Terry Speed recently gave a talk on the role of statisticians in “Big Data” initiatives (see the video or just look at the slides). He points to the history of statisticians’ discussions of massive data sets (e.g., the Proceedings of a 1998 NRC workshop on Massive data sets) and how this history is being ignored […]
I was thinking about department websites, partly because my own department’s website is terrible, and recently a colleague asked me whether I could suggest some good department sites. I’ll describe the basic principles for a good department website, and then I’ll comment on a number of examples. But first: No discussion of academic web pages […]
Stack Exchange is a series of question-and-answer sites, including Stack Overflow for programming and Cross Validated for statistics. I was introduced to these sites at a short talk by Barry Rowlingson at the 2011 UseR! meeting, “Why R-help must die!“ These sites have a lot of advantages over R-help: The format is easier to read, […]
It’s great that, in a step towards improved reproducibility, the Nature journals are removing page limits on Methods sections: To allow authors to describe their experimental designs and methods in enough detail for others to interpret and replicate them, the participating journals are removing length restrictions on Methods sections. But couldn’t they include the Methods […]
I attended the ENAR meeting in Orlando, Florida, last week. (ENAR = “Eastern North American Region” of the International Biometric Society.) I had a great time, but I did come to the strong realization that what I view as important is distinctly different from what the typical ENAR attendee views as important. (Rafa said, incredulously, […]
Much has been written about reproducible research: that scientific papers should be accompanied by the data and software sufficient to reproduce the results. It’s obviously a Good Thing. But it can be hard to stick to this ideal in practice. For my early papers, I’m not sure I can find the materials anymore, and that’s […]
Last week, I wrote about the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health logo. I now present part 2 of the story. Hopkins SPH had done some fancy renovations of part of the building, including an important new feature, the “Wall of Wonder“: a big display composed of nine LCD screens in the atrium of [...]
I was just telling a distinguished visitor a few of my various stories about the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health logo. She suggested that it would be a great blog topic. And now that I’m a tenured faculty member at a different university and so can’t get into any [further] trouble over this… [...]
Karl Rohe has an interesting commentary in Amstat News this month, on how our current publishing system is obstructing research progress, and what a better future might look like.
There has been a lot of discussion lately about whether to be in academia or industry. Some of it I think is a bit unfair to academia. Then I saw this post on Quora asking what Hilary Mason’s contributions were to machine learning, like she hadn...
