Tag Archives: Important statisticians

Recommended: A sampling of outstanding women in analytics

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This is a list (with single paragraph descriptions) of 186 women who have accomplished great things in the area of Analytics. There is a brief accompanying article at the Forbes magazine website, but it is very brief. The author of this list, Meta S. Brown, defines Analytics quite broadly, so the women have very diverse backgrounds and interests. I only recognized one name off the bat, Grace Wahba, an excellent researcher, but someone, unfortunately, that I haven’t met. If I get a chance, I’ll include in a separate blog post a list of outstanding women in Analytics that I HAVE met. Meta Brown’s list includes links so you can find out more about these talented women. Continue reading

Recommended: Hi, I’m Mike Bostock.

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This is an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session with Mike Bostock, a former graphics editor for the New York Times and creator of the d3.js data visualization package. I’ll be writing a few things about d3.js once I figure things out. Mike is someone worth watching, because he is working on high visibility, high impact stuff. Continue reading

Recommended: What I need from statisticians

This interview with Nate Silver was conducted shortly after his keynote address at the 2013 Joint Statistical Meetings. I was at those meetings, but was stuck in a class (a very good class by the way, but I still felt stuck) on software engineering for statisticians. This article summarizes the main points of Mr. Silver’s keynote address and adds some extra insights through an interview after the speech. The best part was the quote at the end.

When asked that “Data science is the term of the day. Do you think there is a difference between data science and statistics? Silver replied, “I think data-scientist is a sexed up term for a statistician”, the reaction from the audience was for most, one of instantaneous laughter and applause. “Statistics is a branch of science. Data scientist is slightly redundant in some way and people shouldn’t berate the term statistician.”

If Nate Silver can say something this controversial, then maybe I shouldn’t be so bashful. Continue reading

Recommended: The Next Billionaire: A Statistician Who Changed Medicine.

This is a nice profile of Dennis Gillings, a statistician who started a small company in the 1980s with only 5 employees. This company, Quintiles, is now the world’s largest CRO (Clinical Research Organization). The article appeared in May 2013, shortly before Quintiles offered an IPO that would turn Dr. Gillings into a billionaire. Continue reading