Data Scientists have been named the sexiest job of the 21st century

[Mackin USA]

"With the amount of volume and variety of data churned out by businesses, consumers and governments today, it's no surprise that data science and analytics are slowly becoming a regular part of company positions as well as school curriculums."

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/big-data-download/hottest-job-21st-century-bet-151026538.html

[ergophobe]

The last US presidential election brought this out into the awareness of the general population. An election is complex of course, but there were two things obvious to anyone and written about ad nauseum after the fact

- Obama "outdataed" Romney and this had a significant impact
- the big data analysts with little political knowledge were way more accurate than the dyed-in-the-wool politicos with good (not great) numbers and years and years of experience observing races.

[Mackin USA]

So true...

[littleman]

I think Nate Silver's blog has done a lot to bring the forecasting to prime-time.  I know I was hooked during the election -- it cut through a lot of the BS.

[ergophobe]

The other big "event" last year regarding data crunching was the success of the film Moneyball. Between Moneyball and the election, it was the year when statistics entered the public consciousness.

Nobody can make data crunchy sexy like Brad Pitt.

Then the fact that Nate Silver, one guy in a room with a computer who really knows how to crunch numbers, was able to completely outperform overpaid analysts with all the data Romney and Rove could throw at them was a watershed moment for political analysis (we don't really know much about Obama's number crunchers because, since they agreed with Silver, they were sort of out of the news, but the question is whether they agreed with Silver because they were good or because they were just as bad as the Republican crunchers but just had a different bias).

As a reformed academic (professional historian for 20 years), Silver reminds me of the mode you get into when you're doing good academic research. You get so obsessed with uncovering the story that you get a rush of thrill and excitement when you find something that flatly proves you wrong, but which brings light and insight to the question.

Though the Romney campaign kept accusing Silver of being an Obama flack, I see Silver as someone who however he felt about Obama and Romney is simply more passionate about numbers and good analysis than he is about any given politician.

[littleman]

>As a reformed academic (professional historian for 20 years),

And now you climb mountains, live in the woods & promote things on the Internet -- that's quite a lifestyle change.

[ergophobe]

>As a reformed academic (professional historian for 20 years),

And now you climb mountains, live in the woods & promote things on the Internet -- that's quite a lifestyle change.

Well, I've been a rock climber since I was 8 or 9, my homes have often backed up to miles of woods, and I've been sitting in front of a computer working from a home office of some sort for most of my adult life.

The big difference is that I now don't spend much time in the archives leafing through dusty, 500 year-old documents, which is the only part I miss. No matter how much you read in history, when you get deep into original unpublished manuscripts, you always come across something fun.