Media Coverage

It’s a sad fact of doing business: customers leave. “You’d like to have 100 percent of customers stay 100 percent of the time,” says Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta. “But that’s just not the case.” There can be plenty of reasons why a once-loyal customer jumps ship—maybe they were unhappy with customer service, or your prices went up, or a competitor offered a better deal. But if a company lets too many customers show themselves the door, then they’ll waste too much of their time recruiting new customers.

For the past decade, university arms races have centered on who can build the most luxurious dorms and biggest sports facilities or offer the most “country club” amenities like posh gyms and pools. But the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign may have cornered what has become the most crucial amenity of all as the 2020 school year kicks off: COVID testing.

Nearly 6 million people in the U.S. have tested positive for the coronavirus. Public health experts warn that the reopening of schools and businesses could lead to a rise in cases.

At the end of August, Glassdoor had more than 53,000 job postings that mention machine learning (ML) and 20,000 jobs that include data science with salaries ranging from $50,000 to more than $180,000. More and more companies are making data analysis and machine learning central to new product development and future revenue opportunities. Big tech companies as well as independent tech organizations offer training programs for people who are new to data science as well as professionals who want to master the newest technology. Each program on this list of the best courses online for data science will expand your expertise and add a valuable line item in the form of a data science certification to your resume.

Short-term investors are widely seen as bad for they companies they invest in, because they are likely to focus on immediate changes in stock value — potentially at the expense of the company’s long-term profitability. But new research suggests that there may be times when a short-term focus can actually help companies perform better over the long run. The study, expected to be published in the scholarly journal Management Science, found that companies with more short-horizon investors — who trade stocks regularly — adapted more quickly when their competitive environments changed “radically.”