Business Intelligence one of hottest skills for 2010

Computerworld takes a look at the main needs for 2010 and finds that Business Intelligence will be a hot skill. This article is mainly about the IT world but it reflects a growing need for data transformation and data mining in business today. There is a lot that goes into Business Intelligence other than just setting up an enterprise ready database system. The article mentions that there will be a need for analysis and decision making. From the article...

More important than a BI expert, though, are programmer/analysts who can relate the nitty-gritty of data tables, database joins and data structure to business requirements. "That's what I'm finding is more valuable to us at this stage in getting BI established and used by the business

Data analysis and processing information is only going to grow in this data rich economy. Organizations are going to be looking for people who can not just sift through the data but also relate it to business decision analysis. I believe that Operations Research could really see a "re-birth" if you will. I'm going to be looking forward to 2010.

Learn to program in Python by making games

Python is a great programming language for applying some basic mathematical programming. Here is an article via Makezine.com blog about how to learn Python by writing games. This is a follow up to my last article on Artificial Intelligence with Python. Learning a new programming language can be a bit dull. I thought it might be more fun to learn how to write games in Python. Perhaps this is something to do for while off for the New Year.

Artificial Intelligence with Python

While stumbling across cyberspace looking for some interesting Python tools and tutorials I found this rather interesting webcast. The video is of Raymond Hettinger at PyCon 2009. Raymond describes the usefulness of Python with applying artificial intelligence and data mining. This talk is very interesting to see how useful of a tool Python can be to performing some relevant Operations Research tasks specifically with data manipulation and learning. As I have mentioned before Open Source software offers a lot in the way of Operations Research tools. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Source:
http://blip.tv/file/1947373

Weekend fun: The perfect way to slice pizza

The New Scientist has a fun article about slicing perfect pizza, mathematician style. The basic premise of the article is to find out if there is an optimal way to slice the pizza so that the pie can be distributed among diners equally. Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann of LSU have been trying to prove the hypothesis of the equitable slices. Of course it comes as no surprise as it all comes down to the cut. I'm not really sure what makes me more hungry, reading about proofs or about the pizza? Either way you slice it looks like fun to me.