It's that time of year when we start getting the "best x of 2015" posts. Nathan Yau of FlowingData just published his list of the best visualization projects. Yau reckons that this was the year of using visualization to teach about data and statistics. My favorite is "Science Isn't Broken" by Christie Aschwanden of FiveThirtyEight. It's a visual interactive demonstration of how you can shape the … [Read more...]
Don’t tell me you don’t have the data
If they can follow a seal into the freezing Antarctic water, you can collect a few log entries. Really. … [Read more...]
Subjectivity in data science
An article recently published in Nature reinforces the fact that the real challenge in data science is not mastery of the technical tools, but the ability to understand and define the problem. Researchers posed the question of whether the color of a soccer player's skin is a factor in how many red cards (serious reprimands) he receives. Seems like a pretty straightforward analysis. The authors … [Read more...]
Analyzing an Isle of Man TT legend
The BBC has an article on using a sensor array to determine what makes 23-time Isle of Man TT winner John McGuinness so quick. Motorcycle riders have been tackling the 38-mile street circuit for over a hundred years. As it's run on (closed) public roads, it's an incredibly dangerous race. Riders average 212kph (132mpg) round the course---often coming within inches of stone walls and … [Read more...]
Data science and statistics
Prolific R developer Hadley Wickham provided an interesting perspective on data science and statistics in a recent Priceonomics article. There are definitely some academic statisticians who just don't understand why what I do is statistics, but basically I think they are all wrong. What I do is fundamentally statistics. The fact that data science exists as a field is a colossal failure of … [Read more...]