Introduction

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Although I have always had an interest in data and analytics, Microsoft's recent moves to incorporate R into SQL Server, as well as Visual Studio's integration with Python, makes learning data analytics an easier option, as well as a likely necessity for my career.

It is not that I would not enjoy analysis on my own:

  • I was likely the only person really capable of writing SAS in my Statistics for the Social Sciences, and ran so many correlations for my study on education and fitness I was almost banned from the lab
  • While in B-school, around 2002, I looked to analyze and publish the relationship between Hofstede's cultural dimensions and OECD economic data
  • Eventually, I found significant negative relationships between income inequality on social welfare, years before it became widely popularized


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