Most people know what marketing executives do every day. They try to catch people’s attention through email, ads, tweets, and press releases. As for data scientists, well, their work is not nearly as well understood.

That’s been slowly changing this year as companies slowly loosen up about letting their hard-won data scientists talk about their work.

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There’s certainly been a lot of uncertainty in the angel and venture capital arenas over the past decade, and understandably so. Add to that, the lure of crowdfunding—a nearly $3 billion business in 2012—and it’s led some angel groups to consider if there is a role for individual investors in crowdfunding their deals.

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A new year is upon us, here’s a look back at a handful of the most popular pieces on NewGeography from 2013. Thanks for reading, and happy New Year.

12. Gentrification as an End Game, and the Rise of “Sub-Urbanity” In January Richey Piiparinen points out that gentrification driven by affluent young people moving back to the city might be creating “a ‘sub-urbanity’ that is emerging when the generalization of gentrification meets the gentrification of the mind.”

It may seem like a superpower to be able to wake up without an alarm, but it's more attainable than you think. It's really just regular ol' biology--the result of your hormones getting you ready for the day.

It's a habit that you can train yourself in, making you more alert in the morning time, and, daresay it, more productive.

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The focus of my life in recent months has been living mindfully, and while I don’t always remember to do that, I have learned a few things worth sharing.

The first is a mindful life is worth the effort. It’s a life where we awaken from the dream state we’re most often submerged in--the state of having your mind anywhere but the present moment, locked in thoughts about what you’re going to do later, about something someone else said, about something you’re stressing about or angry about. The state of mind where we’re lost in our smartphones and social media.

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What's the last New Year's resolution you actually kept?

If you're better than us and have cut down on your spending, effectively managed stress, or lost ten pounds and actually used that gym membership, than you need not read any further.

For the rest of us, we're going to try and make things a bit more manageable.

The first step to being successful at your New Year's Resolutions is be being realistic about yourself. First things first: we're all inherently lazy creatures. But that doesn't mean we can't form productive habits, and, in turn, fulfill otherwise daunting resolutions.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

A lot of ink has been spilled on people’s opinions of what makes for a great leader. As a scientist, I like to turn to the data.  In 2009, James Zenger published a fascinating survey of 60,000 employees to identify how different characteristics of a leader combine to affect employee perceptions of whether the boss is a “great” leader or not. Two of the characteristics that Zenger examined were results focus and social skills. Results focus combines strong analytical skills with an intense motivation to move forward and solve problems.  But if a leader was seen as being very strong on results focus, the chance of that leader being seen as a great leader was only 14%. Social skills combine attributes like communication and empathy. If a leader was strong on social skills, he or she was seen as a great leader even less of the time — a paltry 12%.

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Know someone who drowned from jumping off burning water skis? Well, there’s a new medical billing code for that.

Michael Meistar Been injured in a spacecraft? There’s a new code for that, too.

Roughed up by an Orca whale? It’s on the list.

Next fall, a transformation is coming to the arcane world of medical billing. Overnight, virtually the entire health care system — Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers, hospitals, doctors and various middlemen — will switch to a new set of computerized codes used for determining what ailments patients have and how much they and their insurers should pay for a specific treatment.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com/ - Michael Meistar 

I have always believed that the starting context of entrepreneurship - why someone turns entrepreneur - has a significant impact on not just the entrepreneur's behaviour but also the trajectory of the business.

Typically, you can visualise three profiles of the entrepreneur: entrepreneur by compulsion, by volition, by presumption. The profiles are self-explanatory - the first turns an entrepreneur because of not much other choice, the second has many choices and yet chooses the entrepreneurial road and the third is expected to join the family business.

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Apple’s iPad is continuing to dominate U.S. personal computing device sales, and according to recent data, it drastically outsold both Android- and Windows-powered tablets this past year. The data comes from the NPD Group, which also had some interesting information to share concerning notebook sales, too.

Out of all personal computing devices sold between January and November 2013, the iPad (the 9.7-inch iPad and the iPad mini combined) accounted for 15.8%. This is a lesser figure than the iPad’s share of 2012’s sales, which was slightly higher at 17.1%, but it’s nevertheless bigger than the shares attributed to both Android- and Windows-powered tablets.

Image: http://mashable.com 

If you’re one of the many people in this world who can’t distinguish between musical notes or carry a tune to save your life, get excited -– science may have found a way to make you a musical genius. With just a little bit of neural tweaking in adulthood, researchers say they can fix the part of your brain that makes understanding music so tough.

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Spotted by Engadget on Samsung Korea, the enormous TV is 8.5 feet (2.6m) wide and 5.9 feet (1.8m) tall.

No other details about the device, except its UHD resolution and size, have been revealed — including the price, which will undoubtedly be high. At least we know where it's coming to first: China, Middle East and Europe.

Image: http://mashable.com 

When Anant Vats was working for Infosys in Houston, he once took the bus with some friends to go to dinner in town. Suddenly, an old lady sitting next to them asked them if they could fix her computer. Pleasantly surprised at this request, Anant asked her what led her to believe they could. “Because you are Indian!” she said.

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“If it’s happening in the world, it’s happening on Twitter.” That pretty much sums up 2013 for me. As 2013 nears its close it’s always fun to look back at some if the biggest trends that came and went throughout the year. Looking back at the year on Twitter shows that tweets in 2013 can be divided into news, entertainment, sports and “showcase” (a publishing partner-picked selection of the best tweets of the year) – an interesting trip down memory lane focusing on global events, breaking news, pop culture and local tales from around the world that were shared this year on Twitter.

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2013 has been a great year for digital, a real game changer in terms of its transformation towards the digital revolution that is set to impact the way we communicate, do business and LIVE forever. The evolution of communication, through the evolution of social, has led us to experience one of the most dramatic changes in the way we communicate, inform ourselves, and interact with each other.

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Picture a person reading these words on a laptop in a coffee shop. The machine made of metal, plastic, and silicon consumes about 50 watts of power as it translates bits of information—a long string of 1s and 0s—into a pattern of dots on a screen. Meanwhile, inside that person’s skull, a gooey clump of proteins, salt, and water uses a fraction of that power not only to recognize those patterns as letters, words, and sentences but to recognize the song playing on the radio.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com/ 

During 2013, stock prices of technology firms raced upward, acquisitions of companies hit a 14-year high, more startups went public than at any time since the dot-com boom, and enthusiastic expectations for the transformative power of technologies like drones and consumer 3-D printing started to defy practical reality.

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If an entrepreneur doesn't find themselves in over their head at least 20 percent of the time, they are probably not pushing the limits, not taking enough risk, and probably not working on an idea that's worth doing. The challenge in to know when and how to ask for help, and not let bravado and ego mask anxieties. The best people know when they don't know, and know how to find the right help.

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Holidays, we all need them, and by law you are entitled to them. Traditional companies allocate their employees between 15 and 21 days of leave on average, per year. Often a bulk of that is forced over Christmas and New Years time when offices are closed. But startups are not traditional workplaces by definition. Often the way you operate and approach work at a startup is creatively, spontaneously, and adaptively… at the least that’s the ideal. So why shouldn’t a startup approach holidays in a similar fashion. Here are some examples I’ve come across that break the mould of the traditional holiday break.

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The last year we’ve seen a lot of startups do a lot of great things. On top of that, we’ve not only seen small businesses from emerging markets continue to raise the stakes internationally but more importantly, cater and adapt to their own markets — tackling real issues and market gaps with innovative solutions. Most of these startups listed below have done just that and have maintained sustainable business models worth note.