Data Scientists

Data Scientists-‘The Czar of the Modern World’

The Harvard Business Review claims Data Scientist as one of the sexiest jobs of the 21st century; and yes the term itself beholds quite vim and vigor as Data Scientists are getting hotter for better.

The Data Scientist title has been around for less than a decade and the term was coined in 2008 by Dr. DJ Patil, Chief Data Scientist White house of Science and Technology Policy and Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief-Scientist, Cloudera. They described it as a rare species being chased by startups and big technology companies alike for their ability to make sense of large and complex set of information. No wonder its demand is rife and served as a booster for their salaries that have shot through the roof. The Data Scientists are no less than big guns as their sudden prominence portrays that even the bigwig’s and startups now need to comb huge volumes of data for information that is critical for the success of an idea or business.

The Data Scientists are no less than big guns as their sudden prominence portrays that even the bigwig’s and startups now need to comb huge volumes of data for information that is critical for the success of an idea or business. The ecommerce companies who are quite ubiquitous in India have also realized their worth. The chief technology officer of Flipkart, Amod Malviya mentions that ‘Data is a large asset that is often not used to its full potential in most organizations. There is a huge amount of technology investments that we can make in this area’. No wonder the online retailer generates terabytes of data every day and is now building a data science lab that can help them sell better. The big technology trend is to make systems intelligent and data is the raw material.

Here are Five reasons why Data Scientists are Hot:

1. IBM & HP's of the world pouring Billions of Dollar-Yes, they are the new ‘Honcho’s’

To meet growing client demands in today’s data intensive industries, IBM has established the world’s deepest and broadest portfolio of Big Data and Analytics technologies and solutions, spanning services, software, research and hardware. Fueling this is the fact that IBM has made a multi-billion dollar investment in big data and analytics — $24 billion since 2005 through both acquisitions and R&D — to extend its leadership position in this strategic market. HP and GE on other hand each invested over $1 billon in big data. The big data and analytics market will reach $125 billion worldwide in 2015, according to IDC. So if you have any doubt if Big Data is only a buzz word think twice!

2. Demand Supply Gap- Greet the sexy beast!

From tech startups to Fortune 500 companies, data scientists are a hot commodity. A McKinsey study predicts that by 2017 the U.S. could face a shortage of almost 200,000 people with “deep analytical skills.” No surprise, then, that they boast an eye-popping average starting salary of around $120,000. People with the necessary skills are scarce, primarily because the discipline is so new. But, the situation is rapidly changing, as some universities around the world have started to offer different kinds of masters programs in data science. This year, for example, New York University is offering Master in Data Science, and Aegis School of Business & Telecommunication in association with IBM has launched Full Time and Executive Part Time Post Graduate Program (PGP) in Business Analytics and Big Data, India's first holistic Data Science program.


“Presently, there are only 10,000-15,000 analytics and data experts in India, and there will be a shortage of two Lacs data scientists in India over the next few years,” CEO of Fractal and a member of the Analytics Interest Group, Srikanth Velamakanni.

3. Its Money Raining- The hunt for Unicorn Data Scientists are in the making!

Mobile commerce player Paytm is hiring a team of eight data scientists in Canada, paying on an average $250,000 (Rs 1.5 crore) each. "The team will look at the large amount of data we have from different angles. For instance fraud detection, up selling and such," said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of One97 Communication which owns Paytm. "If a person paid Rs 60-70 Lacs is offered Rs 1.2 crore, then no one in the marketplace will touch him for a while," said Gattu, chief operating officer at Gramener. At least four senior industry professionals said Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon and Walmart were among the companies waving fat pay packets to top data scientists.

A data scientist is a job title for an employee or business intelligence (BI) consultant who excels at analyzing data, particularly large amounts of data, to help a business gain a competitive edge.

Salaries for chief data scientists with over 10 years of experience in mathematics and statistics are regularly touching the Rs 1 crore mark; as mentioned in Economics Times. Forget the complex Data Science skills, market has become so crazy that even candidates with 1 to 2 years experience in Hadoop alone are making 7.5 to 10 Lacs a year.

Unicorn Data Scientist are the upgraded version of our racy data scientists but are a little hard to hunt and are compensated more than $200,000 per year. Even if our desirables don’t know how to code, all thanks to the rising data science tide that has lifted the compensation of all other data analytics professionals, according to a latest survey!

4. Data Scientists are Supermen with Crystal Ball- Aren’t they big cheese!

Data Scientists are super men who tell stories out of the data, respective of the size of data: big or small. They answer questions like what's happening. What will happen? What we should do now? These are termed as BI, Predictive analytics and Prescriptive Analytics. They use statistics, Machine learning, NLP, R, Python, Hadoop, Spark to create Crystal Ball to predict future, solve business problem or find out the missing opportunities. Snapdeal, which has over 20 million subscribers and generates terabytes of data through the interactions that happen with customers in addition to a catalogue of over 5 million, churns 15 million data points (related data set like a consumer shopping on specific days for a particular thing) within two hours, using Hadoop. About 35% of its orders come from recommendation and personalized systems, and the conversion rate of such orders is 20-30% higher than normal orders, the company claims.

5. With Data Science you can finally be a Rock Star!

If you weren’t homecoming royalty in college, it’s time to wipe away your tears. From Google to Twitter, IBM to Snapdeal the hottest tech and E commerce companies are clamoring for data scientists. President Obama has appointed Dr. DJ Patil as Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy and Chief Data Scientist in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. As Chief Data Scientist, DJ will help shape policies and practices to help the U.S. remain a leader in technology and innovation, foster partnerships to help responsibly maximize the nation’s return on its investment in data, and help to recruit and retain the best minds in data science to join us in serving the public.

CSS3 and html5

tools & resources for web professionals

the best site for understanding and creating online code of css3.

http://westciv.com/tools/gradients/

http://westciv.com/

what you can do by using cc3. http://www.everydayworks.com/css_typography/HTMLCSSrotation.html

i like it. alot. :D

http://creatingsexystylesheets.com/

Website Development - Six Reasons to avoid Flash

Recently one of my reader commented on my Post Web Standards and described how some Company in his knowledge suffered due to fully Flash Website.

Flash is a great interactive tool and really has changed Web Contents but in my view, it is not a good choice for most commercial web sites. Its great to use Flash as part of website, but in no way a prudent choice for full website. Flash being a proprietary technology breaks most web standards and conventions.

Here are six reasons, why we should avoid to use Flash.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Problems:

Although recently Google has announced that with collaboration of Adobe, now they are able to read through Flash contents but still Information embedded in Flash is often invisible to many other large search engines like MSN.

Search engines scan information on a web site, process and retrieving the best match for each user query. Robots (Small Software, used by Search Engines to scan a website) usually cannot process text embedded in Flash and graphic files. Sites designed completely in Flash often offer very little textual information completely ignoring different type of SEO Basics and fully contravene with most of rules given in Google Web Master Guide.

Tip: From SEO point of view, don’t use fancy flash buttons and navigation bars. Search engines track and love text links.

2. Statistics; An Important feature of Today’s Web; is missing

Web Statistics helps to evaluate website success and provide important information about visitor’s behavior, that help professional Web Developers, Designers and Marketer to come with more better and user oriented web solutions.

Some of important questions, web statistics answers are: Visitors came from, the pages visited and from where visitors left a site. Web Statistics are able to track when a Flash object, typically a swf file, is viewed. They are not able to track navigation within a Flash object – so if a site is composed of one Flash object which contains multiple site sections, the web analytic system will see a swf download, but will have no idea which parts of the site a visitor viewed nor where the visitor left the site.

3. Flash breaks web usability standards

Flash Breaks some of most important Web Usability Standards. Few examples are:

Browser Back Button do not work.
You cannot copy-paste important information like contact information.
Important Accessibility Features of browsers like Zoom In, Zoom our and Font Size change are not available.
You can’t book mark some page form site for future review. (As Flash Site has only one page as per Browser Eye)
4. Lack of consistent cross platform support

One of the keystones of the web is that a website should work in any browser on any computer – it is openness and standardization which has made the Internet universal. Flash breaks the basic tenets of website design. While most Internet users have Flash installed – they don’t necessarily have the right version installed. Indeed version 8 wasn’t even released for the Linux platform, locking those users out of sites developed for Flash 8 and 9 (Flash 9 for Linux has finally been released, months after the Windows version).

5. Some users disable Flash to avoid flash based advertising.

Savvier web users have learned to disable Flash in web pages to avoid animated advertising and / or to improve page-loading times on dial-up connections.

6. Website updates continually require Flash skills
Although now Flash based photo galleries and some other content management features are available but either that higly expensive or have limited features. Usually for sites developed in flash need high level flash skills for updation. (Khuram)

Programming is NOT an art

I have been quiet lately as I work on some larger bits of writing, but some posts today can't be ignored, mainly "Programming as a Fine Art".

Have you read it? If so, let it be known that I vehemently disagree with the idea that programming is an art. I got paid to be a programmer for a number of years, and never did I feel artistic. I did some new, cool stuff on some projects, and did grunt work on others, as described in the above article. An essential word that is passed by quickly in the article is "craft". Craftsman create things that are to be used; they may be decoratively ornate - think of antique furniture you see on Antiques' Roadshow - but that is to make the object more appealing to potential buyers.

Software is created to be used. Anything that is considered Art is not that pedestrian; Art is intended to communicate, inspire, provoke and all that, I don't see the NEA (U.S.)sponsoring software development, and don't expect software to ever be banned in Boston.

Another essential word in the article is 'engineering', as in software engineering. Engineering is defintely not Art, it is applying methods to solve real-world problems with solutions that don't fall down (like bridges) or fail to work (like software). In fact, reaching an actual Engineering level of discipline for software is something we should aspire to, leaving craftsmenship behind, as happened in the Industrial revolution with manufacturing plants putting craftsman out of work.

I know this article is about why the teaching of programming is suffering in the wider discipline of Computer Science, but treating it as a 'liberal art' is not the solution. If programming is going to continue to be a craft for some time to come, then the classic apprenticeship approach is the way to go. Although I was Computer Science grad, that is how I started. My first employer knew that grads of other disciplines could also be candidates, so it had a programming evaluation test for applicants. If you passed it, the company believed you had the skills to program ,and I enede up working with many people with other degrees like law.

In the end, a university degree shows that a person can learn; the specifics of what they studied may or may not be useful in their careers. So, companies should be looking for people willing to learn programming, rather than expect them to already know how.