before job interview - company peek

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-tips-to-research-a-company-before-you-sit-down-for-a-job-interview/

Online channels that reveal something of the life of a business concern.

data architect (State of Michigan)

SOA Data Architect - Information Technology Specialist 14 at $26.92 - $39.35 hourly
Department: Technology, Management and Budget

The Agency Services Bureau supporting the Michigan Department's of Technology, Management & Budget, Civil Service Commission, Department of Education, and Center for Educational Performance and Information (CEPI) is recruiting to fill an Information Technology Specialist 14 position.  The position will serve as the CEPI Data Architect (CDA) is responsible for Data Services architecture, governance and implementation as it relates to software development at Agency Services/ CEPI.   The CDA implements enterprise data services governance within the meta-data management repository, oversees all data services development, and ensures that all data services are integrated into the enterprise data framework.  In collaboration with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) designs agency data frameworks that integrate in to the enterprise data frameworks.  Develops and propagates data subscriptions and standards to the development areas. Conducts testing and implementation of data services components and trains development staff on their use. Is responsible for data services developer tools. Mentors Senior development staff on correct tool usage and data modeling standards. As the Data Architect, is primarily responsible for defining and implementing relational data models and OLAP solutions, including infrastructure planning and design, for CEPI’s strategic Statewide Longitudinal Data System (SLDS) program.  In this capacity, the CDA provides relational and OLAP database designs for the SLDS and assists CEPI and Agency Services staff with ETL design and implementation.

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, AND ABILITIES

·         Thorough knowledge of Database Design.
·         Thorough knowledge in use case modeling, transaction and OLAP-based data modeling and use of related modeling tools, and the development and documentation of detailed technical design specifications.
·         Thorough knowledge in developing and using SQL databases and queries.
·         Thorough knowledge in developing and using SAS databases and queries.
·         Thorough knowledge of Internet protocols, and .NET system design concepts.
·         Thorough knowledge of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
·         Thorough knowledge of design and development.
·         Skills to analyze multiple system architectures and points of system interaction.
·         Thorough knowledge of application and network security issues.
·         Ability to troubleshoot under difficult circumstances and to independently act to resolve issues that need immediate attention.
·         Ability to plan, resource and lead projects.
·         Ability to quickly learn and implement new technologies and procedures.
·         Ability to establish and maintain good rapport with agency staff at all levels.

=== Required Education and Experience

   Education
Possession of a bachelor's degree with at least 21 semester (32 term) credits in computer science, data processing, computer information systems, data communications, networking, systems analysis, computer programming, or mathematics.
   Experience
Four years of professional experience equivalent to an Information Technology Infrastructure or Programmer/Analyst P11 or one year equivalent to an Information Technology Infrastructure or Programmer/Analyst 12.

State of Michigan

Job #: 6401-13-PSC-108 Jaya           Job Title: Departmental Analyst E 9-11
Salary: $18.50 - $28.97 hourly          Department: Licensing and Regulatory Affairs - LARA

This entry level analyst performs economic and statistical analysis of utility reports, financial records, and rate case presentations to determine the appropriate level of rates for regulated energy utilities, utilizing laws, regulations, and Commission policies and precedents.
This analyst must develop the skills and expertise to testify as an expert witness in contested rate proceedings.

=-=-= also, Database Development Specialist     Department: House of Representatives     Salary: Negotiable

The Database Development Specialist is a member of the Information Systems Department for the Michigan House of Representatives. Responsibilities include database design and implementation, development of new databases and applications, maintenance of existing databases and applications. Development environment for desktop and web-based applications include VB.NET, ASP.NET, SQL Server and FileMaker Pro databases.

database architect, State of Michigan

Job Title: ITS 14 Database Solution Architect

Salary: $26.92 - $39.35 hourly (x2000 hours/year)

Location: Lansing, Michigan

Dept: Technology, Management and Budget

--Description

This position will support the DHS Legacy applications, MiSACWIS, MI Bridges and Bridges application databases.  This position is the UNIX Database Server Architect; serving as the backup to the ITS 15 DBA.  The incumbent must have a solid understanding of the UNIX operating based system, understands paging and swapping, inter-process communication, devices and device drivers and can preform system analysis and tuning.  The incumbent will identify database and UNIX Operating System tasks which should be automated and then write tools to automate them.  The incumbent will be able to program in at least two or more administrative languages, (shell, Perl, Awk, TK) and port C programs form one platform to another and write small C programs.

This position supports approximately 10 production database servers with over 1600 Oracle schemas with 10+ TB of data for over 90 applications for the following environments: Production-PROD, User Acceptance Testing-UAT, Quality Assurance Testing-QAT, Integration-INT, and Development-DEV.

--Education

Possession of a bachelor's degree with at least 21 semester (32 term) credits in computer science, data processing, computer information systems, data communications, networking, systems analysis, computer programming, or mathematics.

--Experience

Four years of professional experience equivalent to an Information Technology Infrastructure or Programmer/Analyst P11 or one year equivalent to an Information Technology Infrastructure or Programmer/Analyst 12.

State of MI (SoMI) statistician

Job #:	ks-4301-12-Stat13-C7
Job Title:	Statistician Specialist 13 - CSA Quality Improvement
Closing Date/Time:	Tue. 02/26/13 5:00 PM Eastern Time
Salary:	$24.42 - $35.84 hourly
Bargaining Unit:	SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING (SEIU)
Location:	Lansing, Michigan
Department:	Human Services - Central Office

  Description

Position functions as the statistical expert for the Children’s Services Administration - Division of Continuous Quality Improvement (DCQI).  Position is responsible for the completion of highly complex work assignments involving sample design, creation of queries, statistical evaluation and verification of data integrity, analysis and calculations of data. Position is also responsible for development of child welfare reports, spreadsheets and graphics for use in presentations or inclusion in documents. Position will act as the expert for reporting on child welfare DCQI data related items as specified in the Modified Settlement Agreement, Child and Family Services Review, Child and Family State Plan (5 year plan), etc.

  Education

Possession of a bachelor’s degree with at least 12 semester (18 term) credits in statistics.

  Experience

Four years of professional experience in the systematic collection, compilation and interpretation of numerical data equivalent to a Statistician, including two years equivalent to a Statistician P11 or one year equivalent to a Statistician 12.

State of MI - dept of tech, management, budget

 -- note job scope and training requested

The Center for Educational Performance and Information (CEPI) is recruiting to fill three Departmental Analyst 9-P11 positions in its Longitudinal Data unit.

 

In each of these positions, the analyst will be responsible for documenting, integrating, analyzing, and reporting from complex, multi-agency data resources in a manner that accurately portrays information on Michigan students, staff, and schools over time. The work includes supporting the creation of an environment that encourages maximum use of CEPI’s Michigan Statewide Longitudinal Data System (MSLDS) for improving education policy decision-making and meeting federal and state data reporting requirements. These positions work closely with the reporting and implementation team managers in achieving the overall goals of the Longitudinal Data unit and CEPI by responding to the education data needs of schools, state agencies, the Legislature, the Governor’s office and other stakeholders. 

 

Note: the focus of one position is that of a reporting analyst.  In this role, the employee will follow the standards, policies, procedures and protocols related to data quality, reporting tool designs/models, and other data manipulation techniques.   Ideal candidates for this position will have a concentration of college courses in statistical theory, logic and analytics, as well as database design and modeling.

 

The focus of the other position (two jobs) is that of an extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) analyst.  The employee will follow the standards, policies, procedures and protocols related to extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes, quality assurance activities, and other data manipulation techniques.  Ideal candidates will have a concentration of college courses in information management systems that include database design and modeling.  Note:  If you applied for one of these two ETL positions in December-January 2012 your application has been retained.  It is not necessary to reapply.

data & stats round-up 2012 Nov 21

1. http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/locating-haystack-full-needles [snippet]
A Haystack Full of Needles: Cutting Through the Clutter of the Online World to Find a Place, Partner or President (TED Books) by Jim Hornthal
 Published in October of 2012. 61 pages, $2.99.

 Orbitz and Expedia may have killed the travel agency business, but my family desperately needs a skilled trip advisor to plan our next vacation. (The number of travel agents has dropped from over 110,000 in 2001 to about 77,000 today).  
 iTunesU (and Napster) destroyed Tower Records, but I have no idea how to get a better playlist for my morning run.
 Amazon and Netflix put Borders and Blockbuster out of business (Blockbuster is limping along out of bankruptcy), but it is doubtful that our new way of finding books and movies is resulting in us reading and watching better books and movies. (Although Long Tail enthusiasts may disagree).
Jim Hornthal thinks that we are about to enter the second wave of consumer Internet platforms. The new platforms will be based less on community content (Facebook), or cloud applications (Gmail) - but on personalization via algorithms and massive data analysis.   
 His canonical example is Pandora's Music Genome Project. Pandora breaks each song in its database into 450 discrete musical characteristics. The system then learns your musical tastes by how you rate different songs, and by building on ratings from all Pandora listeners (over 51 million), the site can predict which music (from a catalogue of almost 1 million songs) that you are likely to enjoy...
2. http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/coursesmart-analytics-bad-idea [snippet]

I am a little late to this story, but apparently digital textbook provider CourseSmart will be introducing a new tool that, in the words of my parent publication, "could make identifying unprepared students even easier, and, the creators hope, improve outcomes and retention."
 The idea is that CourseSmart Analytics can quantify student interactions with the text. The software "tracks students’ engagement with their e-textbooks and provides and allows professors and colleges to evaluate the usefulness of learning materials and to track student work."
 The theory, as I understand it, is that this additional data will help universities “prove” their students are learning, presumably by showing how much and in what ways they interact with their reading.
 ... will not be using this tool because I have a better way of measuring their engagement. I call it “their grade.”

3. http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/19/165498842/matching-dna-with-medical-records-to-crack-disease-and-aging [snippet]

   Researchers weren't sure how they were going to extract genetic information from the saliva until a company called Affymetrix came along with a new system that could process lots of samples really quickly.
   The National Institutes of Health provided grant funding of nearly $25 million, which allowed Affymetrix and the Kaiser team to process the saliva samples in just 15 months.
   Then came another daunting task: matching each participant's genetic information with detailed health information in Kaiser's electronic records, which go back to 1995. The records include diagnoses, procedures, prescriptions and results of medical tests. For people who sent in saliva, Kaiser also has information on smoking and drinking habits, body mass measurements, and even geographic information that could be used to estimate exposure to certain chemicals in the air or water...

on informatics

job announcement hints at scope: ...Department of Informatics with emphasis on teaching telecommunications law and policy courses to networking, web design, information assurance and media studies undergraduate and graduate students.

Job Description
Full time tenure track position in the Department of Informatics with emphasis on teaching telecommunications law and policy courses to networking, web design, information assurance and media studies undergraduate and graduate students. The preferred candidate for this position will have professional as well as teaching experience in law and policy areas including but not limited to: state and federal legislation, state and federal regulation, intellectual property, and business transactions in cyberspace, cybercrime, competition and economic policy, universal service, and an understanding of constitutional considerations for freedom of speech, search and seizure, and privacy as related to society’s interaction with networks and cyberspace.

By comparison, here is Wikipedia on INFORMATICS

• Computer science, the study of complex systems, information and computation using applied mathematics, electrical engineering and software engineering techniques.
• Information science, the study of the processing, management, and retrieval of information
• Informatics (academic field), a broad academic field encompassing human-computer interaction, information science, information technology, algorithms, areas of mathematics (especially mathematical logic and category theory), and social sciences that are involved
• Informatics engineering
• Information technology, the study, design, development, implementation, support, or management of computer-based information systems
  • Archival informatics
  • Bioinformatics
    • Bioimage informatics
  • Biodiversity informatics
  • Business informatics
  • Cheminformatics
  • Community informatics
  • Computational informatics
  • Development informatics
  • Disease informatics
  • Ecoinformatics
  • Education informatics
  • Engineering Informatics
  • Environmental informatics
  • Evolutionary informatics
  • Forest informatics
  • Geoinformatics
  • Health informatics
    • Consumer health informatics
    • Imaging informatics
    • Public health informatics
  • Hydroinformatics
  • Irrigation informatics
  • Laboratory informatics
  • Legal informatics
  • Materials informatics
  • Medical informatics
  • Music informatics
  • Neuroinformatics
  • Pervasive Informatics
  • Social informatics
  • Technical informatics
  • Translational research informatics

data points & future outlined

Data biz, 

 [excerpt from http://www.npr.org/2012/10/08/162397787/predicting-the-future-fantasy-or-a-good-algorithm]

After failing to predict the Arab Spring, intelligence officials are now exploring whether Big Data, the combing of billions of pieces of disparate electronic information, can help them identify hot spots before they explode. The intelligence community has always been in the business of forecasting the future. The question is whether tapping into publicly available data — Twitter and news feeds and blogs among other things — can help them do that faster and more precisely.

Enter a Swedish-American start-up company called Recorded Future. The company has developed algorithms that chew through huge volumes of information to find relationships between people and organizations. Then its visualization software spits out that information in the form of a giant searchable timeline....

job blurb "data warehouse"

DATA WAREHOUSE FUNCTIONAL ANALYST/FINANCIALS  

Home Department =Application Support & Dev - OIT  

Position Summary:

The Data Warehouse Functional Analyst's role is to elicit, analyze, specify, and validate the business needs of data warehouse users. This includes interviewing stakeholders and gathering and compiling user requirements for the design and implementation of financial reports and visualizations. The Data Warehouse Functional Analyst assists or leads data modeling and ETL initiatives of financial data. This includes gathering data requirements, developing and maintaining ETL processes and dimensional data models, and promoting best practices in data warehousing to the organization.

This position focuses on the delivery of business intelligence solutions including: dashboards, scorecards, reports, user interfaces, and associated database design and data structures using Microsoft and SAP technologies, applications and tools.

The individual will apply proven communication skills, problem solving skills, and knowledge of best practices to guide the development team on issues related to design, development and deployment of CMU Core and mission-critical software systems.  

Required Qualifications

Bachelor's degree (preferably in Computer Science, Mathematics or Information Systems) or equivalent
Two years experience working with a leading ERP platform
Familiarity with Enterprise Financial modules
Demonstrated experience gathering requirements
Excellent technical aptitude
Excellent communication (oral/written) skills with respect to team members, peers, and staff at all levels of the organization.
Ability to concisely, logically, and accurately present issues verbally and in written format.
Strong problem-solving skills
Good interpersonal skills that can foster, demonstrate, and promote excellence in a team environment.
Reliable, self-motivated, and focused on high quality delivery of work products; willing to accept responsibility and accountability  

Preferred Qualifications:

Experience with Project Management
Experience gathering requirements for complex systems
Experience with SAP ERP, preferably within the FI module
Experience with ETL process
Experience with Microsoft Integration Services and Reporting Services
Experience with Microsoft SharePoint
Knowledge of University reporting needs
Extensive programming experience
Strong preference for data warehousing experience
Strong preference for dashboard development Experience