“They “trust me”…dumb f**ks.” Excuse me for the expletive. And sorry to break it to you, but that’s pretty much how Mark Zuckerberg described his 4,000 users back in 2004 when Facebook had barely started. He was only answering his friend, who had asked how he’d been able to collect personal data. Ok, we could […]
Think about it. We have 26 letters in the alphabet and 10 basic numerical digits. Yet, somehow it all combines to generate more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data on a daily basis. That, in essence, is a million multiplied by itself five times. And you know what? This rate has not been growing progressively […]
When presenting information how you frame it matters. To illustrate this point we’re going to compare how FiveThirtyEight, one of the best data news sources, changed their framing between the US Presidential election in 2016 versus the US Mid-Term election in 2018. Using Percentages First, let’s see how they framed the race for president between […]
In working with data from any source, you need to make sure you don’t have duplicate values. In many systems, this can be particularly cumbersome. In my favorite manual data processing tool, Excel, there are a few ways to simplify this process. I’ve used this technique to remove duplicates from Excel for years for its […]
Background As the saying goes, “if sales are the air a company breathes, then data is the blood running through its veins.” At least that’s how I remember the saying. That’s because, for decades in business or organizations, data has been the underlying force that makes all of it possible. It’s basic because without […]
It was 1969. The US was in the middle of the Vietnam war. Money was tight and the United States Senate Subcommittee on Communications was holding hearings to determine the “value” of public broadcasting. The main decider (Senator Pastore) had been hearing testimony after testimony and was bored of the same tired arguments. By the […]
I played the role of “boss” for many years in my career, and I never liked hearing the word no from my team. There are, however, a few occasions where I found it not only acceptable but necessary. Let me explain – Being in a position where you’re responsible for another person triggers a primal […]
LinkedIn recently published their Workforce Report for 2018 which gives us insights into the US job market from their 150 million members. For us Data Geeks, this report told us something we already knew, Data Science skills are in demand. Direct from their study they state – Demand for data scientists is off the charts […]
I’ve worked with data for over half my life, almost 20 years now.. Throughout my career, I’ve been on teams that drove initiatives and helped guide the business to success One of the teams I helped back in the late 90’s grew our entire sales call center to #1 in the nation of a multi-billion […]
The thing is, every company already has a data science department, even if they don’t know it. In order to understand that though lets’ start with a definition of “Data Science” since it is easily one of the most confused and overused terms in tech. Originally Data Scientist was basically a statistician that could […]