Companies like QlikView and TIBCO Spotfire are attacking this weakness head on by providing data analysis and visualization capabilities that allow end-users to assemble data, connect it, and explore it.

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While the folks at Rosstat do great work, their website is not exactly the most modern in the whole world and it can sometimes be quite difficult to assemble comparative data across long timeframes.

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With those criteria in mind we dug deep into the available data to assemble the accompanying slideshow of 10 model-year 2013 vehicles that, with proper attention, can reasonably be expected to keep up with traffic for at least 250, 000 miles.

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The machines use magnets and radiowaves to excite hydrogen atoms in body tissues, creating data that computers assemble into three-dimensional images.

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All told, we delved into more than a dozen data sources in order to assemble city rankings in 38 different criteria, including everything from air quality to unemployment, cost of living to death rates.

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To do that it is important to streamline, yet assemble a posture where I had access to the applications and data that I need with the same level of computing power anytime, anywhere.

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Finally, my thesis adviser in grad school has researched Russian demographics for over 30 years, including during the Brezhnev period when basic demographic indicators were state secrets (he had to painstakingly assemble estimates by laboriously pouring over specialized virology and immunology journals which had a few data points scattered throughout them).

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These steps should be of vital concern not just to data scientists or BI analysts, but to senior management, the CEO, who should be desperate to assemble the whole picture of what customers are doing from as many sources as possible.

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