I know it has been awhile since I’ve posted anything new, and I do try to keep something for everyone to read while I’m away with work, and school. I hope that you haven’t lost interest quite yet, and that you’ll stick around a bit longer. After a mountain of homework that I finally tackled this weekend, and while perusing the internet as I so often do I came across an article about the next big career in IT… wait for it ~ Data Scientist. After reading the article (I’ll post the article at the end of my post) I was amazed at how little I fathomed the amount of data that people use on a day-to-day basis. This prompted me to do a bit more research on the subject, and what did I find exactly… Well, tons and tons and tons of…yup you guessed it — DATA!!! (Data on data, how puzzling, but I digress) Until recently I hadn’t even thought of where all of the data that I view, or use, or create goes or comes from. It seems difficult to grasp a subject that you can’t actually grasp… let me elaborate. While in school we read textbooks, take notes, do homework, make projects, all of which is a sort of data. Now this “data” gets graded and turned back into us either at the end of class, quarter/semester, or year. What do we do with this data? Well in some cases this data gets thrown away some people tend to be collectors of data (we’ll call them hoarders), and while others keep only the important data and destroy the rest. Now imagine the mass quantities of data that you plus everyone else creates while in high school, or college even, and expand that even further to businesses, non-profit organizations, the “Government”, and you can see that the amount of data storage that we require is astronomical…and it will only grow as we continue to create more data, and require more storage. Different technology companies have responded by creating smaller and faster storage devices, and even the “Cloud”, which is in its simplest form is offsite data storage, all of these things help us to store the massive amounts of data that we create and use on a day-to-day basis.
First hard drive introduced by IBM in 1956 with 5MB of storage.
Currently consumer hard drives can go up to about 4TB (terabyte) which is about 4000GB of storage, and average about $399.00 in price from what I found on newegg.com. Granted most companies require quite a bit more storage than your average user, and therefore there are much larger options for them as well.
Now back to the analogy from earlier about the amount of data you accumulate in school, if you consider that while in school you are in control of all of this data, and that the data is physical in nature and you figure out ways of storing, and using this data to your benefit. This to me is what a Data Scientist would do with all of our data that we create and use on a daily basis now and in the future. These questions…Where does all of that data go? Where should it go? How should it be stored? How can it be indexed? Is it searchable? Will this data ever need to be accessed again? Can this data be analyzed to produce better sales? and the list goes on and on. It definitely seems that there will be a need for Data Scientist’s and I suppose the only question now is…will you or I be one of them?
Happy computing 🙂
Interesting Articles:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/06/data-scientist-jobs/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/timeline_50_years_of_hard_drives.html
newtechiegirl 
Is this similar to saving cancelled checks for at least seven years as my generation did?
Not sure if you need, save them & can’t figure out what to do when it’s determined saving them is silly.
Yup, I would say it is definitely similar, and I remember keeping those and not knowing what to do with them.