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i've lately been espousing the opinion that colleges should add some scripting and data manipulation to gen ed requirements in order to adequately prepare students for the next generation of white-collar work.

then again, i barely remember a thing from my entry-level stats course.

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This. My little sister is working at The Economist and will go to Princeton next year to study Developmental Economics. She could work magic with the data she can get from the kiva API or the UK government data website, but she has no easy way to parse it other than nag me (who got a 3rd in CS from UCL) to write a little script in ruby that does it for her.

In part, this is what we're working on solving at Timetric; the skills gap between people who understand the physical nature of data and people who have the domain knowledge to tell you what it means.

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