I just returned from the useR! 2012 conference for developers and users of R. One of the common themes to many of the presentations was integration of R-based statistical systems with other systems, be they other programming languages, web systems, or enterprise data systems. Some highlights for me were an update to …

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As I’ve discussed here before, there is a debate raging (ok, maybe not raging) about terms such as “data science”, “analytics”, “data mining”, and “big data”. What do they mean, how do they overlap, and perhaps most importantly, who are the people who work in these fields? Along with two other DC-area Data Scientists, …

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I’m fond of navel gazing, meta discussions, and so forth. I’ve recently written about inferring navel gazing from link data, and about the meaning of the “Analytics” buzzword. This post will be my second on that other infectious buzzword, “Data Science”. When I moved to Washington DC in July, I was struck by the fact …

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I recently attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, aka “INFORMS Analytics 2011”, conference in Chicago. This deserves a little bit of an explanation. INFORMS is the professional organization for Operations Research (OR) and Management Science (MS), which are terms describing …

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Neil Saunders has an interesting (to me) blog post up this morning, with the title “Dumped on by data scientists.” He uses the use of “data scientist” in a Chronicle of Higher Ed article to rant a little bit about the term. For Neil, it’s redundant, as the act of doing science necessarily requires data; it’s insulting, …

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