I want to parse this statement by new EPA Chief Scott Pruitt, as quoted in this New York Times article: I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. I'm not going to talk about…
In his book, Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer): Why Common Sense Fails, Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia, imparts urgent lessons that are as relevant to his students as to self-proclaimed data scientists. It takes only nominal effort to generate narrative structures that retrace the past, Watts contends, but developing lasting theory that produces valid predictions requires much more effort than common sense. Watts’s is…
In the on-going series of posts about the IMDB dataset, from Kaggle, I have so far looked at several of the scraped variables, including the number of faces on movie posters (1, 2), plot keywords (3), and movie rating by title year (4). In this post, I tackle the variables resulting from a data merge between IMDB and Facebook. These columns have names like "Director Facebook Likes", "Actor 1 Facebook…
You've heard me say often, numbersense is the most important quality for good data analysts; little did I know that numbersense would become the new requirement for healthy American democracy. From the first day in office, the new President is at war with numbers (over attendance figures at his inauguration). But I believe that getting to the bottom of data-driven claims is a bi-partisan issue: while it is obvious that…
Just leaving this quote from ASA President Jessica Utts here (Source: Amstat News Dec 2016): A few days ago, I was in Vietnam and took a four-hour bus ride from Ha Long Bay to Hanoi. When I arrived, my fitness tracker had given me credit for taking 9,124 steps and climbing 81 flights of stairs during those four hours, even though I only left my seat once during a short…
What do the following items have in common? A. Motion-detection light switch in your office that shuts off while you're typing at your computer B. Automatic flush that turns on while you're seated C. Voice-recognition system that picks up ambient noise and asks you to repeat something you didn't say D. Auto-correct software that flips a correct spelling to the wrong one you didn't anti-auto-correct the last time E. Fuzzy-logic…
For me, 2016 is a year of water leaks. I was forced to move apartments during the summer. (Blame my old landlord for the lower frequency of posts this year!) That old apartment was overrun by water issues. In the past four years, there were two big leaks in addition to annual visible "seepage" in the ceiling. The first big leak ruined my first night back from Hurricane Sandy-induced evacuation.…
This is the third and final post about the controversy over statistical analysis used in peer-reviewed published scholarly research. Most of the new stuff are covered in post #2 (link). Today's post covers statistical issues related to sample size, which is nothing new, but it was mentioned in Amy Cuddy's response to her critics and thus I also discuss it here. In post #2 (link), I offer the following mental…
