Interesting article by Ted McConnel. It would be interesting to know what's the proportion of ad revenue is coming from "blank displays" or user clicking on a link by mistake. Here's the article:

This is the story of a blank display ad that notched twice the click-through rate of the average branding one.…

Data scientists and analytic professionals usually command salaries well above average. Here's the detailed salary distribution in US. You can easily check your rank. Also, a breakdown per county is available.…

Check the influencer list built by Gil Press, at https://alist.traackr.com/datascience. As of 4/28, the top 10 are as follows:…

As of yesterday, a toll system is in place for drivers crossing the I-520 bridge, linking Seattle to Redmond, where the big Microsoft campus is located. It is claimed to be the most modern toll system in US, and drivers don't need to stop to cross the bridge, there's actually no toll booths, no human beings to process your payment.…

Turbo Mapreduce (Or How to Run Sawzall on 1 Terabyte of Text in 7 Seconds)

By Silvius Rus, on behalf of the Cluster Team at Quantcast

A few weeks ago I was talking to our CTO.  I was looking for wisdom on how to convince Java users to start programming in a new language.  We had just ported Sawzall, a highly productive mapreduce language from Google, to run on our proprietary Mapreduce cluster based loosely on Hadoop.  Even though Sawzall…

HOPKINTON, Mass., Dec. 5, 2011 -- EMC Corporation today unveiled the findings of the largest-ever global survey of the data science community. Spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India and China, the EMC Data Science Study reveals and quantifies a rampant scarcity across the globe for the prerequisite skills necessary for a company to capitalize on the opportunities found at the intersection of Big Data and data analytics. Only one-third of companies are…

She conceived two sons in 1996 and 1997. Both died from infant death syndrome after one month. The statistical expert testifying in court said that the chance of such a rare event is one in 73 million. She was convicted of murder and imprisoned. Freed a few years later, her life was destroyed and later died of alcohol poisoning.

My rebuttal to the 1 in 73 million argument is as follows:

• Even if "1 out of 73 million" was the correct probability, the fact that there are…

I'd rather use the word data magician or data wizard, I think there's more craftsmanship than there is science involved, to "make the data talk". Anyway here's the article:

Changes can come from muliple sources: definition of a visit or web site visitor is changed, resulting in visitor counts suddenly dropping or exploding. Internet log files change, for instance the full user agent string is no longer recorded, impacting traffic quality scores. Or one client has data fields that are not the same or only partially overlap with those from other clients.

How do you handle this issue?

The answer is simple: when a change in…

I'm kidding. But see below public records from the USPT (United States Patent and Trademark Office). Isn't it unbelievable? Maybe next time someone will manage to trademark "big" and/or "data", separately. Or trademark all the numbers, and maybe not just integers or zip-codes, but all the real or complex numbers.

Of course, by granting such ridiculous trademarks (and rejecting good ones - I'll publish on this subject later if there is interest), USPT as well as patent lawyers lose all…

This is the divide between those with an analytical mind, and those without. 

Analytic People

• Have further developed their talent by pursuing an analytic degree
• Mostly, being analytic is a talent that you have or don't have, but not a set of skills that you learn
• Manage their finance well, win more frequently on the stock market
• Avoid losing schemes such as lotteries, casinos (unless they do it for fun, but not for…

OK, so your company has taken a big step toward operating more efficiently by implementing a business intelligence (BI) solution—or it’s planning to install one in the near future. But if that’s the case then you’re probably also going to have to enlist the help of a new type of worker—a “data geek”—to make sense of all that BI data.

At…

Information Management Online, May 12, 2011 , Valerie Valentine

May 12, 2011 - Big data predictive analytics developerAlpine Data Labs got a $7.5 million funding boost this week, at the same time as it announced entry to the market after 15 months of product development of the Big Data…

In a survey of rankings from a variety of sources, Pleated Jeans maps the United States of Shame. Because all states must be bad at something. Go, California. If we're the worst at air pollution, does that mean we actually have…

Ed. note: Data scientists have received a lot of …

In a presentation to the Chicago R User Group last night, Drew Conway used his new…

• Minimizing X-ray usage due to radiation exposure
• Automatically identifying frequent fliers who are not…

Some of them require very serious skills to succeed, or being well known, and income is volatile. Feel free to add other jobs to my list.