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Be a Text Analytics Heretic
Promises, promises! Text analytics literature is full of them. Gain valuable insights! Know your customer! Harness the power of Big Data! And so on, and so on. And hey, who doesn’t want valuable insights? The problem is that knowing something about...
Selecting Big Data Sources for Predictive Analytics
Why is big data valuable? Because it’s big? Not really. In fact, very large datasets always come with a very large set of headaches. Storage, maintenance and management of very large datasets is not simple. And just having a lot of data doesn’t...
Protecting Public Data
Public data, the data that government makes available to the public, is at risk. Wait a minute, what about all those great Open Data initiatives you’ve heard about? Isn’t government sharing more data than ever? Well, no.Public data includes many...
Ending the American Community Survey: Privacy is Not the Issue - by Virginia Carlson
How do we as a nation know who we are, what areas are prospering, who is in trouble, where we need new schools, roads and shopping opportunities? Previous posts in this series have introduced the role that the federal statistical system plays...
Why Business Needs Public Data
With over 30 years in retail site location strategy, I used Census data every day to analyze business critical issues. Where do our customers live? How has that changed in the past decade, and what’s likely to happen in the next 10 years? What is...
Open Data: What’s It Hiding?
Let’s get this straight – I’m all for open data. Yet the fanfare about open data is taking up so much of our attention in the analytics community that many are unaware of looming threats to public data resources.If you follow tech industry news,...
Text Analytics Is Hard (That’s What She Said)
You think math is hard? Hah. At least in math, there is a clearly defined right answer, unless you’re talking statistics, and even there we have well-defined methods and accepted ways of doing things. If you like an analytics challenge, try...
Text Analytics, Big Data and the Keys to ROI
When you were a child, and the grownups asked what you wanted to do when you grew up, you said, “I want to do text analytics on Big Data!” Right?Well, maybe not. Maybe you wanted to be… a rock and roll star. Or President of the United States...
The STEM Profession that Women Dominate
Do you know which major STEM field boasts as many women in the profession as men? Where almost half the college degrees – even at the PhD level – are granted to women? Where women have a significant presence in the most influential circles of the...
Planning for ROI in Text Analytics
Want good ROI from text analytics? You’ve got to plan for it! In any field, there are always two major ways to get returns on investment – increase revenue or decrease costs. The key to good returns is shortening the path from the analysis to...
Big Data Analytics: Reframing Political Campaigns
A lot of people talk about Big Data, but not may do anything meaningful with it. Planned Parenthood is one of the "not many," and we are all witnessing the power of Big Data analytics in current political events. In a post on my personal blog last...
Big Data Blasphemy: Why Sample?
Since data mining began to take hold in the late nineties, “sampling” has become a dirty word in some circles. The Big Data frenzy is compounding this view, leading many to conclude that size equates to predictive power and value. The more data the...
