Who Cares About Your Data?

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Who Cares About Your Data?

Dave Convery

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Points: 2159
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May 30, 2015 at 2:49 pm

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Who Cares About Your Data?

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natewest Old Hand Points: 307 More actions · Answer 1

Editor of the medical journal The Lancet recently argued that at least half of science is wrong.

http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1.pdf

As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”.

This goes double in the business world. We follow the fad instead of focusing on what works, so now we've got people with a small 1 TB of data buying Hadoop to "mine" the data. And we hire a bunch of medicine men (i mean "data scientists") who will magic their way to riches via machine learning! No need to think hard about our business anymore, let the computer think for us!

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004290 More actions · Answer 2

As Granny used to say...

"Figures can lie and liars figure."

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Eirikur Eiriksson SSC Guru Points: 182901 More actions · Answer 3

Very nice piece Jeff and a very good point.

😎

As a side note, I have not hindered or limited my children's access to any source of information, rather I've spent the effort on teaching them to question all sources (even me), this is beyond a gate or a barrier, it's closer to superstition.

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004290 More actions · Answer 4

Eirikur Eiriksson (5/31/2015)
Very nice piece Jeff...

To be sure, Dave wrote the article... not me. 🙂

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Phil Hummel Grasshopper Points: 24 More actions · Answer 5

Microsoft has tried to market Analysis Service as a tool that turns anyone into a data scientist. I disagree. It is not about just having the tool, it is more about the art and science of knowing how to test data to see if there are any stable and meaningful INDICATIONS. When someone reports that our data indicate there is a strong correlation between factor A and factor B it gives me confidence that they are not over hyping the findings. When I see a claim that X causes Y, I'm always skeptical at least.

natewest Old Hand Points: 307 More actions · Answer 6

Don't even get me started on the marketing bull that is the term "data scientist" or "data science". Chemistry is a science. It uses lots of data. Physics is a science. Heck, one could even say that "business" can be studied as a science. All of these sciences have data, and analyzing that data in the context of that field is science. Analyzing data itself, shorn of the connection to anything real, is not science - it's mathematics.