by Angela Guess
A new article looks at the growing occupation of Data Scientist brought on by the data deluge. It begins, “The proliferation of ways to measure things — point of service terminals, web analytics, geographic and temporal records, even semantic information — means businesses are drowning in data. This has led to a new class of engineer, the ‘data scientist,’ whose job it is to perform the sophisticated mathematical gymnastics required to extract actionable information from this mass of numbers. According to mathematician Cathy O’Neill, the skills of a data scientist include not only crunching numbers, but also visualizing the results.”
It continues, “As Carnegie Mellon statistician Cosma Shaliz points out, O’Neill’s description of the skills required of a data scientist are precisely those of a suitably well-educated statistician, even if he or she has only an undergraduate degree in the subject. Granted, Shaliz teaches at Carnegie Mellon, which is among the best engineering schools on the planet, so that’s not to say that everyone with a B.S. in statistics has mastered modern regression, advanced data analysis, data mining and statistical visualization.”
The article adds, “This re-branding of statistical literacy as “data science” points out a larger trend — disciplines that were formerly the domain of the specialist, such as statistics, are now more important than to a larger segment of the business world than ever. The fact that so few students view even a fraction of this level of mastery as necessary — and that schools often do not offer even a basic statistical education to non math majors until the post-graduate level — suggests that in this area, perhaps even more than other areas associated with engineering, there is a yawning gap between the skills our workforce possesses and the skills employers require.”
photo credit: MIT Technology Review
The genius of the good leader is usually to bid farewell to him an issue which sound judgment, with no grace of genius, can deal with successfully.
Should you aren’t playing well, the sport isn’t as much fun. When that occurs I tell myself just to decide to play while i did while i would have been a kid.