September 6, 2016
Briefly
- Facebook’s step towards predictive models instead of people for its news editing didn’t work very well last week
- Why more interesting local restaurants tend not to show up on internet maps.
- A preview of Cathy O’Neil’s book about data science and its potential dangers, coming out tomorrow.
- From Flowing Data, how the frequency of different household structures has changed in the US since 1970
- A map of the world’s languages — showing the difficulties in definition, since all the Chinese languages are lumped in together when probably equally distinctive languages from different countries are given separately.
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 »
Thats the issue with some european languages as well. What is know as standard italian(or Tuscan) is a distinct language from ‘northern italian’ group of dialects. Simliar to Spain with Spanish and Catalan. Its best to think of the names as being language families in the broad sense
8 years ago
Yes, but Chinese is more diverse than that — it’s more like the entire set of Romance languages
8 years ago