Columbia data science course, week 1: what is data science?

Here's what happened yesterday at the first meeting. Rachel started by going through the syllabus. So, what is data science? This is an ongoing discussion, but Michael Driscoll's answer is pretty good: Data science, as it's practiced, is a blend of Red-Bull-fueled hacking and espresso-inspired statistics. But data science is not merely hacking, because when hackers finish debugging their Bash one-liners and Pig scripts, few care about non-Euclidean distance metrics.