

Teaching Students to Sift Mountains of Data - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/technology/12data.html

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ShabbyDoo
I am reminded of the early-90's complaints from IT organizations -- "You
[Univeristy X] don't teach your students how to do anything useful like Visual
Basic 3, etc. They come to us, and we have to teach them these basic skills."

While techniques for dealing with large volumes of data are certainly more
general (and intellectual) than VB3, these complaints are similar in nature. I
don't hear Google complaining about deficiencies in top-ranked undergraduate
CS programs. It's not as if a basic knowledge of algorithms and data
structures is not still required (if anything, it's more valuable with large
datasets).

For years, universities have thought their mission was to educate, and
businesses thought their goal ought to be training. Interestingly, those
businesses with reputations for hiring top talent don't seem to complain about
specific coursework. It's not like the mid-90's Microsoft complained that its
recruits didn't know VB! And, Google certainly has a penchant for hiring smart
people without regard to specific technical knowledge.

~~~
barry-cotter
_Interestingly, those businesses with reputations for hiring top talent don't
seem to complain about specific coursework._

Yes, because they assume they can train you. If you're a smart bastard, you'll
learn fast, and almost anybody will learn faster by applying knowledge than by
reading a textbook.

"And, Google certainly has a penchant for hiring smart people without regard
to specific technical knowledge."

Again, yes. What does this suggest? Google (and like companies) are hiring for
intelligence, not specific skills. What does this suggest combined with the
lack of concern about specific coursework?

They're hiring for intelligence, they're not that bothered about what you
know, and they mostly recruit from top schools. This suggests that the top
schools mostly act as a filter; anyone who got into School X is a smart
bastard, so we should give strong consideration to hiring them just because
they're smart.

So Google could cut out the middleman and hire based on SATs and cut out the
middleman. Why not? They like _some_ skills, and getting through college
signals a certain degree of conscientiousness, which is good to have in
employees.

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psyklic
I was lucky enough to write software for government supercomputers and work
with government scientists. From these experiences, I've come to the
realization that "science has turned into data management" is completely the
wrong conclusion. In 99% of scientific supercomputing studies, if you do not
know what you are looking for (or at least have a _very_ good guess) before
you start looking, then you will not find anything in your data -- you only
have time to code and wait for a few analyses.

Unfortunately, the systems that scientists study with supercomputing are often
beyond our understanding. Even with the supercomputers, we can not form good
hypotheses and therefore we learn very little.

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Retric
If finding useful pieces of information from huge databases was really hard
search engines would advertise _smaller_ databases. But, fear of large numbers
makes a far better story.

PS: The only way a scientist is _overwhelmed with information_ is when they
need to do something by hand. It's hard to guess how a scientist would like to
collect less information. Worst case you ignore it because you can't process
it _yet_.

~~~
tigerthink
>If finding useful pieces of information from huge databases was really hard
search engines would advertise smaller databases.

Come again?

