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Where data analysis is a nightmare

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There are the dream organizations that deploy data analysts wisely. Then there are the nightmares, such as the I.R.S. as portrayed in David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, reviewed yesterday in the New York Times.

… In a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true [data] out into the light and holding them up for inspection, clear and remainder-­less, really is a sacred one. … The problem, as I.R.S. recruits soon discover, is that neither moral nor heroic codes hold true anymore.

These recruits work with “excruciating difficulty … in an age of data saturation.”… Read the rest “Where data analysis is a nightmare”

Running through a data analyst’s mind late at night

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From an email to me this week. Quoted with permission.

I’ve been doing this ‘data analyst’ thing for almost a decade now and I’m not even sure I’m doing it right. Does anyone really know what a data analyst is? I’m a Microsoft Access guy that got lucky and learned SQL from a bunch of very sharp devs. Then I got lucky again when I met [name withheld] and discovered [name of tool withheld]. Now I get to play with data in a creative way. I guess that makes me a data analyst. I know there are better da’s out there that write ugly SQL, but they get the job done so I guess it’s not about coding. 

… Read the rest “Running through a data analyst’s mind late at night”

Answering the real questions in data analysis

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A guy walks into your cube and asks you to whip up an econometric model. You’re a statistician, after all, and you’ve got a Ph.D. in something or other. You do this for lunch, he figures.

He “over-thought,” says the one whose cube such a guy walked into. Theresa Doyon has been routinely navigating datasets in the 50 to 300 million-unit range for 10 years. She’s good at all-terrain tools like SAS and KXEN. She could have produced the report he wanted. Instead, she asked him, “Why?”

They talked for an hour. What he actually needed, she discovered, was more of a descriptive report — something that gives a picture of a current situation.… Read the rest “Answering the real questions in data analysis”