Keyboard Power - a light-hearted look

An interesting approach from +Randall Munroe  (XKCD) to looking at how much power it takes to type on a keyboard.

Some sound mathematical conclusions along with the usual great drawings.

5 steps to offload your Data Warehouse with Hadoop

This +TDWI whitepaper is produced by Syncsort.

It's all about finding the most costly ETL and replacing it with equivalents in MapReduce.

25 Most popular Data Science blogs and 33 most noted Data Scientists on Twitter

+Big Data Made Simple has this list of the 25 most popular Data Science blogs and the 33 most noted Data Scientists on Twitter.

I follow #9 Simply Statistics blog and have since I did a series of courses on the topic with +Coursera given by the contributors to this blog.  Those are a great place for a beginner to start.

Using Big Data to make better pricing decisions

This insight from +McKinsey & Company goes through some practical uses of Big Data in relation to pricing.

Very interesting and could be useful when doing a CBA for doing a Big Data project.

30 most influential papers in the world of Big Data

+Big Data Made Simple have published this list of the 30 most influential papers in the world of big data.

I suggest you set some time aside to go through the list and read them all carefully.  You are going to want to bookmark some of them so you can refer back to them repeatedly (I know I have).

The future of Big Data - Prescriptive Analytics changes the game

In this article on +Data Informed by +Mark van Rijmenam he discusses the use of Prescriptive Analytics and how it changes everything with it's use of a large variety of techniques, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and mathematical sciences.

There is also this article on +TDWI by Mark Peco on the same subject.

I think it will be fascinating to see how this can change the way some things are done.

22 free tools for Data Visualisation and Analysis

This article is on +Computerworld and is written by +Sharon Machlis.

I've personally only used R out of her list but it gives some more tools to choose from next time I need another one.