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
In 1964, when the American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were setting up a new radio telescope at AT&T Bell Labs, they decided to point it towards deep space where they expected a silent signal that could be used to calibrate their equipment. Instead of silence, however, what they heard
In previous posts, I pondered the evolution of problem solving that is being data-driven by our increasing reliance on algorithms, which some mistrust as a signal that we’re shifting from human to artificial intelligence (AI). Would you like to play a game? “Slowly but surely,” John MacCormick explained in his book Nine Algorithms that Changed the
My previous post was inspired by what Andrew McAfee sees as the biggest challenge facing big data: convincing people to trust data-driven algorithms over their expertise-driven intuition. In his recent VentureBeat blog post, Zavain Dar explained that the real promise of big data is that it will change the way
“As the amount of data goes up, the importance of human judgment should go down,” argued Andrew McAfee in his Harvard Business Review blog post about Convincing People NOT to Trust Their Judgment, which is what he sees as the biggest challenge facing big data. “Human intuition is real,” McAfee
Fifteen years ago, updating a website required knowledge of HTML. Now, many content management systems like WordPress, Tumblr and Joomla merely require knowledge of WYSIWYG tools like Microsoft Word. So, will the same thing happen with big data? I hesitate to say that everyone will need to learn data-related skills. I
One of the hottest job descriptions in the data management field in the last couple of years is the position of “data scientist.” The rise of this job description matches the rise of the concept of big data – data sources that are very large in volume, change frequently, and
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
Data scientist is one of the hottest jobs in the country right now, and probably the world. In an oft-cited report, McKinsey estimated that the U.S. will soon face a shortage of approximately 175,000 data scientists. Demand far exceeds supply, especially given the hype around big data. Universities like UC
What makes a great data scientist? It's an interesting question and, to be sure, an increasingly important one now that that we've entered the era of Big Data.
