DECISION STATS

Timestamps can be manipulated leading to confusing meta data. cognition can be manipulated using images.

Someone I dont know asked this question-

I had a few questions sir. Could I ask them to you? Like mainly based on the direction in which I should work or learn. I don’t mean to bother you. But it’s hard to find the right people who can guide new comers like me.

I first explained why people don’t really give advice for free. I am using principles I learnt from Reader’s Digest about something known as a Fermi Problem. Fermi Problems are common in tech interviews.

1. there are 3000 newcomers to every such right person (who gives free advice to newcomers he does not know).
2. out of them only 300 will get the courage to ask the right people.
3. out of them 250 will write a badly written email.

so by the time the right person has gotten 250 spam emails, he is not responding to the 50 out of the 3000 who

1. write well, and
2. are passionate about learning more.

that is an example how you can use mathematical thinking to understand why things work.

Then I gave in and gave her some free advice on what direction a data science newcomer should put efforts in

which direction should you work?-

1. interest/passion/quality – do something you are good at, because then only it will sustain your interest and you will be put up the 10000 hours to be great at it. and
2. greed  (higher salary) versus fear (different skills)– it should make you money but you make more money if you create your own niche. so should you be like thousands of analysts in credit card analytics (easy route) or should you do analysis on videos ( tougher).
3. networking– why dont you atleast go to data science meetups, and try to take part in a few kaggle competitions. also, have you stopped reading r-bloggers.com or kdnuggets.com.Do this for three months and you will find enough opportunities or data. take decisions based on data not from anecdotal advice from experts.

I hope I was able to be useful. What do you think?

Enrico Fermi, Italian-American physicist, received the 1938 Nobel Prize in physics for identifying new elements and discovering nuclear reactions by his method of nuclear irradiation and bombardment. The Fermi technique is named after physicist Enrico Fermi as he was known for his ability to make good approximate calculations with little or no actual data. Fermi problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities and their variance or lower and upper bounds. Probably you can use it for Big Data Analysis about online chatter when your machine learning is not able to process videos (Youtube) or Images ( Instagram) as efficiently as it analyzes text.

Big Data and Data Science should help Google detect copyright infringements or detect terror motivational videos  on Youtube

What the world might need (in this writer’s much derided opinion) is a global set of volunteers to help find ISIS cyber army which uses the internet for motivation through videos and pictures in Instagram and Youtube, recruitment of sleeper lone wolves among carefully selected demographics among Western and Eastern locations , cyber retaliation targeted at law enforcement and military personnel culled from social media, propaganda for political and fundraising ( and real-time communication with both potential terrorists as well as internally using both encryption, and unorthodox methods of communicating)  .

Crowd sourced cyber intelligence which can be incentivized to prevent members of Anonymous being recruited by North Korea or ISIS bitcoins.  Think of volunteers that tried to fight in Russia’s fall to communism or volunteers that tried to fight against the Fascists in Spain. The West’s half hearted efforts in both these conflicts led the much bigger conflicts later on. Well does the free world need volunteers in the cyber terror fight against ISIS. Unfortunately the same people with a particular set of skills that can help FBI encrypt or decrypt phones, are people that have been aggressively prosecuted in the past. There is no cyber witness program and indeed no effort to reach out by counter-terrorism infrastructure to the hacker activist cyber infrastructure. This despite mutual suspicions of tax money wastage and cyber criminality. A house divided against itself will fall , in the real world and on the Internet.

Well what about Hemingway?  From my favorite website

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#Spanish_Civil_War

Spanish Civil War

In 1937, Hemingway agreed to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA),^[86] arriving in Spain in March with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.^[87] Ivens, who was filming The Spanish Earth, wanted Hemingway to replace John Dos Passos as screenwriter, since Dos Passos had left the project when his friend José Robleswas arrested and later executed.^[88] The incident changed Dos Passos’ opinion of the leftist republicans, creating a rift between him and Hemingway, who later spread a rumor that Dos Passos left Spain out of cowardice.

Late in 1937, while in Madrid with Martha, Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, as the city was being bombarded.

The Spanish Civil War took place from 1936 to 1939 and was fought between the Republicans, who were loyal to the democratic, left-leaningSecond Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists, a falangist group led by General Francisco Franco. The Nationalists won, and Franco then ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from April 1939 until his death in November 1975.

The Spanish Civil War seized the fears and hopes of the world, including not just diplomats and politicians, but intellectuals, religious leaders, and labor unions, as well. Opinion divided three ways. The right and the Catholics supported the Nationalists as a way to stop the expansion of Bolshevism. On the left, including labor unions, students and intellectuals, the war represented a necessary battle to stop the spread of fascism. Antiwar and pacifist sentiment was strong in many countries