One of the things I'm realizing from Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) -- those online free classes from universities that have seem to sprung up from almost nowhere in the last year and a half -- is that they offer a perfect opportunity to explore...
The only thing missing is the cryptic ID number. Well, the only bad thing is that I am trying to run a probabilistic graphical model on some real data, and having a crash like this will definitely slow things down.
Tired of slides, I’ve been experimenting with different ways of presenting. At the recent Conference on Statistical Practice, I decided only to use slides for an outline and references. As it turns out, the most critical feedback I got had to do with...
I just received this email: Caltech's Machine Learning MOOC is coming to an end this spring, with the final session starting on April 2. There will be no future sessions. The course has attracted more than 200,000 participants since its launch last ...
Caltech has an online course Learning from Data, taught by Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa, that seeks to make the course material accessible to everybody. Unlike most of the online courses I've taken, this one is independently offered through a platform c...
I guess I've been living in a bubble for a bit, but apparently there are a lot of people who still mistrust R. I got asked this week why I used R (and, specifically, the package rpart) to generate classification and regression trees instead of SAS Ente...
Better Journals… Worse Statistics? : Neuroskeptic In the linked blog entry, Neuroskeptic notes that high impact journals often have fewer statistical details than other journals. The research reported in these journals is often heavily amended, i...
So, now I'm seeing some buzz over Twitter that the Big Data disillusionment is starting now. Frankly, I've been wondering when this would happen. Of course, the next stage involves making strategic investments in Big Data resources, and having these re...
The Guardian recently discussed the "declining linguistic standards" in State of the Union addresses. I thought this was an interesting exercise, but something seemed wrong about the article, and it turns out this is one case where the data do no...
Recently, I was working with a team to finalize a clinical trial protocol. I raised some concerns about their strategic matters, and my concerns were dismissed as "operational details." The thing about those pesky operational details is that, if somet...
