Data Science of the Facebook world [Article]

Stephen Wolfram makes mathematics sexy. In a recent article on his blog, Stephen explains how he used the anonymised data that people contributed to Wolfram Alpa, to understand their facebook connections & some interesting observations from these analysis.

I’ve always been interested in people and the trajectories of their lives. But I’ve never been able to combine that with my interest in science. Until now. And it’s been quite a thrill over the past few weeks to see the results we’ve been able to get. Sometimes confirming impressions I’ve had; sometimes showing things I never would have guessed. 

Job interviews & Data Analytics [Video, Article]

Evolv is a HR analytics consulting company that is helping Xerox determine what attributes & propensities are associated with success in a given position.

Employees who live within 10 minutes of the office may be 20 percent likelier to stay at the company at least six months than ones who live 45 minutes away or further. Employees who have a college degree may be less inclined to stick with a call-center job than those who do not. According to The Wall Street Journal, Evolv, the company assisting Xerox in its recruitment efforts, determined that the ideal candidate to staff the company’s call centers “uses one or more social networks, but not more than four.”

This video says it best.