May 10, 2013

Briefly

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  • Forbes has a profile of a soon-to-be billionaire statistician, Dennis Gillings.  He basically invented the commercial clinical research model, and his company, Quintiles, is going public. 
  • The New York Times has a story about data(!) and science(!) being used to modify Hollywood scripts.  As Matt Yglesias points out, the studios can’t really take it that seriously or they’d be paying more than $20 000 for the service
  • Some Big Data backlash, from Quartz. Most data isn’t big, most data isn’t very good quality, and most businesses are in more need of expertise on data analysis than on large-scale computing.
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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »