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Jim Harris
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Blogger-in-Chief at Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality (OCDQ)

Jim Harris is a recognized data quality thought leader with 25 years of enterprise data management industry experience. Jim is an independent consultant, speaker, and freelance writer. Jim is the Blogger-in-Chief at Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality, an independent blog offering a vendor-neutral perspective on data quality and its related disciplines, including data governance, master data management, and business intelligence.

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Lean against bias for accurate analytics

We sometimes describe the potential of big data analytics as letting the data tell its story, casting the data scientist as storyteller. While the journalist has long been a newscaster, in recent years the term data-driven journalism has been adopted to describe the process of using big data analytics to

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Big data hubris

While big data is rife with potential, as Larry Greenemeier explained in his recent Scientific American blog post Why Big Data Isn’t Necessarily Better Data, context is often lacking when data is pulled from disparate sources, leading to questionable conclusions. His blog post examined the difficulties that Google Flu Trends

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What magic teaches us about data science

Teller, the normally silent half of the magician duo Penn & Teller, revealed some of magic’s secrets in a Smithsonian Magazine article about how magicians manipulate the human mind. Given the big data-fueled potential of data science to manipulate our decision-making, we should listen to what Teller has to tell

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What Mozart for Babies teaches us about data science

Were you a mother who listened to classical music during your pregnancy, or a parent who played classical music in your newborn baby’s nursery because you heard it stimulates creativity and improves intelligence? If so, do you know where this “classical music makes you smarter” idea came from? In 1993, a

Data Management
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Why can’t we predict the weather?

This is the time of year when we like to make predictions about the upcoming year. Although I am optimistic about the potential of predictive analytics in the era of big data, I am also realistic about the nature of predictability regardless of how much data is used. For example, in

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Behavioral data quality

For decades, data quality experts have been telling us poor quality is bad for our data, bad for our decisions, bad for our business and just plain all around bad, bad, bad – did I already mention it’s bad? So why does poor data quality continue to exist and persist?

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The four noble truths of data quality

Loraine Lawson recently used the Eight-Fold Path of Buddhism, in which practitioners are encouraged to pursue right views, intentions, speech, actions, livelihood, efforts, mindfulness and concentration, as inspiration for her blog post The Five-Fold Path for Ensuring Data = Information. The post offered five recommendations for ensuring that data is transformed into

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Preventing the zombie data-pocalypse

Since tomorrow is How-long-has-it-been-since-you-used-this-data-ween, it’s time to review your organization’s preparedness for preventing the zombie data-pocalypse. (Please Note: This should not be confused with your organization’s preparedness for preventing the zombie apocalypse, for which check out the resources provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by ever-so-carefully clicking on

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The architects of the invisible

In the era of big data, Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger noted in their book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, “we are in the midst of a great infrastructure project that in some ways rivals those of the past, from the Roman aqueducts

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The antimatters of MDM (part 4)

In physics, antimatter has the same mass, but opposite charge, of matter. Collisions between matter and antimatter lead to the annihilation of both, the end result of which is a release of energy available to do work. In this blog series, I will use antimatter as a metaphor for a

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The antimatters of MDM (part 3)

In physics, antimatter has the same mass, but opposite charge, of matter. Collisions between matter and antimatter lead to the annihilation of both, the end result of which is a release of energy available to do work. In this blog series, I will use antimatter as a metaphor for a

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The antimatters of MDM (part 2)

In physics, antimatter has the same mass, but opposite charge, of matter. Collisions between matter and antimatter lead to the annihilation of both, the end result of which is a release of energy available to do work. In this blog series, I will use antimatter as a metaphor for a

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The antimatters of MDM (part 1)

In physics, antimatter has the same mass, but opposite charge, of matter. Collisions between matter and antimatter lead to the annihilation of both, the end result of which is a release of energy available to do work. In this blog series, I will use antimatter as a metaphor for a

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