3 ms·
I quite like the term "data civilian."
by michaelmior 12y ago
I quite like the term "data civilian."
- larrydag 12y agoI was wondering what that meant.
- michaelmior 12y agoThe article doesn't give a definition, but I assume it is referring to people who work with data at a small scale, i.e. something that couldn't be called "big" data. Totally arbitrary, but it's nice to have a term which is somewhat the opposite of "big data scientist."
- marvin 12y ago"Big" is of course also relative; there is a massive difference between something you can load in Excel, Google's 2 terabytes of N-grams and datasets that you can't even fit on a regular hard drive.
- PeterisP 12y agoIMHO it's not relative all and is pretty clearly defined - "big data" refers to technologies and processes for analyzing data that doesn't fit on a single machine, and only to that. It is often misused to mean anything that doesn't fit on an A4 sheet of paper, but for many companies the largest dataset that they have fits in the RAM of an ancient laptop. If you need to analyze a couple million sales transactions or a dozen gigabytes of web visitor logs then the most appropriate methods won't include 'big data' in their descriptions.
- marvin 12y agoI agree of course (I'm in science at the moment), but my day would be a lot more annoying if I corrected every misuse of the terms "data mining", "big data" or any other technical/scientific term that has been adopted by the press.
- idlewords 12y agoYes! They'll never know what life is really like in the data trenches, watching your best buddy get renormalized just one standard deviation away from you. And maybe they can sleep at night. Semper chi^2, bro.
- justinph 12y agoReally? It made me think that Monica Rogati, the speaker of said term, is very full of herself and her profession.
- michaelmior 12y agoHaving met Monica briefly at a conference, I don't think that's the case. But I can understand why that would give the impression.