Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century. Artwork: Tamar Cohen, Andrew J Buboltz, 2011, silk screen on a page from a high school yearbook, 8.5" x 12" Download a free chapter from Thomas H.
Davenport's book Keeping Up with the Quants. When Jonathan Goldman arrived for work in June 2006 at LinkedIn, the business networking site, the place still felt like a start-up. The company had just under 8 million accounts, and the number was growing quickly as existing members invited their friends and colleagues to join. But users weren’t seeking out connections with the people who were already on the site at the rate executives had expected. Goldman, a PhD in physics from Stanford, was intrigued by the linking he did see going on and by the richness of the user profiles. Luckily, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn’s cofounder and CEO at the time (now its executive chairman), had faith in the power of analytics because of his experiences at PayPal, and he had granted Goldman a high degree of autonomy. Google Casts a Big Shadow on Smaller Web Sites. If You Want to Get a Job Learn About SEO Bots. Like in the film iRobot, many menial tasks are now assigned to bots in order to optimize the process and save money for companies.
Search has become so ubiquitous as a technology today that we rarely stop to think where it applies, or how. Search has become the de facto means through which we navigate the web. Without it the massive amount of information locked up in websites and online documents is next to useless. Search technology however is not just useful when it comes to getting websites to rank on the web. It is also used, in a deprecated format, to help sort through job applications. That’s right, your chances of getting a job, or not, are now down to bots. Preposterous as it may sound it makes perfect sense and the reason is money. Despite changes in technology recruiting is one area which has been slow to adapt. Yet it is also a vital part of a business’ means of growing. Automation is seen as one way of fixing this. Here are three key principles to help you: 01. 02. 03.
Experience - knowledge - prediction. Amazon ‘robo-pricing’ sparks fears. PageRank. Mathematical PageRanks for a simple network, expressed as percentages.
(Google uses a logarithmic scale.) Page C has a higher PageRank than Page E, even though there are fewer links to C; the one link to C comes from an important page and hence is of high value. If web surfers who start on a random page have an 85% likelihood of choosing a random link from the page they are currently visiting, and a 15% likelihood of jumping to a page chosen at random from the entire web, they will reach Page E 8.1% of the time.
(The 15% likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping factor of 85%.) Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero. PageRank is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank websites in their search engine results. The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze.
Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. Chinese Drones Will Use Genetic Algorithms to Learn to Hunt For Submarines. China usually holds its military hand very close to the vest--that, or things "mysteriously" leak that it doesn't (does) want the world to know about--so we're left to wonder why the People's Republic has decided to publish this in the journal Advanced Materials Research.
Nonetheless, it's pretty interesting. Chinese navy researchers have plans for a new submarine hunting scheme that uses ship-launched UAVs running genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms narrow down a range of possibilities to an optimal solution much the way evolution does (at least in a simplified sense)--by weeding out the weaker offspring and mating the best with the best to create stronger candidates. These algorithms would take into account things like fuel economy, potential air and sea threats, and oceanographic geography to zero in on the most likely places for submarines to be moving at a given time. Working with dropped sonar buoys, the drones would then attempt to locate enemy subs in action. [New Scientist]
Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world. In Google’s Inner Circle, a Falling Number of Women. Algorithm. Flow chart of an algorithm (Euclid's algorithm) for calculating the greatest common divisor (g.c.d.) of two numbers a and b in locations named A and B.
