Sunday data/statistics link roundup (3/10/13)

Jeff Leek
2013-03-10
  1. This is an outstanding follow up analysis to our paper on the rate of false discoveries in the medical literature. I hope that the author of the blog post will consider submitting it for publication in a journal, I think it is worth having more methodology out there in this area. 
  2. If you are an academic in statistics and aren’t following Karl and Thomas on Twitter, you should be. Also check out Karl’s (mostly) reproducible paper.
  3. An article in the WSJ that I think I received about 40 times this week. The online version has a quote from our own B-Caffo. It is a really good read. If you are into this, it seems like the interviews with Rebecca Nugent (where we discuss growing undergrad programs) and Joe Blitzstein where we discuss stats ed are relevant. I thought this quote was hugely relevant, “The bulk of the people coming out [with statistics degrees] are technically competent but they’re missing the consultative and the soft skills, everything else they need to be successful” We are focusing heavily on both components of these skills in the grad program here at Hopkins - so if people are looking for awesome data people, just let us know!
  4. A cool discussion of how the A’s look for players with “positive residuals” - positive value missed by the evaluations of other teams. (via Rafa)
  5. The physicist and the bikini model. If you haven’t read it, you must be living under a rock. (via Alex N.)
  6. An interesting article about how IBM is using Watson to come up with new recipes based on the data from old recipes. I’m a little suspicious of the Spanish crescent though - no butter?!
  7. You should vote for Steven Salzberg for the Ben Franklin award. The dude has come up huge for open software and we should come up huge for him. Gotta vote today though.
  8. The Harlem Shake has killed more than one of my lunch hours. But this one is the best. By far. How all simulation studies should be done (via StatsChat).