Company officials pressed her during her interview on how she had kept up her data-modeling ability during her six years away from the specialty.

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That 3-D data then got plugged into a solid-modeling program where engineering parameters such as material, thickness and structure were assigned to the shape.

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Earlier this decade she ended up at Sprint designing databases -- a specialty called "data modeling" that isn't widely taught in schools and usually requires hands-on experience.

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In viewing our universe by way of models, we can build a hypothesis as a picture, visual data organizing itself more easily than word-based modeling (either as sound or text), and visualization lends itself to extremely large models.

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C. metro area, according to Economic Modeling Specialists, an employment-data firm.

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True, if you live behind a corporate firewall, have fast wired connections, and not a tremendous need for performance (network lags can be detrimental to data-hog applications like video editing, software development, and 3D modeling), then you can make do with a Chromebook-like endpoint.

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Using predictive data modeling, contestants will examine three years of historical medical data from anonymized real-life people.

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Entrepreneur Anthony Goldbloom has also taken a community-focused approach in founding Kaggle, a predictive modeling competition platform for solving large data problems presented by companies, governments, and researchers.

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