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World Airline Routes Every company is looking for that cool data scientist who will come equipped with all the knowledge of data, domain expertise, and algorithms to turn around their business. The inconvenient truth is there are no such data scientists. Mike Loukides discusses the overfocus on tech skills and cites DJ Patil : But as DJ Patil said in “Building Data Science Teams,” the best data scientists are not statisticians; they come from a wide range of scientific disciplines, including (but not limited to) physics, biology, medicine, and meteorology. Data science teams are full of physicists. The chief scientist of Kaggle, Jeremy Howard, has a degree in philosophy. The key job requirement in data science (as it is in many technical fields) isn’t demonstrated expertise in some narrow set of tools, but curiousity, flexibility, and willingness to learn. And the key obligation of the employer is to give its new hires the tools they need to succeed. I do agree there's a skill ga...

A big thank you to BISNOW and my fellow panel members for an outstanding discussion and very informative event, last week's Data Center Investment Conference and Expo. The federal marketplace is certainly being changed by cloud and the data center industry is certainly willing and able to support this important transition. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (Reposted from " Habitat for Data-manity "    Our federal roundtable, moderated by purple tie-wearing King & Spalding partner JC Boggs , explained that agencies are all moving at different speeds to the cloud. The most mission critical programs are moving the slowest . FAA CIO Steve Cooper says his agency is starting to stand up federal private clouds. And there are plans to share that environment with other government agencies, as well as offer them cloud-based services . But St...

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain In a casual conversation with a dad of an eight-year old over a little league baseball game on a breezy bay area evening, who also happens to be an elementary school teacher, he told me that teaching cursive writing to kids isn't particularly a bright idea. He said, "it's a dying skill." The only thing he cares about is to teach kids write legibly. He even wonders whether kids would learn typing the same way some of us learned or they would learn tap-typing due to the growing popularity of tablets. He is right. When the kids still have to go to a "lab" to work on a "computer" while "buffering" is amongst the first ten words of a two-year old's vocabulary, I conclude that the schools haven't managed to keep up their pace with today's reality. I am a passionate educator. I teach graduate classes and I have worked very hard to ensure that my class...

GSA is using the RFI process to collect information about alternative models and/or solutions for future cloud acquisition vehicles and processes that further these goals. One emerging concept in cloud computing is that of a 'cloud broker', an entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between Cloud Providers and Cloud Consumers. The objective of this RFI is to learn more about how government can further leverage the key characteristics and advantages of cloud computing to save money and increase IT efficiencies.   Cloud brokerage is one concept that GSA is exploring and this RFI contains questions specific to cloud brokerage. According to Gartner, A cloud services brokerage (CSB) plays an intermediary role in cloud computing. CSBs make it easier for organizations to consume and maintain cloud services, particularly when they span multiple providers. Gartner Research VP Benoit Lheureux explains what a Cloud Service...

The DoD recently released the department's formal cloud computing strategy. DoD Cloud Computing Strategy View more documents from Kevin Jackson . In the forward, DoD CIO Teresa Takai said that: "The DoD Cloud Computing Strategy has been expanded to address use of commercial cloud services in the Department's multi-provider enterprise cloud environment. Adoption and implementation of commercially provided cloud services are being rapidly accelerated with the maturing of the Federal Cloud Computing initiative, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), and release of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act." Specific cloud computing transition steps include: Foster adoption of Cloud Computing Optimize Data Center Consolidation Establish the DoD Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure; and Deliver Cloud Services A subsequent memo identified the Defense Information Systems Agency as the department cloud services broker. DISA Broker Designation View mor...

Confirming what we already knew, today Microsoft announced they are acquiring Yammer for $1.2 billion in cold cash. Here's a blog post by David Sacks , the CEO of Yammer. Microsoft doesn't report a revenue breakdown for their individual products but SharePoint is believed to be one of the fastest growing products with annual revenue of more than $1 billion. Regardless of how Microsoft markets and positions SharePoint, it has always been collaboration software and not really social software. Microsoft does seem to understand the challenges it faces in moving their portfolio of products to the cloud, including SharePoint. Microsoft also understands value of having end users on their side even though SharePoint is sold as enterprise software. Microsoft's challenges in transitioning to the cloud are similar to the ones faced by other on-premise enterprise software vendors. But, I really admire Microsoft's commitment by not giving up on any of these things. Skype's acq...

Last year I ran a highly unscientific experiment. I would regularly put a DVD in an open mail bin in my office to mail it back to Netflix, every late Monday afternoon. I would also count the total number of Netflix DVDs put inside that bin by other people. Over a period of time I observed a continuous and consistent decline in the number of DVDs. I compared my results with the numbers released by Netflix. They matched. I'm not surprised. Even though this was an unscientific experiment on a very small sample size with a high degree of variables, it still gave me insights into the overall real data, that I otherwise had no access to. Proxies are as useful as real data. When Uber decides to launch a service in a new city or when they are assessing demand in an existing city they use crime data as surrogate to measure neighborhood activity . This measurement is a basic input in calculating the demand. There are many scenarios and applications where access to a real dataset is either pr...