NYU Data Science newsletter – May 21, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

We compare 3 major NoSQL databases: MongoDB, DocumentDB, and HDInsight in terms of data models, scalability, availability, query types, and support for transactions.

… It seems obvious: The best way to get rid of human error is to get rid of humans.

But that assumption, however fashionable, is itself erroneous. Our desire to liberate ourselves from ourselves is founded on a fallacy. We exaggerate the abilities of computers even as we give our own talents short shrift.

It’s easy to see why. We hear about every disaster involving human fallibility — the chemical plant that exploded because the technician failed to open a valve, the plane that fell from the sky because the pilot mishandled the yoke — but what we don’t hear about are all the times that people use their expertise to avoid accidents or defuse risks.

The complexity of cities is a widely shared siren song amongst the vanguard of the new urban scientists. Yet nowhere is it being more fundamentally addressed than in the high desert of the American Southwest, where a handful of the world’s brightest physical theorists are trying to describe this complexity in precise detail at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), established in 1984 to explore the then-new field of complexity. As useful as the boundless streams of data being produced by the world’s new urban research labs may be, without theory they may do little to advance our understanding of the bigger picture of urban evolution.

A political scientist on Tuesday said he was retracting a paper he’d co-authored — one with wide influence on how campaigns can change public opinion — when faced with evidence that the paper’s central finding was based on polling that probably never happened.

The article, published last December in Science Magazine by UCLA graduate student Michael J. LaCour and Columbia University political scientist Donald P. Green, appeared to show that an in-person conversation with an openly gay person made voters feel much more positively about same-sex marriage, an effect that persisted and even spread to the people those voters lived with, who weren’t part of the conversation. The result of that purported effect was an affirmation of the power of human contact to overcome disagreement.

In anticipation of his upcoming Predictive Analytics World for Manufacturing conference Jeffrey_Thompsonpresentation, Manufacturing Analytics at Scale: Data Mining and Machine Learning inside Bosch, we interviewed Jeffrey Thompson, Senior Data Scientist at Robert Bosch, LLC. View the Q-and-A below to see how Jeffrey Thompson has incorporated predictive analytics into manufacturing at Robert Bosch, LLC. Also, glimpse what’s in store at the PAW Manufacturing conference.

We invite you to submit a paper to be presented, to submit your name as discussant, or as an attendee, at the sixth annual research conference on “New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data” to be held by NYU’s Center for Data Science on October 16-17, 2015. This two-day invitation-only conference draws together scholars from many different universities and disciplines to discuss developments in text as data research.

Call for Papers Deadline: Monday, June 1

After an open election among members of the IEEE Visualization and Computer Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC), Professor Claudio Silva of the department of Computer Science and Engineering was elected chair of the organization. The appointment will last for two years.