Cloud

Jake Porway who was a data scientist at the New York Times R&D labs has a great perspective on why multi-disciplinary teams are important to avoid bias and bring in different perspective in data analysis. He discusses a story where data gathered by Über in Oakland suggested that prostitution arrests increased in Oakland on Wednesdays but increased arrests necessarily didn't imply increased crime. He also outlines the data analysis done by Grameen Foundation where the analysis of Ugandan farm workers could result into the farmers being "good" or "bad" depending on which perspective you would consider. This story validates one more attribute of my point of view regarding data scientists - data scientists should be design thinkers . Working in a multi-disciplinary team to let people champion their perspective is one of the core tenants of design thinking. One of the viewpoints of Jake that I don't agree with: "Any data scientist worth their salary wil...

Hopefully you really have a good answer for this. Getting hacked is no longer a distant probability; it's a harsh reality. The most recent incident was Evernote losing customer information including email addresses and passwords to a hacker. I'm an Evernote customer and I watched the drama unfold from the perspective of an end user.  I have no visibility into what level of security response planning Evernote had in place but this is what I would encourage all the critical services to have: Prevent You are as secured as your weakest link; do anything and everything that you can to prevent such incidents. This includes hardening your systems, educating employees on social engineering, and enforce security policies. Broadly speaking there are two kinds of incidents - hijacking of a specific account(s) and getting unauthorizd access to a large set of data. Both of these could be devastating and they both need to prevented differently. In the case of Evernote they did turn on two-f...