Data Scientist Hat
Many professions have a traditional hat and a logo. What should a self-respecting data scientist wear? We review several proposals. Send us your suggestions.
Many professions have a traditional hat - a tall white hat for a chef, a 10-gallon hat for a cowboy, a mortarboard hat for a graduate, a hard hat for a miner.
In the 20th century analytics professionals could wear a data miner hat, adapted from a regular miner hat by addition of a large database (here is Gregory modeling a data miners hat for Huffpost). However, now analytics professionals prefer the title of a data scientist, proclaimed the 21st century sexiest profession.
What should data scientists wear?
For any kind of hat, there should also be a logo.
The combined brainstorming of Talent Analytics and KDnuggets have produced the first 3 designs for the logo - see below.
The first 3 graph designs have Confusion on the vertical axis, Data Size on the horizontal axis, and a Data Science curve showing which decreases in confusion as the data size increases.
Version 2 also has a red Hype curve (increasing confusion as the data size increases).
Version 3 has Intuition curve, and Insight at the point of intersection of Data Science and Intuition.
Version 4 is a simplified version of Drew Conway Data Science Venn Diagram.
Which of these design do you like best? Vote via twitter by replying to @kdnuggets with your selection corresponding to the design: #DataScienceHat1, #DataScienceHat2, etc
Do you have a better design for a data science logo ? Please email to .
If there is sufficient demand, we will produce actual physical data scientist hats, with white-hat and black-hat options, of course. There could be a snake-skin version for Python Data Science.
In addition, data science profession could have approriate one-liners, such as
- Size matters! My Data is Bigger than Yours
- Data Science is 80% data preparation, 20% complaining about data preparation (thanks to @BigDataBorat)
- Torture data long enough and it will confess to anything (Black hat data science?)
- Size is not important! It's how you use it that's important (thanks to Brendan Tierney)
What are your favorite data science one-liners?
Here are some additional hat suggestions received on LinkedIn group Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling:
- Vincent Granville: These hats are supposed to protect you or others from something:
- Miner: hat protects head from rock falls, hitting a rock wall
- Cowboy: hat protects head from bullets or from sun
- Baker: hat protects cakes from being contaminated by hair
- Data Scientist: hat protects brain from nefarious radiations and waves
- Gregory Piatetsky: Great idea ! We need a data scientist hat that will protect from Hype and Overfitting !
- Bill Galen: I would suggest a Sam Spade fedora, but that's already been taken.
Panama is a close second--even for the ladies: www.pilotguides.com/images/content/tv_shows/crews/panama_columbia/panama_hat200x250.jpg - Mauricio Pommier Gasser: I like this hat ^ ...
- Andrew Troemner: This reminds me when I was in grad school for Economics, and one of my old high school teachers swore he would buy me the most atrocious-looking bowtie.
If neckwear is on the table, may I recommend and ascot? Not because it's particularly appropriate but just because I want to be classy while I'm pouring over Python scripts.