the three sexy skills of data geeks

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Hvis der er noget som kan gøre data sexet er det GIS ...
/Sik

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If anything GIS can make data sexy ...
/Sik

Quote

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by Michael E. Driscoll

Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, was interviewed a few months ago, and said the following in the McKinsey Quarterly:
“The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill.”

In prepping for tonite’s talk at theGoogle IO Ignite event, this quote inspired me to muse about how sex appeal and statistics might go together: so I chose to mash up a few scatter plots with Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe.

Statisticians’ sex appeal has little to do with their lascivious leanings (ahem, BedPost), and more with the scarcity of their skills. I believe that the folks to whom Hal Varian is referring are not statisticians in the narrow sense, but rather people who possess skills in three key, yet independent areas: statistics, data munging, and data visualization. (In parentheses next to each, I’ve put the salient character trait needed to acquire it). [...]

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Read more: http://dataspora.com/blog/sexy-data-geeks/

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