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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...

"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...