

Accidental Scientist Hawks ‘Online Marketplace for Brains’ - jph00
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/kaggle/

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tryitnow
Kaggle is pretty awesome and I hope to use it myself one day.

The article makes a good point that a lot of the most interesting data sets
just aren't that big. This is worth pointing out because I've noticed that
there has been some conflating of "Big Data" and "Data Science." These two
buzzwords are related but one does not imply the other. Big data is just that,
working with really large data sets (I think with the implication that the
data are unstructured).

Data science can include Big data as well as little data. It also seems to
cover both structured and unstructured data.

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jph00
(Disclaimer: I'm the "accidental scientist" profiled in this article.)

Yes I've noticed this as well. People are often asking me for my opinion about
Big Data, treating it as a synonym for Data Science. Since the journalist at
Wired had recently written a couple of articles about Hadoop, I took this
opportunity to explain to him how data size and data value are not necessarily
directly related. I think he did a great job in the piece of getting this
point across.

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lurker17
I think you'll find that Hadoop is often used in preparing the data into bite-
size chunks for use in Kaggle contests.

Also, sometimes the contest winners do win by fetching more data related data
than Kaggle provides. This happened in the Wikipedia participating-prediction
contest, for example.

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yobbobandana
Aren't the prizes on offer extraordinarily low for the accomplishments
desired?

For example to "Develop new models to accurately predict the market response
to large trades." is valued at $10,000.

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theorique
If a person were smart enough to "develop new models to accurately predict the
market response to large trades", they would have to be very foolish to sell
it for only $10K.

Assuming it was real and actually worked.

