In this six-minute-long impassioned video, Carl Malamud draws on his considerable poetical and performance skills to introduce The General Index: What is The General Index, and how can it benefit you? The answer, some of it in the form of questions, is in the video. Here, to whet your appetite for viewing the video, are […]
Tag: data
Statistics – Missing data can sometimes be ignored, and sometimes not (study)
When statisticians are confronted with sets of data, they occasionally find there are data missing. This phenomenon has been given the name ‘Missingness’. Sometimes, a decision is taken that these missing data can be ignored, in which case they are classed as ‘Ignorable Missingness’. But on occasion, some missing data just can’t be ignored. In […]
Data Communications via Wet String, or via Hungry Snail
A wet string works, for sending information from one computer to another, says a new experiment. This adds to the list of low-tech ways to move data, the most lively method involving a hungry snail. The string experiment is reported on the RevK’s Rants web site, with the headline “It’s official, ADSL works over wet […]
Schmutz: White Wine Invites Melanoma, and Coffee Discourages It?
Drinking alcohol — specifically, drinking white wine — may increase your change of getting melanoma, but drinking coffee may decrease your chance. That’s what this new study suggests. The study does not suggest, though we do, that you spend a few minutes exploring the ways that someone might find seemingly interesting things by the process […]
Shit and the Need for Data-Driven Standards
Feces, faeces, ordure, dung, manure, excreta, stool, stool-NOT-faeces, and stool-NOT-feces are the prime examples in a newly published study that examines the need for data-driven standards. The study is: “Laying a Community-Based Foundation for Data-Driven Semantic Standards in Environmental Health Sciences,” Carolyn J. Mattingly, Rebecca Boyles, Cindy P. Lawler, Astrid C. Haugen, Allen Dearry, and Melissa Haendel, Environmental […]
Quantifying the Smell of Urban Areas
Data analysis has led to numerous insights into a diverse variety of complex systems. A new paper that gives a whiff of such insights is The Emotional and Chromatic Layers of Urban Smells by Daniele Quercia of Bell Labs, Luca Maria Aiello of Yahoo Labs, and Rossano Schifanella of University of Turin. Quercia et al. write the […]
When Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
“Identifying patterns in the world requires noticing not only unusual occurrences, but also unusual absences.” – inform professor Anne S. Hsu and colleagues Andy Horng, Thomas L. Griffiths and Nick Chater in a new paper for the journal Cognitive Science. “We examined how people learn from absences, manipulating the extent to which an absence is […]
Algorithmic Distinguishing of Novelists from their Punctuation Patterns
Adam J. Calhoun has written a wonderful blog entry that illustrates, with some great data visualization, that it is possible to algorithmically distinguish different novelists based only on their punctuation habits. The idea is simple: just remove all words from a corpus of text and look at the patterns of the punctuation. Here is an illustration. […]
Supper: Data Karaoke
Karaoke has penetrated to so many levels of society that it has reached even the some of the scientists who present data at scientific conferences. This study, by Supper, tells how that came about: “Data Karaoke: Sensory and Bodily Skills in Conference Presentations,” Alexandra Supper, [pictured here], Volume 24, Issue 4, 2015, pages 436-457. (Thanks to Tom Gill […]
What was that Again?: Decay of Attention in Science
The only thing in science than may be even more prominent than the data deluge is the paper deluge: there is an increasingly large number of scholarly (and “scholarly”) journals, and an ever-increasing wealth of papers to fill them. Clearly, this calls for a paper to analyze the situation. In a new study on the […]