From: Pulse It was not so long ago that Steve Lohr quoted economist Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google at the time, as saying “ that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians.” Lohr spoke of a “new breed of statisticians (…) that use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for cancer research and analysing sensor and location data to optimise the handling of food shipments.” But then Lohr went on to say: “though at the fore, statisticians are only a small part of an army of experts using modern statistical techniques for data analysis (…), the new data sleuths come from backgrounds like economics, computer science and mathematics.”
