October 5, 2018

Briefly

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  • “Data for Sale” at Stuff, on data ethics
  • “How a math genius hacked OkCupid to find true love” at Wired
  • Chris Knox interviews Cathy O’Neil, who is in New Zealand for a Stats NZ ‘Data Summit’.  StatsChat readers will already be familiar with Dr O’Neil aka mathbabe.org
  •  ‘People disagree about what fairness looks like. That’s true in general, and also true when you try to write down a mathematical equation and say, “This is the definition of fairness.”’ An interview with Dr Kristian Lum  of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group
  • A group at Johns Hopkins Dept of Biostatistics have been working to reduce the scarcity value of data science. They have a new program: “excited to announce the first part of our new system, a new set of massive online open courses called Chromebook Data Science. These MOOCs are for anyone from high schoolers on up to get into data science. If you can read and follow instructions you can learn data science from these courses!” (There’s obviously a potential conflict of interest here with Auckland’s data science programs, but I think there’s a separate market for in-person training where you can ask questions)
  • “Which neighborhoods in America offer children the best chance at a better life than their parents? The Opportunity Atlas uses anonymous data following 20 million Americans from childhood to their mid-thirties to answer this question.” There’s an obvious difficulty with any dataset like this — if you’re looking at people in their mid-thirties, they were children quite a while ago and things may have changed.  Still interesting to explore.
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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 »