There's no shortage of great talent for companies such as Apple, Google, Intel, Facebook, Wikipedia and some exciting startups. But what if you are not one of these?

I received the following job ad in my mailbox (see below in italics), from a third-party recruiter, and it's probably for a data science position at Nike near Portland, Oregon (my guess). Basically, it's a 6-month gig to build an A/B platform.…

This indeed applies to all industries and all products. In short, how do you detect new uses of a declining product (cigars in this case) that could turn them into a good product and revive the industry in question? The tobacco industry has tried to sell outside US (especially Asia) to make up for declining sales in US. They came with e-cigarettes. But they never thought of a tobacco use in a context not associated with addiction.…

BI is a group of concepts, methods and procedures for making better business decisions using information from several sources and applying knowledge and presumptions to build up a precise understanding of business. It gathers, manages and analyse the raw data for making good understanding/understandable information for…

If I want to build a house, wouldn't it be wise to learn carpentry? Does the analogy hold for data-analytic multivariate models? Or is it simply enough to let a machine do it, with no knowledge by the machine operator of how to interpret the results from those modeling efforts? Or is it true, as one person has recently asserted, that he could replicate ALL statistical procedures and techniques using MapReduce, without knowing anything about statistics and probability, or the vast collection…

Every time a new technology disrupts the job market a "skills shortage" is debated between economists and politicians. The story isn't new - 10 years ago recruiters were asking for programmers with 10+ years experience in Java. The gap is widened by non-technical recruiters employing rigid traditional hiring practices. The truth is that there are all kinds of smart people with relevant skills that don't fit into HR's pigeonhole - we're generalists, not specialists. The onus…

There was a television interview of a man who had to deal with severe breathing problems through much of his adult life.  He underwent various procedures although he found little relief.  In fact, the adverse impact to his body was long-lasting.  So he was surprised to discover how he was extremely allergic to his breakfast cereal, something that he ate almost without fail.  When he stopped eating the cereal, his breathing problems disappeared.  I am sure that many people would regard the…

This "docu-drama" compares the experience of two enterprise developers creating a mission critical application.

All we can say is... Don't be a Larry!

America’s pastime is ripe with opportunities to dust off your data visualization tools and practice your Big Data swing.

As spring begins and bees collect pollen for honey, baseball statisticians collect millions of interesting facts about this year’s baseball season. Ever since the 1870s when sportswriter Henry Chadwick began pulling together players’ data, people have been keeping score on everything from hits and runs to strikeouts and averages.

This year is…

Featured Articles

• Evolving Storage Strategies for a New Computing Era
• The Deadly Data Science Sin of Confirmation Bias
• Our…

Confirmation bias occurs when people actively search for and favor information or evidence that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses while ignoring or slighting adverse or mitigating evidence. It is a type of cognitive bias (pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in…

This morning, I received the following in my mailbox, from Kaggle:…

Here's an interesting piece of email my wife received today - looks like it was sent to all students at university of Washington.

Subject: Update on the Closure of the Physics and Astronomy Reading Room

Hello Huskies,

As of June 13, 2014, the Physics and Astronomy Reading Room will be replaced with a new…

The new content can be found here.

They maintain 284 data sets as a service to the machine learning community.…

Here we go. Enjoy the reading!

Illustration of YARN (from first article below)

Articles from external publishers and bloggers:

• YARN - Apache Hadoop NextGen MapReduce
• Map-Reduce without Map-Reduce coding, using YARN (presentation)…

Managing performance of enterprise applications and achieving high levels of Performance with minimum resources is topic of discussion in today’s large enterprises. Resolving performance issues is essential for database administrators (DBAs) when it happens however it is best to react to the problems proactively. Proactive management requires very high level of attention and to help make sense of the overwhelming data provided by the database engine.

In database management being…

Embodiment is comparable to the idea of an “ecosystemic” or “holistic” approach. In an ecosystem, each thing affects everything else. In light of the interrelationship, a person would not attempt to correct a problem by considering only a single piece of the puzzle. Instead, there is a need to bring together many aspects of the body. To understand embodiment, it is necessary to recognize how “the body” separates an organism from its environment; in a manner of speaking, the body represents…

In the modern era, business environment is changing rapidly. They are seeking for valuable business information as being essential assets which will not only lead organisation towards the path of success but also help to sustain business in a competitive environment. Business Intelligence (BI) is a model which relates managerial values, and a tool which is used in an organisation to handle and filter information in order to make healthy business decisions. It refers to the appropriate…

Feel free to add your keywords. Here's a start:

The alphabet:

• Algorithm (also: API, accountability)
• Big data…

Guest blog pst by Pasha Roberts, Chief Scientist, Talent Analytics @pasharoberts

Much has been written about customer churn - predicting who, when, and why customers will stop buying, and how (or…