content and that this will have profound implications for society in much the same way that near universal literacy has. So what [...]

“Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem”

So says Professor Jimmy Lin at the University of Maryland in a recent NYT Technology article about the shortfall in “Big Data-competent” university students.  The article points out that the kind of data we are now dealing with (which will only continue to increase exponentially) requires a different perspective and experience than most currently have.  [...]

Crowdsourcing Data Coding

I just finished watching the video below of CrowdFlower’s presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference.  CrowdFlower is a plaform that allows firms to crowdsource various tasks, such as populating a spreadsheet with email addresses or selecting stills from thousands of videos that have particular qualities.  The examples in the video include very labor intensive tasks, but [...]

The ‘Soft Sciences’ to get their Day?

In a recent report, Garnter proposes that as corporations try to benefit from the growth of social media they will come to rely more and more on employees with formal, advanced training in the social sciences. Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in the near future. Though [...]

Challenges of Consuming Real-time Data

I’ve run across quite a few stories lately discussing the 1) the revolution in data production we are living through and 2) the challenges we face in being able to sift through and view that data in a meaningful way through the web. The first comes from GigaOM, where Jennifer Martinez looks at the emerging [...]

More on a Data-driven World: Links & Commentary

Last week I wrote about the increasing demand for analytically-skilled, sophisticated statisticians by all sorts of companies looking to take advantage of our increasingly data-driven world.  This past Wednesday, the New York Times published another piece yet again highlighting this trend: As suggested by Daniel Pink’s assertions on the rise of a right-brained working elite, [...]

Profiting from an Analytically Driven World

The NY Times had a great article yesterday profiling the increasing fortunes for advanced statisticians.  As the world has become more data-driven and flush with raw numbers, the need to derive sophisticated insights from all that data has increased. Data does not speak for itself: The new breed of statisticians tackle that problem. They use [...]