BI-TAGS

Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions.

Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”

its a very powerful query engine/data transformation tool.

what's fascinating is its ability to load web data from static html pages, tables on web pages, web services, etc. I had a need to search recent activity on Twitter and decided to test drive Data Explorer in Excel.