O'Reilly have published their 2015 Data Science Salary Survey. SQL, Excel, R and Python remain the top tools. Spark (and, consequently, Scala) have been the big climbers---and people with these skills are getting paid well. R remains popular, but might be an intermediate step to other tools. Those using Python and Spark are less likely to use R. This makes intuitive sense. R is a great … [Read more...]

R has moved from 9th (2014) to 6th place in the 2015 IEEE Spectrum top ten programming languages list. Pretty impressive given it's a statistical computing language. With Microsoft's recent backing, and its début in Spark, interest seems unlikely to have peaked. … [Read more...]

IBM announced a major commitment to Spark last month, calling the open source project potentially the most important new open source project in a decade. The announcement covered a number of actions, including building Spark into the core of the company's analytics and commerce platforms using Spark to power Watson Health Cloud open sourcing their SystemML machine learning technology and … [Read more...]

Dozens of Women's Institute members have been removed from a Buckingham Palace garden party guest list after spending hundreds of pounds on new outfits and train tickets to London. Too many tickets were assigned due to "an administrative error with the spreadsheet". We've written before about the problems with spreadsheets. They continue to cause misery. … [Read more...]

A common question from those starting out on a data science career is "Should I learn R or Python?" Both are very popular in the data science community and, as ever, the answer is, "It depends." The DataCamp Blog has published an infographic that contrasts the two languages in an attempt to assist those faced with this choice. Of course, you could always just learn both---and SQL. … [Read more...]