by Ted Cuzzillo
Some of the books Stephen Few reviews may at first glance to have little to do with data analysis. On second glance, though, they have everything to do with it. He often goes into the essence of thinking, insight, and decision making — core knowledge for BI practitioners.
See his latest, posted yesterday afternoon, on Gary Klein’s Streetlights and Shadows.
by Ted Cuzzillo
Wolf Blitzer calls for heads to roll after the Christmas Day attack. But Jill Dychè is a data pro, and she’d rather let the heads think.
“Who should get fired?” is the same conversation as after screwups in corporations, writes Dychè, principal at Baseline Consulting.
… Read the rest “Rolling heads can’t think”Instead, the government should be addressing process issues. Indeed, the real conversation should be how to move forward. These questions should be asked now: “How should we bring identifying data together? What are the key sources? How should integration, access, and usage policies be formulated? What would a sustainable process look like?” Those questions aren’t “who” questions, they’re “how” questions, and they should be front-and-center in the national security conversation.
by Ted Cuzzillo
George Packer wrote in the New Yorker (quoted in Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire) on the books that Obama and his generals are reading. He wrote this about making public policy, about the difficulty of basing decisions on the past.
… Read the rest “Choices are never the same twice”Making policy is about making choices, and they are never the same twice. Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe that doing it well is hard—almost impossible. It takes imagination, a knowledge of history, a certain analytical coldness, an ability to hold contradictory ideas in one’s head at the same time, intellectual courage, and prolonged immersion in staggering depths of facts.