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Erik Gfesser

📍 Greater Chicago Area

Pro Bono: IEEE Chicago Section Statistician - Part 4

This post is the fourth in a series on my pro bono efforts outside of the workplace as Statistician for the IEEE Chicago Section, a new position that I filled in September 2012 after the membership development team realized that ongoing data analyses and reporting was needed around declining enrollment.

New Book Review: "Data Science for Business"

New book review for Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking, by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett, O'Reilly Media, 2013, reposted here: As the authors discuss in the preface to this text, the content presented here provides a conceptual foundation

New Book Review: "The Purpose Economy"

New book review for The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community is Changing the World, by Aaron Hurst, Elevate, 2014, reposted here: The author believes that we as a society are in the early days of what he calls the "Purpose Economy", a

Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 6

The last post in my series on Liquibase, an open source database change management tool, mentioned that I had been contacted by a startup that was looking to potentially work on a commercial release. A couple months after meeting with the cofounder and CTO of the firm as part of

Personal Reading List: 2Q2014

My personal reading list for April, May, and June 2014. Color Key: Special Notes, Currently Queued, Completed Reading. Updated throughout the Quarter. At Bat (Schnell) Agile Data Warehouse Design: Collaborative Dimensional Modeling, from Whiteboard to Star Schema, by Lawrence Corr and Jim Stagnitto, DecisionOne Press, 2011. Applied Predictive Analytics: Principles

New Book Review: "Customer Data Integration"

New book review for Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth (SAS Institute Inc), by Jil Dyche and Evan Levy, Wiley, 2006, reposted here: After discussing customer relationship management (CRM), master data management (MDM), and CDI, the authors discuss the challenges of data integration and the far-reaching

New Book Review: "Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration"

New book review for Getting Started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration, by Jonathan Bowen, Packt Publishing, 2012, reposted here: Decent introductory text on getting started with Talend Open Studio for Data Integration. After briefly discussing installation (which was trivial in my case, since I installed on Windows 7,

Google Analytics: 4 Years, 30k pageviews, 145 Countries

According to the Google Analytics account I set up for this blog roughly 4 years ago, two thresholds have just been crossed: 30,000 page views by visitors from 145 countries. About 6 months ago, I reported that the 25,000 page view threshold had been passed by visitors from

New Book Review: "R in a Nutshell"

New book review for R in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (Second Edition), by Joseph Adler, O'Reilly, 2012, reposted here: This book is the second that I purchased this past year to get up to speed on the R language and environment, along with "R in

New Book Review: "Drools Developer's Cookbook"

New book review for Drools Developer's Cookbook, by Lucas Amador, Packt Publishing, 2012, reposted here: In my earlier review of "Instant Drools Starter", I mentioned that since it had been several years since I had last used a rules engine to any significant extent on a