Jobs
News & Blogs
Future Big Data: And a Sustainable One At That
Silicon Angle
September 24, 2012 –
As the world becomes more polluted, populated and congested, and as our resources become ever more depleted, humanity is fast reaching the point where sustainable living will become essential to its very survival. Sustainability – the practice of ensuring that we have, and will continue to have, the resources, materials and water we need to protect our health and the environment – is already a big concern for many governments and industries.
Is Data Scientist the Sexiest Job of the Century?
Greenplum Blog
September 21, 2012 –
Hey good lookin'. Yep, I'm talking to you, or at least the data scientists reading this. (The rest of you are incredibly good looking, intelligent, and clearly have good taste, as well.) The Harvard Business Review has put Billy Crystal's "You Look Marvelous" on the hi-fi, dimmed the lights, and declared data science "The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century". Unfortunately for the single data scientists in Datastream's audience, the HBR doesn't offer any clever pickup lines about petabytes. The "sexiness" HBR refers to is more figurative than literal, investigating the current job market for skilled practitioners, who are in high-demand in the enterprise and among online behemoths such as LinkedIn. Still, being in high-demand among employers is a pretty good consolation prize, and if anyone produces a set of foolproof pickup lines for data scientists to use at cocktail mixers, we'll be sure to let you know.
Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century
Harvard Business Review
September 20, 2012 –
When Jonathan Goldman arrived for work in June 2006 at LinkedIn, the business networking site, the place still felt like a start-up. The company had just under 8 million accounts, and the number was growing quickly as existing members invited their friends and colleagues to join. But users weren’t seeking out connections with the people who were already on the site at the rate executives had expected. Something was apparently missing in the social experience.
The Wall Street Journal
September 20, 2012 –
Companies Trade In Hunch-Based Hiring for Computer Modeling. When looking for workers to staff its call centers, Xerox Corp. used to pay lots of attention to applicants who had done the job before. Then, a computer program told the printer and outsourcing company that experience doesn't matter.
Even If You're All-Powerful, It's Hard To Fix The Economy
NPR
September 19, 2012 –
The world inside Mark Zandi's computer model feels pretty familiar. It's full of people who are worried about the economy. Their homes are being foreclosed on. They're paying more for gas. Something like 13 million of them can't find jobs. Zandi is the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, and he built his model to predict what's going to happen in the real world. When he plugs what he thinks is going to happen in the real world, his model spits out a pretty grim result: Four years from now, the unemployment rate will be 6.6 percent. That's lower than today, but still much higher than the 5 percent rate that was typical before the recession.
Will Big Data Kill All But the Biggest Retailers?
Harvard Business Review
September 18, 2012 –
Increasingly, the largest retailers in markets across the country are employing sophisticated personalized marketing and thereby becoming the primary shopping destination for a growing number of consumers. Meanwhile, other retailers in those markets, once vigorous competitors for those loyalties, are being relegated to the role of convenience stores.
TechLines panelist profile: Ford's Michael Cavaretta on internal big data
ZDNet
September 13, 2012 –
For a company like Ford the promise of big data revolves around analyzing internal information from repair logs and sensors. Michael Cavaretta, Ph.D., technical leader of predictive analytics and data mining at Ford Research and Innovation, sees big data as a technology that can solve a lot of internal issues.
Data is Useless Without the Skills to Analyze It
Harvard Business Review
September 13, 2012 –
Do your employees have the skills to benefit from big data? As Tom Davenport and DJ Patil note in their October Harvard Business Review article on the rise of the data scientist, the advent of the big data era means that analyzing large, messy, unstructured data is going to increasingly form part of everyone's work. Managers and business analysts will often be called upon to conduct data-driven experiments, to interpret data, and to create innovative data-based products and services. To thrive in this world, many will require additional skills.
Fortune
September 13, 2012 –
A heartbeat, a child's first word, a photograph, a phone call, a Facebook update -- all drops in a vast ocean of data. "Big" data, then, is something of a misnomer. It's colossal. From the beginning of recorded time until 2003, we created 5 billion gigabytes of data. In 2011 the same amount was created every two days. By 2013 that time will shrink to 10 minutes. So what are we learning from it all? Truths about our measured world and our measured selves. What follows is a look at both.
HBR
September 12, 2012 –
We recently surveyed executives at Fortune 1000 companies and large government agencies about where they stand on Big Data: what initiatives they have planned, who's leading the charge, and how well equipped they are to exploit the opportunities Big Data presents. We're still digging through the data — but we did come away with three high-level takeaways.
