Stats Chat

Winners of a student datavis competition

Thomas Lumley — Sun, 19 May 2013 02:40:09 +0000

From the University of San Francisco. The winners were all interactive maps, showing, respectively: pollution, population change, and child mortality.

Two colour-matching games/puzzles

Thomas Lumley — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:59:29 +0000

Surprisingly addictive Color: match colours under a time limit Munsell Hue Test: arrange colours in order between two endpoints.

Science survey

Thomas Lumley — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:54:31 +0000

From the Wellcome Trust Monitor, a survey examining knowledge and attitudes related to biomedical science in the UK The survey found a high level of interest in medical research among the public – more than seven in ten adults (75 per cent) and nearly six out of ten of young people (58 per cent). Despite this, understanding of how [...]

How do you get a career in statistics?

James Curran — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:06:58 +0000

This is a common question from our students. Unfortunately our perspective does not always lend itself easily to life outside of research and academia, as what I look for in a curriculum vitae and in a job interview is usually with respect to hiring someone who will become an academic staff member. However, fellow statistician, [...]

Explore the budget

Thomas Lumley — Thu, 16 May 2013 03:25:35 +0000

Keith Ng’s budget visualisation now has today’s newly-released Government budget. (update) There’s also one at Stuff, by Harkanwal Singh (note that it uses nominal, not inflation-adjusted amounts)

Back to my favourite topic – beer

James Curran — Thu, 16 May 2013 02:35:34 +0000

Here is a site to show with a flourish when your friends tell you at the pub that studying Statistics is no use. LifeHacker reports that BeerViz attempts to use historical data collected by BeerAdvocate, and presumably a statistical model, to suggest new beers to you based on what you already like. If they’re not [...]

Whichever way you look it – “Is that an Android, I mean Samsung you’re holding there?”

James Curran — Thu, 16 May 2013 02:09:55 +0000

A report by research firm Strategy Analytics has estimated that Korean electronics giant Samsung took a whopping 94.7% share of the $US5.3 billion first quarter operating profits for Android handset sales. Whichever way you look at it, currently Samsung is the Android platform of choice. The Register notes that the same report notes that Android [...]

Briefly

Thomas Lumley — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:02:28 +0000

Via @felixsalmon, bad graphics moving into baseball Twitter Hate Map aims to show where racist or homophobic tweets occur. It tries to correct for the usual denominator problem, but there just aren’t enough tweets from some parts of the country Early this morning, the moderately accurate pageview counter on WordPress ticked over to quarter of a [...]

Future of applied statistics

Thomas Lumley — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:45:05 +0000

Rafa Irizarry at Simply Statistics has a longish piece on the future of applied statistics: Despite having expertise only in music, and a thesis that required a CD player to hear the data, fitted models and residuals , I was hired by the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Later I realized what was probably [...]

NRL Predictions, Round 10

David Scott — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:23:30 +0000

Team Ratings for Round 10 Here are the team ratings prior to Round 10, along with the ratings at the start of the season. I have created a brief description of the method I use for predicting rugby games. Go to my Department home page to see this. Current Rating Rating at Season Start Difference [...]