A Save-the-World Field Trip for Millionaire Tech Moguls

If there was one thing troubling Scott Harrison as he stood up to address a group of nearly 50, including more than a dozen Silicon Valley wunderkinds, it was the matter of the private jet.

Scott Harrison, founder of charity: water, carrying a jerry can to simulate the water hauling done by local residents.

Harrison addresses a group of wealthy donors at a campsite in Tigray, Ethiopia.

Actually, “private jet” was, when he thought about it, a bit of an exaggeration. Harrison was no Greg Mortenson, the disgraced education advocate whose use of donations for chartered jets (among other things) led to an investigation by the Montana attorney general as Mortenson’s schools in Afghanistan foundered. He wasn’t even Bono, taking a little glamour into the bush — not that there was anything wrong with that, in Harrison’s opinion. But still, charity: water, the nonprofit he started, was supposed to be a rejoinder to conventional philanthropy — the inefficiency, the celebrity culture, the Learjets.

Harrison had rented the aging 737 to take the entrepreneurs from Dubai to a four-day event last spring he was calling F.ounders Ethiopia — the name and funny punctuation a result of a partnership with F.ounders, a Dublin-based technology conference — and he was worried that some people might take it the wrong way. Several days earlier, he asked me, if I mentioned the plane, to include its price, $82,000, a figure he decided was “not scary.” (The guests would each pay their share of the trip, $5,000, from which roughly $1,700 would go to the rental of the plane.) “What I don’t want is a bunch of guys flying in on a private jet to pet the poor for a couple of days,” he said. “I don’t want the perception that these tech darlings aren’t like the rest of us.”

I was to join this crew of just-like-us tech guys as they headed with Harrison to Tigray, the mountainous region in Ethiopia’s far north, where much of the rural population still lacks basic services like paved roads, electricity, toilets and, crucially for Harrison, access to clean drinking water. It’s not uncommon for a woman there to walk an hour or more to fetch water, drawing it unfiltered from a murky, open well, and then to turn around and haul the sloshing 40-pound jug back home. Not surprisingly, waterborne illnesses are among the leading causes of death in children younger than 5; the infant mortality rate in Tigray is 6.4 percent.

Since its founding, Harrison’s charity has worked in 20 countries, but it has spent more money drilling wells and setting up hand pumps in Tigray than anywhere else — projected to be some $27 million by the end of this year. By trying to ensure that the region’s entire rural population, some four million people, has access to clean water, Harrison hopes to be able to offer proof (a word he loves) that the global water crisis is solvable. So far, charity: water claims to have provided clean water to a million people in the area. Tigray also happens to be relatively safe and heartachingly beautiful — making it a suitable destination for a group of young millionaires. “It’s where I take people to kind of start,” Harrison told me in his New York office in April. “It’s Abyssinia. The priests are wrapped in shrouds. It’s sick” — by which he meant very cool.

Harrison, who is 37, has a tendency, honed while working in his 20s as a Manhattan nightclub promoter, of taking over any room in which he happens to find himself. Supremely effective as a public speaker, he can be overwhelming in more casual settings. When we met in his office not long ago, he fidgeted excitedly, anticipating and then interrupting me even before I began speaking — all the while furiously scribbling notes directly onto the surface of his table using a dry-erase marker. When I got home from that interview and checked my e-mail, I found an 87-page paper about the economic benefits of water projects, a 17-page PowerPoint presentation about charity: water’s values and an invitation to attend a service with him and his wife, Viktoria, at Hillsong, a rock-music-playing megachurch that fills Irving Plaza or the Gramercy Theater in Manhattan six times each Sunday. “Scott the nightclub promoter no longer exists, but there are parts of that personality that need to be fed,” says Ross Garber, a former technology executive who is Harrison’s business coach. “He loves promoting, loves going hard, loves being loved.” Viktoria Harrison, who was charity: water’s designer before she and Scott became romantically involved, told me that the first time he asked her out, he looked at her so intensely that she was sure she was about to be fired.

Universities Offer Courses in a Hot New Field: Data Science

The field has been spawned by the enormous amounts of data that modern technologies create — be it the online behavior of Facebook users, tissue samples of cancer patients, purchasing habits of grocery shoppers or crime statistics of cities. Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions.

In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates.

In the fall, Columbia will offer new master’s and certificate programs heavy on data. The University of San Francisco will soon graduate its charter class of students with a master’s in analytics. Other institutions teaching data science include New York University, Stanford, Northwestern, George Mason, Syracuse, University of California at Irvine and Indiana University.

Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”

Eurry Kim, a 30-year-old “wannabe data scientist,” is studying at Columbia for a master’s in quantitative methods in the social sciences and plans to use her degree for government service. She discovered the possibilities while working as a corporate tax analyst at the Internal Revenue Service. She might, for example, analyze tax return data to develop algorithms that flag fraudulent filings, or cull national security databases to spot suspicious activity.

Some of her classmates are hoping to apply their skills to e-commerce, where data about users’ browsing history is gold.

“This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them — Netflix telling them what movies they should watch, Amazon telling them what books they should read — so this is an academic interest with real-world applications,” said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,” he added, “they know it will make them employable.”

Universities can hardly turn out data scientists fast enough. To meet demand from employers, the United States will need to increase the number of graduates with skills handling large amounts of data by as much as 60 percent, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. There will be almost half a million jobs in five years, and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data.

North Carolina State University introduced a master’s in analytics in 2007. All 84 of last year’s graduates in the field had job offers, according to Michael Rappa, who conceived and directs the university’s Institute for Advanced Analytics. The average salary was $89,100, and more than $100,000 for those with prior work experience.

“This has become relevant to every company,” said Michael Chui, a principal at McKinsey who has studied the field. “There’s a war for this type of talent.”

Because data science is so new, universities are scrambling to define it and develop curriculums. As an academic field, it cuts across disciplines, with courses in statistics, analytics, computer science and math, coupled with the specialty a student wants to analyze, from patterns in marine life to historical texts.

Claire Cain Miller is a technology reporter for The Times.