New York Times reports that Harvard rescinded admission offers to 10 students (link). These kids allegedly engaged in horrible behavior on "private" chatrooms online. Not reported is how Harvard admission officers got a hold of such information. Is it possible there are jealous classmates? I am not condoning the bad behavior - I put this link up to remind people: (a) no data are private, not even "deleted" data (b)…
A nice article in Zerohedge about the recent rate hike for Tesla owners (link). Of course, Tesla is crying foul. The gist of the story is that Tesla owners tend to get into more crashes and the repair cost is higher than for other brands. The former is a matter of statistics - but also self-selection: in my limited encounters, the first things Tesla owners tell me about their cars…
Kaiser Fung, founder of Principal Analytics Prep, discusses Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's new book, Everybody Lies
The New York Times Magazine has been publishing some pieces that directly relate to a couple of my blog posts. In this article, Amanda Hess noticed that "privacy became a commodity for the rich and powerful." This echoes my blog post on "Data is the next frontier of equal rights." Hess discussed the asymmetry and hypocrisy of the situation whereby the same businesses and business executives that are wantonly stripping…
The following chart showing wage gaps by gender among U.S. physicians was sent to me via Twitter: The original chart was published by the Stat News website (link). I am most curious about the source of the data. It apparently...
Here are some of the papers that I've been reading recently. Some of them may appeal to you, too:Bampinas, G., K. Ladopoulos, &T. Panagiotidis, 2017. A note on the estimated GARCH coefficients from the S&P1500 universe. WP 17-09, Rimini C...
@apollo_0 on twitter asks me to comment on this, by Scientific Britain: Here's my comment:
There has been a barrage of negative publicity related to Uber recently. The latest salvo is a long article in the New York Times (link). This piece focuses on Uber's CEO, who was trained as a computer engineer, but my interest lies primarily in several revelations about how Uber collects and uses customer data. The key episode picked up by various outlets (e.g. TechCrunch, Wired) involves Uber "secretly identifying and…
The World Economic Forum published this chart: The "EF EPI Score" is a measure of English proficiency. So the evidence is clear as day: "Better English and Income Go Hand in Hand," as their headline blares. Last time I was in the New York subway, the panhandler spoke good English. What's a blogger to do? I pulled out the EPI scores from the EPI report, and downloaded the Gross National…
This New York Times article draws attention to real trends in the financial investments industry but gets completely lost in the smoke around those pushing "machines" and "data". The trend most concerning to the investments industry is the sustained, large-scale outflow of money from "actively-managed" funds, mutual funds being the biggest category of such. The industry makes loads of money from management fees by promoting the idea that investors are…
