The New York Times has been making waves this week featuring management practices at Amazon and workplace tracking practices at various companies (link). These are essential references for how data make us dumber. I am going to ignore the shocking claim by the journalist who stated that GE is "long a standard-setter in management practices." To give him some credit, he did not say "good" management practice. It is true…
In our newest column, we take on the recent media obsession with companies who make robots that hire people. (link) As with most articles about data science, the journalists failed to dig up any evidence that these robots work, other than glowing quotes from the people who are selling these robots. We point out a number of challenges that such algorithms must overcome in order to generate proper predictions. We…
Syllabus for one-day seminar on Big Data jobs and careers by Kaiser Fung
It's Spring Break at NYU, which for professors, is not a break. I have been marking midterms for my business analytics class. Since I like to set open-ended questions (are there anything else in statistics?), I get a variety of answers. One of the questions helps clarify what I mean by numbersense. The question asks students to comment on the distribution of a variable (median income) in a dataset of…
