https://youtu.be/9nUARk6aFE4?t=1 A National Geographic puzzle (described below) that 80% of children can solve flummoxes most adults. As we get older we develop a whole range of skills that allow us to operate more efficiently. The problem is that these optimizations result in blind spots and lowering of creativity. Now, don't get me wrong---the tradeoff is worthwhile. You really don't want a … [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...]
Definite proof that Jim Carrey causes autism
Fun example of "confusing" correlation with causation. … [Read more...]
R Consortium
The R Consortium has just been announced - with Microsoft as a founding Platinum member. Google, HP and Oracle are Silver members. According to their website, the consortium is a group of businesses organized under an open source governance and foundation model to provide support to the R community, the R Foundation and groups and individuals, using, maintaining and distributing R … [Read more...]
R at Microsoft BUILD conference
R was prominent at last month's BUILD---Microsoft's conference for developers. Corporate Vice President for Machine Learning, Joseph Sirosh, said, if there is a single language that you choose to learn today...let it be R His keynote demonstrated a genomic data analysis using Revolution R Enterprise, recently acquired by Microsoft, running on a 1600 core Azure Hadoop cluster. Microsoft are … [Read more...]