  What it is Think of Kaggle as The Amazing Race for brainiacs.
The site manages competitions in which statisticians,
scientists, academics and other whizzes compete to uncover the
best predictive modeling--also called data mining--to solve
specific challenges. The winner receives a money prize in return
for intellectual property rights to the model. Kaggle has helped
an insurance company find out which drivers are more likely to
crash a car, worked with a financial services company to gauge
default risks for particular customers and figured out how to
rate chess players.  How it started Through an internship at The
Economist magazine, founder Anthony Goldbloom was able to
interview chief information officers about the role of "big
data." The biggest complaint he heard was that predictive
modeling, a top priority for large firms, was confusing,
expensive and came with no guarantee of accuracy.  Goldbloom,
who had worked in macroeconomic modeling at the Reserve Bank of
Australia and the Australian Treasury, sa