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For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word - Statistics - NYTimes.com
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In another sign of the growing interest in the field, an estimated 6,400 people
are attending the statistics profession’s annual conference in Washington this
week, up from around 5,400 in recent years, according to the American
Statistical Association.
The
attendees, men and women, young and graying, looked much like any other
crowd of tourists in the nation’s capital. But -
The attendees, men and women, young and graying, looked much like any other
crowd of tourists in the nation’s capital. But their rapt exchanges were filled
with talk of randomization, parameters, regressions and data clusters. The data
surge is elevating a profession that traditionally tackled less visible and less
lucrative work, like figuring out life expectancy rates for insurance companies. - 2 more annotations...
Statistical Data Mining Tutorials
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The following links point to a set of tutorials on many aspects of
statistical data mining, including the foundations of probability, the
foundations of statistical data analysis, and most of the classic machine
learning and data mining algorithms.These include classification algorithms such as decision trees, neural nets,
Bayesian classifiers, Support Vector Machines and cased-based (aka
non-parametric) learning. They include regression algorithms such as
multivariate polynomial regression, MARS, Locally Weighted Regression, GMDH and
neural nets. And they include other data mining operations such as clustering
(mixture models, k-means and hierarchical), Bayesian networks and Reinforcement
Learning.
Numbers Are Bad Liars - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
Numbers Are Bad Liars\nBy Freakonomics\n\nAfter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of Iran's June 12 presidential election, protesters have been crying fraud. In a Washington Post op-ed, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco claim that the truth lies in the digits of the vote count. Humans are bad at making up fraudulent numbers, they write, and the fact that the vote counts for the different provinces contain "too many 7's and not enough 5's in the last digit" and not enough non-adjacent digits points to made-up numbers. Iran's election monitors, meanwhile, acknowledged that the number of votes exceeded the number of voters, but deny fraud.
Fraud in science: Liar! Liar! | The Economist
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Admissions of outright fraud (ie, having fabricated, falsified or modified data
to improve the outcome at least once during a scientific career) were low.
According to the meta-analysis, 2% of researchers questioned were willing to
confess to this. But lower-level fraud was rife. About 10% confessed to
questionable practices, such as “dropping data points based on a gut feeling” or
“failing to present data that contradict one’s previous research”—though this
figure was just a straight average of the underlying studies, since the relevant
parts of the underlying studies were too disparate to run through the
meta-analysis. -
Fabricating data is a heinous scientific sin. It steers people down paths that
do not lead anywhere and discourages them from following those that do. But
cleaning data up has a long tradition. Robert Millikan, the physicist who first
measured the charge on the electron, discarded results that did not match his
expectations, yet he won a Nobel prize—because he was right. The results of
Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, are also suspiciously
over-accurate by the tenets of modern statistics. When such practices shade into
dishonesty is itself a shady area. Just as everyone thinks himself a
better-than-average driver, these results (assuming that they are honest)
suggest people are more willing to see sin in others than in themselves. And
that, at least, proves something that is sometimes forgotten. Scientists are as
human as everyone else.
Wired Struggles to Find Niche in Magazine World - NYTimes.com
Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, believes in logic the way Tina Brown believes in buzz. He rarely approves a story idea unless the writer backs up the thesis with data. The basis of his best-selling book "The Long Tail" was a statistical phenomenon called the Pareto distribution; in his coming book, "Free," he expresses arguments in profit-loss charts. The walls in his San Francisco office are whiteboards, covered with scrawled formulas.
Genetic Future : Why biology students should learn how to program
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I'd agree that biological data-sets can't compete with particle physicists in
terms of sheer scale, although the speed with which they are accumulating is alarming.
Where biological data-sets really become intimidating is in their diversity, in
the complexity of the underlying processes, and in the levels of noise and bias.
I suspect a lot of people used to dealing with extremely large data-sets would
still balk at the complexity of computational biology once they dug a little
deeper, particularly in a few years' time. -
That said, such tools and databases, however powerful, will always lag
substantially behind the science. For young biologists who want to work
right at the cutting edge - which will require dealing directly with rapidly
changing technologies, generating biological data at an increasingly dizzying
pace and in constantly evolving formats - solid informatic skills, including
at least basic programming and sound statistical knowledge, will make you
a far more productive scientist. - 1 more annotations...
Crowds are good | The kindness of crowds | The Economist
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. Rather, they have accidentally gathered a huge body of data on how people
behave, and particularly on how they behave in situations where violence is in
the air. This means that hypotheses about violent behaviour which could not be
tested experimentally for practical or ethical reasons, can now be examined in a
scientific way. And it is that which may help violence to be controlled. -
Virtual reality may thus allow Dr Levine to understand the collective
choreography of violence better than he does now, but he is already convinced
that, despite the moral panic over violence in Britain today, the influence of
groups is largely benign. His work could have practical consequences, since
police generally aim to break crowds up. If he is right, that approach may
unintentionally lead to more fights. It sounds counter-intuitive, but many of
the best ideas are. And if it is true, then perhaps Big Brother could give up
the CCTV habit and go and do something more useful instead.
Basics - In ‘Geek Chic’ and Obama, New Hope for Lifting Women in Science - NYTimes.com
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With the inauguration
of an administration avowedly committed to Science as the grand elixir for the
nation’s economic, environmental and psycho-reputational woes, a number of
scientists say that now is the time to tackle a chronic conundrum of their
beloved enterprise: how to attract more women into the fold, and keep them once
they are there. -
On the one hand, they said, the new president’s apparent enthusiasm for science,
and the concomitant rise of “geek chic” and “smart is the new cool” memes, can
only redound to the benefit of all scientists, particularly if the enthusiasm is
followed by a bolus of new research funds. On the other hand, they said, how
about appointing a woman to the president’s personal Poindexter club, the
President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology? - 4 more annotations...
R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts - NYTimes.com
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is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of
data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua
franca partly because data mining has entered a golden age, whether being used
to set ad prices, find new drugs more quickly or fine-tune financial models.
Companies as diverse as Google,
Pfizer,
Merck,
Bank
of America, the InterContinental Hotels Group and Shell use it. -
It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without
knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.” - 6 more annotations...
Men's Chess Superiority Explained : Scientific American Podcast
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Women are so much better than men at so many things. But according to a report
published by the Royal Society, chess is not
one of them. The topic of sex differences when it comes to matters of the mind
is, needless to say, a divisive one. Those who wish to argue that women are just
not as smart as men often point to chess as their proof. Although girls can
obviously play, no woman’s ever been world champion. But before looking for
cultural or biological explanations for the disparity, scientists say you need
to do the math.
Serious chess players are assigned ratings based on
their performance against other players. So the scientists compared the ratings
of the top hundred male and top hundred female players from Germany. And they
found that the men indeed outperformed the women. However that difference can be
almost entirely explained by statistics. Because the larger the population, the
wider the range of measured scores—the bell curve has a longer tail. And because
many more men play than women, the best male players are extreme outliers on
that bell curve. As more women play, a few should also reach those extremes,
right out there with the men. To which one might be tempted to say: Checkmate.
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