halloween edition

Also, in time for Halloween, I give you an alternative to the normal distribution:

I won't let you down

For all the talking I do about how data will change the world-- science, industry, education, even art-- I also feel strongly that we will always rely on human creativity and talent.

OK Go has been amazing me with their music and videos for 12 years, and now they've done it again! Truly awesome. And simply the feat of how many people it took to make that video is one thing that makes it so fabulous.

messy big data

Shout out to Michael Jordan at Berkeley for saying what everyone needs to hear:

"[If] people use data and inferences they can make with the data without any concern about error bars, about heterogeneity, about noisy data, about the sampling pattern, about all the kinds of things that you have to be serious about if you’re an engineer and a statistician—then you will make lots of predictions, and there’s a good chance that you will occasionally solve some real interesting problems. But you will occasionally have some disastrously bad decisions. And you won’t know the difference a priori."

The Myth of I'm Bad at Math

Here is an outstanding op-ed about how we should try to improve our math ability in America-- certainly not by teaching less math!

"In response to the lackluster high school math performance, some influential voices in American education policy have suggested simply teaching less math -- ... The subtext, of course, is that large numbers of American kids are simply not born with the ability to solve for x."

Thanks to Betsy Blake for sharing this with me!