January 28, 2012

More people want to learn statistics

 
More people want to learn statistics
Published on FlowingData | shared via feedly

Data is hot right now, so as you would expect, more people are signing up and applying to learn about it. Quentin Hardy for The New York Times reports.

At North Carolina State, an advanced analytics program lasting 10 months has, since its founding in 2006, placed over 90 percent of its students annually. The average graduate’s starting salary for an entry-level job is $73,000. Its current class of 40 students had 185 applicants, and next year’s applications are already twice that. In 2009, Harvard awarded four undergraduate degrees in statistics. Two graduates went into finance, one to political polling and one became a substitute teacher. There were nine graduates in 2010, 13 last year. They headed into Google, biosciences and Wall Street, as well as Stanford's literature department.

And in 2011, just about everywhere.

[New York Times via @jsteeleeditor]


January 18, 2012

R is definitely the future (for those who can learn with English).

I had witnessed one of the founders of SAS moved to R in 2003 when I was a graduate student.

Now I am watching that the founder of SPSS moved to R and founded a new company based on R. (take a look of the last page of the pdf and see the intro of the author and the company:
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/why-revolution-r/whitepapers/The-Rise-of-Big-Data-Executive-Brief.pdf

Here is the slide that may also interest you:
http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/news-events/free-webinars/2011/big-data-analytics/Big-Analytics-Revolution-Starts-with-R.pdf

Using R in academics can become a common language in the coming years. I am glad that I am on this exciting track and believe that you will feel the same.
I am also going to share these progresses with my students in the data analysis course using R next semester.