Any Other Team Wins The World Series Good For

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tvh5edD22c?wmode=transparent&autohide=1&egm=0&hd=1&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0&w=500&h=375]

“Any other team wins the World Series, good for them…if we win, with this team … we’ll have changed the game.”

Moneyball! Maybe the start of the era of data. Plus it is a feel good baseball movie where a statistician is the hero. I haven’t been this stoked for a movie in a long time.

Data Science = Hot Career Choice

Not only are data analytics companies getting scooped up left and right, “data science” is blowing up as a career. Data science is sort of an amorphous term, like any hot topic (e.g., cloud computing). Regardless, people who can crunch numbers and find patterns are in high-demand, and I’m not the only one saying so.

Don’t believe the hype? Search for “data” on the career site of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Groupon, Livingsocial, Square, ….

Data analysis companies getting gobbled up

Companies that specialize in data analysis, or essentially, statistics, are getting gobbled up by larger companies. IBM bought SPSS, then later Algorithmics. MSCI bought RiskMetrics. HP bought Autonomy. Who’s next? SAS?

Build your own pre-cog

Okay, this is not really about pre-cog, but just a pointer to some data that might be of interest to people. A number of cities post their crime data online, ready for scraping and data analysis. For example, the Baltimore Sun has a Google map of homicides in the city of Baltimore. There’s also some data for Oakland.

Looking at the map is fun, but not particularly useful from a data analysis standpoint. However, with a little fiddling (and some knowledge of XML), you can pull the data from the map and use it for data analysis.

Why not build your own model to predict crime?

I’ll just add that the model used in the pre-cog program was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in this article.

Awesome Stat Ed Links

1. Openintro - A free online introduction to stats textbook, even the latex is free! One of the authors is Chris Barr, a former postdoc at Hopkins.
2. The undergraduate guide to R - A free intro to R at a super-beginners level, the most popular (and free) statistical programming language. Written by an undergrad at Princeton.