Sertaç Taşdelen, a Turkish entrepreneur and creator of the fortune-telling app Faladdin, does his best to resemble Aladdin's genie. When I recently visited his coworking office in downtown Istanbul, Taşdelen was wearing an electric blue jacket, white trousers, and a fluffy button-down shirt, and his bearded, square-jawed face carried the mischievous smile of the fictional jinn. "Faladdin is my alter ego," Taşdelen said of the psychic he plays in the app. "If I quit business today," he whispered, leaning in, "I'd be a gypsy fortune-teller living in a caravan." In Apple's App Store, Faladdin describes itself as "far beyond a fortune telling app." The description states that it can predict one's destiny "by evaluating a person's past." It does this by bringing the Turkish tradition of coffee fortune-telling into the Internet age.

The job market for individuals with analytical skills is hot, and it's only getting hotter. A recent study by the McKinsey Global Institute puts the situation in perspective, citing a shortfall of nearly 200,000 professionals with strong analytical skills by the year 2018. Businesses are looking to colleges and universities to help fill that gap, asking them to provide their students with the analytical skills they need to fill many of these currently vacant analytical roles. How students can prepare for a career in analytics, and the role universities play in preparing them, is the focus of Dursun Delen's recent article, Mandate for STEM Educators, found in the August issue of INFORMS magazine. Given the shortage, Delen, a professor of business analytics within the Department of Management Science and Information Systems at the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University, says educators haven't had a "mandate this clear since the space race of the 1960s."