Sunday data/statistics link roundup (12/2/13)

Jeff Leek
2013-12-01
  1. I’m in Australia for Bioinfo Summer 2013! First time in Australia and excited about the great lineup of speakers and to meet a bunch of people at the University of Adelaide. 
  2. An interesting post about how CS has become the de facto language of our times. They specifically talk about CS50 at Harvard. I think in terms of being an informed citizen CS and Statistics are quickly being added to Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic as the required baseline knowledge (link via Alex N.)
  3. A long but fascinating read by Gary King about restructuring the social sciences with a focus on ending the quantitative/qualitative divide. I think a similar restructuring has been going on in biology for a while. It is nearly impossible to be a modern molecular biologist without at least some basic training in statistics. Similarly statisticians are experiencing an inverted revolution where we are refocusing on applications and some basic scientific experience is becoming a required component of being a statistician (link via Rafa).
  4. This is how you make a splash in data science. Rochester is hiring 20! faculty across multiple disciplines. It will be interesting to see how that works out (link via Rafa). This goes along with the recent announcement of the Moore foundation funding Berkeley, UW, and NYU to build data science cultures/environments.
  5. PLoS is rich and they have to figure out what to do! They are a non-profit, but their journal PLoS One publishes about 30k papers a year at about 1k a pop. That is some serious money, which they need to figure out how to spend pronto. My main suggestion: fund research to figure out a way to put peer reviewing on the same level as publishing in terms of academic credit (link via Simina B.)
  6. A group of psychologists got together and performed replication experiments for 13 major effects. They replicated 11/13 (of course depending on your definition of replication). Hopefully these results are a good first step toward reducing the mania around the “replication crisis” and refocusing attention back on real solutions.