In a recent post, I discussed the importance of shopping skills for a career in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. Most STEM projects involve a small amount of stuff specifically built to a particular purpose and a much larger amount of stuff that has to be obtained pretty much like…
I started this morning posting this update to my LinkedIn account: A curious thing about my listing of skills in my profile is that I did use the listed skills productively in my last job and in many cases within just a few days of starting that job, but I had nearly none of those…
I observe a common theme in several topics of recent interest on Internet. The theme is a popular desire to avoid being confronted with uncomfortable or disagreeable content. Besides a personal choice of avoiding difficult topics, we are increasingly demanding institutional or policy changes to govern the information in such a way to…
This article Data mining your children from Politico provoked a lot of thoughts for me. I appreciate and share the concerns raised by data collection of the learning process. It does present some serious privacy concerns especially as this data will be assigned to the child for the rest of his life. No…
This post follows up on last post suggesting that there should be a fresh emphasis on data science (the selection, scrutiny and analysis of data) in the elementary and secondary education. Recent education reforms such as common core present an opportunity to look forward to the challenges of future citizens and workers participating in…
This article reminds me that we have for many years promoted the introduction of computer technologies to primary and secondary classrooms with the primary goal of teaching software programming. I object to the notion that the motivation should be to prepare students for jobs as computer programmers. Programming languages take about a week to…
I offer a new word to inspire this post: Dedodemocracy : government by data. In the very recent past, there has been a very rapid shift to exploit large data collections to change the way our government makes policies. We increasingly using large historical data stores to replace statistical approaches using smaller sample…
In the past day I have been thinking about my recent posts on diversity in the work place and how it ties back to my earlier posts on labor force participation and on education performance. In particular, I realized my formulation of diversity as a mutual respect for equal intelligence and intention of good…
In earlier posts, I described the appeal of big data analysis to find answers to questions that lack any direct observations. The idea is that enriching observations with additional details can expose patterns that can provide information otherwise we would miss. It is like a business marketing study of big data that finds that…
Many of my earlier posts extrapolate from my experiences as a self-described data-scientist. Another way to describe these posts as viewing the world through my internal biases of seeing everything as just data. In some posts I suggest that the entire universe appears nothing more than a one-dimensional line of data. Other posts…
