Database Scientist

  GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking. Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills. To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired. In business, economics and other fields, Professor Brynjolfsson says, decisions will increas...

  Members of the media do “research” by performing all sorts of tasks — pulling financial records, tracking down contact information for sources, scraping data from government websites. But another key skill is the ability to   locate and review academic studies   to strengthen and deepen stories. The   Journalist’s Resource studies database   distills top research, but there’s a much bigger universe of research out there. One common search strategy for finding academic research is trying a series of keywords in popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. That general method may fail if you’re trying to find cutting-edge research findings on policy or news-related issues. A search engine’s algorithm may not immediately bring up new or seldom-searched studies, or the full, searchable text may remain locked away. While no particular strategy is perfect, establishing a checklist of key databases is essential. Your selection of databases may ul...

  New online tool tracks skills, research and policies for artificial intelligence, as part of global effort to understand and control the new technology In the global rush to develop artificial intelligence (AI), the US, European Union and China have taken an early lead in published research papers – but they are often drawing on talent from India, Turkey and other countries, according to a new database launched by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD database – part of a growing inter-governmental effort to track AI trends and policies – indicates India has produced three times as many people with AI-related skills as the average for the 20 biggest economies in the world. And, the database shows, Indian AI experts are also the most likely in the world to have used their skills to get work abroad – often in the US or Germany, two of the biggest importers of AI talent. Besides India, other major exporters of global AI talent include Turkey and China. ...

  The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has requested the retraction of six studies and corrections in another 31 papers after a scathing critique drew attention to alleged errors a blogger and biologist said range from sloppiness to “really serious concerns.”  The allegations — against top scientists at the prestigious Boston-based institute, which is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School — put the institute at the center of a roiling debate about research misconduct, how to police scientific integrity and whether the organizational structure of academic science incentivizes shortcuts or cheating.  The criticism also spotlights how artificial intelligence is playing a growing role in catching sloppy or dubious science.   After the publication of David’s blog, Dr. Barrett Rollins, the institute’s integrity research officer, said in a statement emailed Wednesday that Dana-Farber scientists had requested that six manuscripts be retracted, that 31 manuscripts ...

  Scientists and public health leaders are taking stock of the Trump administration's abrupt decision to pull down web pages  datasets and selected information from federal health websites. Some of the pages on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention website that  went offline last week  have since reappeared. The Atlas Tool, used by policymakers to track rates of infectious diseases such as HIV and STIs, disappeared but now is back. Pages that explained the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which monitors adolescent health, were gone but can now   be seen again. And the  CDC's data site , which was taken offline over the weekend, is back up with datasets available for download. "Across the country, folks like me are trying to catalogue what is missing and what has changed in terms of what's back up," says Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and dean of Yale University's School of Public Health. Some of it is obvious, she s...

  Researchers estimate that 85% of used clothes and other textiles end up in landfills and incinerators. To increase recycling and reduce waste, the industry needs better technology for automatically sorting used textiles and clothing. NIST’s new “NIR-SORT” database contains the molecular “fingerprints” of different kinds of fabrics and will enable more rapid and efficient sorting of textiles and clothing. Picture this: You have a bag of heavily used clothes that can no longer be donated taking up space in your closet, so you drop it off at your local recycling center. But what happens to that bag of clothes? You might assume that the clothes would get broken down and reused to make new products.  However, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in 2018 around  85% of used clothes and textiles  headed to landfills and incinerators, wasting precious resources and polluting our environment. One reason is that recycling can be more expensive than landfi...