[mindcrime]

I still can't get over the term "data science", though. Not only is it ridiculously meaningless - what sort of science doesn't involve data, and how often would data be useful to something that isn't scientific at some level - its meaninglessness derives from the hyped buzzword trendiness that drove its upswing.

I tend to rail against the needless creation of new buzzwords myself, but I can actually see some use for "data science". It is a little vague, but I see it as a slightly more concise way of saying "the confluence of applied statistics, machine learning, and analytics" or something roughly to that effect.

[gaius]

The thing is tho', that what we call "machine learning" nowadays, statisticians were already doing for years. 25-year-old "data scientists" think that before they came along all there was was Excel... And don't realize that now most of what they do can be done in Excel...