Category: Blog
Our team of experts explores interesting topics relating to data analytics, industry news, and more!
post: Founder’s Corner: Volatility
If you were to ask an entrepreneur what word best described their life, you might get two answers. If you don’t know them well, you’ll get a long string of “great, awesome, amazing.” If you can push past the surface, I would wager the answer would be a hesitant look, a pause and then some […]
post: Founder’s Corner Budgeting
Budgeting is the most wonderful time of the year. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are great holidays, but its Q4 budget making time that really gets me giddy… No, I’m not that lame. My colleagues and kids might disagree, but how can anything compete with glutinous turkey indulgence and piss poor football games (when was the […]
post: Buzzwords & Bullsh!t: Data Driven…Anything
“Data-driven ______”. Fill in the blank with just about anything relevant to today’s societal events and chances are a Google search will turn up at least a few thousand examples of whatever it is you typed in. Much like other current business buzzwords (“big data”, anyone?), I see one phrase used far more often than […]
post: Buzzwords & Bullsh!t: Statistical Significance
What’s the difference between the right amount of ketchup on a burger and too much or too little? One might think they could just eyeball what is right, but when it comes to large quantities of burgers, a specific measurable process would be needed to define what is or is not abnormal. For those of […]
post: Buzzwords & Bullsh!t: Machine Learning
“In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there’s a land that’s fair and bright….” In this song about a distant, magical place, not only is the land fair and bright, but it never rains or snows, the wind is never blowing, eggs come out of hens already soft-boiled, work never has to be done, and, among […]
post: Buzzwords & Bullsh!t: KYC
Buzzwords. I heard them while I was a banker and I hear them now working in fintech. There are PLENTY of tech terms that make my skin crawl, but the one that I hear thrown around the most is infamous for anyone who has ever worked in a financial institution. It’s something that is engrained […]
post: Buzzwords & Bullsh!t: Big Data – Understanding the Myth
“Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it.” This all-too-true analogy is attributed to Duke Professor Dan Ariely. Big Data, its connotations, and its often-incorrect implications, also are a pet-peeve of […]
post: Buzzwords & Bullsh!t
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools speak because they have to say something.” -Plato The goal of the NCS blog series has been to give the reader unique insights, be it into the startup life through “Founders Corner” or a better understanding of a specific methodology or treatment through “Nerding […]
post: Take a Snapshot: Using Vector & Raster Data in Mapping
Spatial relationships have been and always will be a relevant part of life; any piece of data which can be observed in space and time can be mapped and visualized. This geospatial data is typically stored in one of two forms: raster and vector. Raster data is organized as a grid, every square of which […]
post: Some Models Don’t Tell the Truth – Using Statistical Models Realistically
“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” This quote, well-known to statisticians, comes from one of the most influential figures in statistics, George Box. The point that Box was making is one that is misunderstood by many data analysts, from novices to experienced researchers: every statistical model is an approximation to reality. To understand […]