Sunday data/statistics link roundup (12/15/13)

1. Rafa (in Spanish) clarifying some of the problems with the anti-GMO crowd.
2. Joe Bliztstein, most recently of #futureofstats fame, talks up data science in the Harvard Crimson (via Rafa). As has been pointed out by Rebecca Nugent when she stopped to visit us, class sizes in undergrad stats programs are blowing up!
3. If you missed it, Michael Eisen dropped by to chat about open access (part 1/part 2). We talked about Randy Schekman, a recent Nobel prize winner who says he isn’t publishing in Nature/Science/Cell anymore. Professor Schekman did a Reddit AMA where he got grilled pretty hard about pushing a glamour open access journal eLife, while dissing N/S/C, where he published a lot of stuff before winning the Nobel.
4. The article I received most the last couple of weeks is this one. In it, Peter Higgs says he wouldn’t have had time to think deeply to perform the research that led to the Boson discovery in the modern publish or perish academic system. But he got the prize, at least in part, because of the people who conceived/built/tested the theory in the Large Hadron Collider. I’m much more inclined to believe someone would have come up with the Boson theory in our current system than someone would have built the LHC in a system without competitive pressure.
5. I think this post raises some interesting questions about the Obesity Paradox that says overweight people with diabetes may have lower risk of death than normal weight people. The analysis is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I’d be interested to hear what other people think about whether it is a serious issue or not.