State of Data This Year – 2011

 Last issue of the year is a revisit of 48 newsletters published in 2011. Happy Holidays! #2011_Books_on_data_and_else

---

 

1. Checklist Manifesto – What works in ER should work in your project. Goes along the aphorism – ‘What can be measured, can be managed’. Very handy for complex projects like moving to new data center + tech stack refresh.
2. *** Thinking, Fast and Slow – We float in data but decide by gut. How same data, but different representation could change the decision. e.g.,A vaccine would save 90% impacted vs. it would kill 10 – may produce different emotional outcome even though both inputs are logically analogous. Book of the year, perhaps of the decade by Nobel winning behavioral psychologist.
3. Information – ‘The universe has so far done 10^120 “ops” to create roughly 10 ^90 bits of data’ is just one of many things one will learn.
4. Think Stats – One of the best refreshers for wannabe Data Scientists.
5. Race Against the Machines – Why ‘Big Data’ problems could all just go away on its own, and ‘optimization’ may become a lost art. Machines are taking over. Scary, thoughtful and with wonderful chessboard analogies. Best $2.99 to spend this holiday season!

#2011_movies_videos

---

1. Moneyball – ‘Analytical, sabermetric approach to Baseball’, and entertaining.
2. Joy of Stats – From the most entertaining statistician ever, perhaps.
3. Sort Algorithms explained by Hungarian Folk Dancers
4. Brilliant Machine Learning Demos
   
5. How Negative reviews could improve sales

#2011_data_learning 

---

1. FREE Classes from Stanford – Data & Others (go to bottom to see full list)
2. VideoLectures – ‘selection in machine learning is particularly noteworthy. Look for the title “For those about to Machine Learn” halfway down the page. It takes you the “Machine Learning Summer School” a collection of tutorials by the leading authorities in the game’
3. MIT OpenCourseWare – ‘In particular, look at this’
4. ‘Finally, MIT announced a new initiative that will begin Spring 2012 that provides students with self-paced instruction, laboratories, and an opportunity to earn a certificate of mastery.’
5. Data Trivia Hunting – Quiz #1; #2; #3 from ‘Significance’

#2011_data_misc (compilation from past issues of 2011)

---

•        Best place for Data Scientists to drink (or, may be, to create this Data API)
•        Big Data & A little boy
•       Best Business/Data Transformation – Bloomberg. Because Bloomberg is Data!
•        Correlation vs. Causation (last of the year!) – Facebook driving Greek crisis? And others.
•        Hunch believes Gmailers are thinners
•        Think Quarterly Inaugural issue on Data
•        NoSQL & SQL – Two sides of the same coin (ed: perhaps best paper of the year)
•        How Machine Learning made Kinect
•        Big Data is the big hope for asthma sufferers
•        Every company should have one! Get Data In & Out to/from ANY Google product
•        Why humans love Pie (chart) so MUCH vs. In defense of Pie Charts
•        How Yammer manages Metrics
•        Generate Easy Sparklines
•        1994’s news today – How StackOverflow made pages 100x faster by….SQL tuning
•        Design of Large Scale Log Analysis
•      Many mean median when they say mean
•       Invasion of Body Hackers – how many are using data about the ‘quantified self’ to change biology, or even the consciousness
•       von Neumann’s Elephant can indeed be drawn with four parameters if they are complex numbers – with the sample Python code.
•       This 2-minute video can change your outlook on data visualization
•       Are we becoming too analytical? Possible bandwagon effect of ‘big data’ and ‘analytics’