intersections are nonsexy. ask the hawkers who ply their wares at intersections. not only do they have to deal with traffic from the north, there is a constan

intersections are nonsexy. ask the hawkers who ply their wares at intersections. not only do they have to deal with traffic from the north, there is a constant barrage of traffic from the south, not to mention the incessant traffic from the east, and hey, how can we forget the speeding traffic from the west... but the same intersections are also frequented by pedestrians from the north, and the west, the south and the east, so the hawkers' trade is lucrative. data science is at the intersection of linear algebra, machine learning, statistics and distributed computing. if you ask the hawkers sitting in a nicely furnished airconditioned shop at the mall, they will tell you that the hawkers at intersections aren't real hawkers, they are just fly-by-night hustlers selling a stalk of unkempt roses that will wither away, selling evening tabloid newspapers that'll be useless to read tomorrow, unhygenic ice-cream cones and candy, unhealthy street food, braids for the hair that'll snap if you tug at it, fake watches, imitation handbags, ... so if you want to be a real hawker selling real healthy food, you must open a real restaurant in a mall. you wanna sell genuine cartier watches, get a license and open a premium retail outlet in a mall. you want to hawk useful literature, open a barnes and noble bookstore in a mall... so also the genuine statisticians will mock the data scientists as fake...oh these guys don't grok industrial strength SAS and S-PLUS, they fool around with unproven toys like R. the genuine linear algebraists are too busy submitting academic papers to the MAA to worry about trivialities like data science. the genuine distributed computing programmers know that data scientists operate with a very tiny subset of distributed computing - usually just hadoop or bigtable, and even that they dodge with syntactic sugar like pig, cascading and scalding. they are not even real programmers - they don't refactor their code, some of them just write ad-hoc scripts that they don't even check in to the repository, they don't do agile, hell they don't care about readability of code - they call their chebyshev decompositions "def cbd()" instead of "public static void chebyshevDecomposition( DenseDouble2DMatrix inputMatrix)", how can you trust these jokers... the genuine ML guys work on world-changing technology like genome sequencing and autonomous vehicles, natural language processing and credit card fraud detection, not fluff like mining information out of tweets and facebook likes and linkedin profiles and foursquare check-ins. but you see, the same intersections are also frequented by pedestrians from the north, and the west, the south and the east, so the data scientists can put food at the table and make rent :)