No need to be a lonely data scientist anymore

More insight posts from others for you. As well as all relating to at least one aspect of holistic customer insight, our unifying themes this week are how not to feel lonely & data scientist. Hope you find them as interesting as I did.

To kick us off, here is a timely and well argued piece on why you may not need a data scientist (at least not yet). A helpful reminder from Yanir Seroussi that Data Scientist is a different role & skill set than Insight/Marketing Analyst, which comes with some prerequisites.

Well worth considering before you advertise for your next vacancy and slip into just using a trendy job title.

You don’t need a data scientist (yet)

The hype around big data has caused many organisations to hire data scientists without giving much thought to what these data scientists are going to do and whether they’re actually needed. This is a source of frustration for all parties involved. This post discusses some questions you should ask yourself before deciding to hire your…

Here’s a heartfelt post on research into helping US adults cope with loneliness. As Robbie Couch explains, there’s been a 20% increase in adults reporting feeling lonely in 2010 compared to 1980. The post then goes on to explain some interesting research conducted by University of Sussex, on the positive effects of daydreaming on increasing feelings of social connection. A small-scale, limited study, but certainly some interesting research, including use of nudges:

Researchers may have spotted a secret weapon in the fight against loneliness.

Feeling connected to our world could be just a daydream away.

Returning to the theme of Data Science, who doesn’t like getting something for free? Well if you’ve been considering investing in data science books or ones to help you learn R or other analytics programming languages, this should interest you. The good folk at the DataSci.com have pulled together a list of free books and other free resources available online to help you do just that. Looking through the list a number of these look really useful.

100+ Free Data Science Books

Pulled from the web, here is a our collection of the best, free books on Data Science, Big Data, Data Mining, Machine Learning, Python, R, SQL, NoSQL and more. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Join over 3,500 data science enthusiasts.

So, here’s hoping you aren’t feeling lonely or if you are then your daydreaming can help. Otherwise consider carefully hiring a data scientist to keep you company or consider trying some of those free resources to grow your own.

Have a great rest of the week, Insight Leaders, and do let us know what you think.