U.S. News and World Report’s guide to the best careers published this month lists data miner as one of a dozen “ahead of the curve” careers for 2009:
Data mining is a great career for people who would enjoy using statistics to unearth patterns in data, using ever more powerful software. Opportunities are particularly good if you also have business sense and the ability to tease out the information that bosses really want to know.
Filed under: Data, Visualisation | Tags: Data Mining, Open Source, R, Robert Gentleman
R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models. Companies as diverse as Google, Pfizer, Merck, Bank of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it.
More: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008616886_btprogramlanguage12.html
The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn’t really work.
A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” Inevitable false positives will result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being incorrectly flagged as suspects.
The whopping 352-page report, called “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,” amounts to at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department’s controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.
