Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

For 30 years persons have asked me questions about analysis. I continue to give the wrong answer.

“How are your analysis skills?”

I remember the question as if was asked this morning. I was coming out of grad school and trying to find a job. It was 1986 (yikes, that long ago). I had no answer. What in the world did the guy mean by that?

A little background. I was working on my PhD with research in artificial intelligence and computer vision, i.e., teach a computer to analyze an image. Hence, I was working in meta-analysis or the analysis of analysis.

My problem was that I didn’t understand the question and didn’t give the meta-analysis reply I should have. Instead, I gave the wrong answer.

Today, I hover around data scientists and data analysis and all the new words we have made up in the last ten years that describe the same things we have been doing for the last few centuries.

“Can you pivot tables in SQL, R, and Excel so that we can wrangle the data?”

My answer, “Huh, uh, no, but five minutes Googling and I can.” ooops, that is still the wrong answer. Perhaps I should talk about meta-analysis this time or the next time.

It is a shame, but I am still giving the wrong answer to these questions about analysis.