February 2012
39 posts
2 tags
An R script for estimating future inflation via...
One factor that is critical for any financial planning is estimating what future inflation will be. For example, if you’re saving money in an instrument that gains 3% per year, and inflation is estimated to be 4% per year, well then you’re losing money in real terms.
There are a variety of ways to estimate the rate of future inflation. You could, for example, use past rates as an...
5 tags
Sunday Data/Statistics Link Roundup (2/5)
Cool app, you can write out an equation on the screen and it translates the equation to latex. Via Andrew G.
Yet another D3 tutorial. Stay tuned for some cool stuff on this front here at Simply Stats in the near future. Via Vishal.
Our favorite Greek statistician in the news again.
How measurement of academic output harms science. Related: is submitting scientific papers too time consuming?...
2 tags
Why don't we hear more about Adrian Dantley on...
In my last post I complained about efficiency not being discussed enough by NBA announcers and commentators. I pointed out that some of the best scorers have relatively low FG% or TS%. However, via the comments it was pointed out that top scorers need to take more difficult shots and thus are expected to have lower efficiency. The plot below (made with this R script) seems to confirm this (click...
4 tags
Cleveland's (?) 2001 plan for redefining...
This plan has been making the rounds on Twitter and is being attributed to William Cleveland in 2001 (thanks to Kasper for the link). I’m not sure of the provenance of the document but it has some really interesting ideas and is worth reading in its entirety. I actually think that many Biostatistics departments follow the proposed distribution of effort pretty closely.
One of the most...
Evidence-based Music
There was recently a fascinating article published in PNAS that compared the sound quality of different types of violins. In this study, researchers assembled a collection of six violins, three of which were made by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu and three made by modern luthiers (i.e. 20th century). The combined value of the “old” violins was $10 million, about 100 times greater...
January 2012
30 posts
2 tags
This graph makes me think Kobe is not that good,...
I find it surprising that NBA commentators rarely talk about field goal percentage. Everybody knows that the more you shoot the more you score. But players that score a lot are admired without consideration of their FG%. Of course having a high FG% is not necessarily admirable as many players only take easy shots, while top-scorers need to take difficult ones. Regardless, missing is undesirable...
5 tags
Why in-person education isn't dead yet...but a...
A growing tend in education is to put lectures online, for free. The Kahn Academy, Stanford’s recent AI course, and Gary King’s new quantitative government course at Harvard are three of the more prominent examples. This new pedagogical format is more democratic, free, and helps people learn at their own pace. It has led some, including us here at Simply Statistics, to suggest that the...
5 tags
Sunday data/statistics link roundup (1/29)
A really nice D3 tutorial. I’m 100% on board with D3, if they could figure out a way to export the graphics as pdfs, I think this would be the best visualization tool out there.
A personalized calculator that tells you what number (of the 7 billion or so) that you are based on your birth day. I’m person 4,590,743,884. Makes me feel so special….
An old post of ours, on dongle...
This simple bar graph clearly demonstrates that...
Some NIH R01 paylines are down to 10%. This means only 10% of grants are being funded. The plot below highlights that all we need is a tiny litte slice from Defense, Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security to bring that back up to 20%. The plot was taken from Alex Tarrabok’s great article in the Atlantic.
Update: The y-axis unit is billions of US dollars.
7 tags
When should statistics papers be published in...
Like many statisticians, I was amped to see a statistics paper appear in Science. Given the impact that statistics has on the scientific community, it is a shame that more statistics papers don’t appear in the glossy journals like Science or Nature. As I pointed out in the previous post, if the paper that introduced the p-value was cited every time this statistic was used, the paper would...
2 tags
The end of in-class lectures is closer than I...
Our previous post on future of (statistics) graduate education was motivated by he Stanford online course on Artificial Intelligence. Here is an update on the class that had 160,000 people enroll. Some highlights: 1- Sebastian Thrun has given up his tenure at Stanford and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. 2- 248 students got a perfect score: they never got a single question...
4 tags
A wordcloud comparison of the 2011 and 2012 #SOTU
I wrote a quick (and very dirty) R script for creating a comparison cloud and a commonality cloud for President Obama’s 2011 and 2012 State of the Union speeches*. The cloud on the left shows words that have different frequencies between the two speeches and the cloud on the right shows the words in common between the two speeches. Here is a higher resolution version.
The focus on jobs...
4 tags
Why statisticians should join and launch startups
The tough economic times we live in, and the potential for big paydays, have made entrepreneurship cool. From the venture capitalist-in-chief, to the javascript coding mayor of New York, everyone is on board. No surprise there, successful startups lead to job creation which can have a major positive impact on the economy.
The game has been dominated for a long time by the folks over in CS. But...
4 tags
Sunday Data/Statistics Link Roundup (1/21)
Is the microarray dead? Jeremey Leipzig seems to think that statistical methods for microarrays should be. I’m not convinced, the technology has finally matured to the point we can use it for personalized medicine and we abandon it for the next hot thing? Not to Andrew for the link.
Data from 5 billion webpages available from the Common Crawl. Want to build your own search tool - or just...
6 tags
Interview With Joe Blitzstein
Joe Blitzstein
Joe Blitzstein is Professor of the Practice in Statistics at Harvard University and co-director of the graduate program. He moved to Harvard after obtaining his Ph.D. with Persi Diaconis at Stanford University. Since joining the faculty at Harvard, he has been immortalized in Youtube prank videos, been awarded a “favorite professor” distinction four times, and...
Data Journalism Awards →
In data journalism, reporters leverage numerical data and databases to gather, organize and produce news.
3 tags
Fundamentals of Engineering Review Question Oops
The Fundamentals of Engineering Exam is the first licensing exam for engineers. You have to pass it on your way to becoming a professional engineer (PE). I was recently shown a problem from a review manual:
When it is operating properly, a chemical plant has a daily production rate that is normally distributed with a mean of 880 tons/day and a standard deviation of 21 tons/day. During an...
5 tags
figshare and don't trust celebrities stating facts
A couple of links:
figshare is a site where scientists can share data sets/figures/code. One of the goals is to encourage researchers to share negative results as well. I think this is a great idea - I often find negative results and this could be a place to put them. It also uses a tagging system, like Flickr. I think this is a great idea for scientific research discovery. They give you...
5 tags
Sunday Data/Statistics Link Roundup
Statistics help for journalists (don’t forget to keep rating stories!) This is the kind of thing that could grow into a statisteracy page. The author also has a really nice plug for public schools.
An interactive graphic to determine if you are in the 1% from the New York Times (I’m not…).
Mike Bostock’s d3.js presentation, this is some really impressive visualization...
