The replacement the article proposes (mean absolute deviation or MAD) is also only particularly meaningful if you're dealing with a symmetric distribution, so it really doesn't address the problem you identify.
Cancer research and particle physics use data scientists. Unfortunately so does amazon.com.
Okay, since cancer research is a very large field, I can't say for sure one way or the other... but I do know that working in bioinformatics at a major academic research center, I've never known a single person in medical research of any kind who called themselves a "data scientist." We have lots of computer scientists and statisticians, most of whom, fortunately, get along well enough to make use of each other's strengths. Regarding particle physics I have no idea, but yeah, I'm willing to bet Amazon or any other large corporation hires more "data scientists" than all the scientific institutions in the world put together--and gets exactly the kind of buzzword bingo they're paying for in return.
What other existing specialization in computer science, physics, etc,. do you feel is qualified to use Hadoop to process trillions of triple stores into a network and subsequently build highly multivariate link prediction models and evaluate their output statistically with respect to ground truth, to name but one trifling task?
As it happens, one of my colleagues runs a project which, among other things, does exactly that. His PhD is in computer science. I'm a bioinformaticist with a background primarily in biostatistics; I couldn't develop a tool like that, but I can certainly see the value in it. In general, I'm not arguing that the tasks currently getting lumped together under "data science" aren't valuable. I'm just saying that I'm not convinced they fit together into a coherent field that can meaningfully be studied in a single degree program, and attempts to make them so may well run into the problem of "jack of all trades, master of none."
Given that most of the buzz about "data science" seems to be in the business world, I'd say it's more lilkely they're corporate hacks working for the propaganda machine that's so effective on suckers like you.
If there are "data scientists" who don't understand what the standard deviation is, then they certainly shouldn't be calling themselves "data scientists," and quite possibly not scientists at all. What subjects are their PhDs in, I wonder? This doesn't do anything to reduce my skepticism that such a thing as "data science" really needs to exist.
I'm sure he wants to crack down on people's freedom of expression, but his comments are so bizarre that I'm not at all convinced he knows what he's talking about. "Ignorant" and "evil" are not mutually exclusive, which I suppose is better for the rest of us... Anyway, there's no need to bring age into it. Politicians of any age are much of a muchness.
Ireland doesn't really matter. It's the Midwest of the United Kingdom. -- Only on Slashdot does an AC get modded Informative for pointing out that the LHC is in Europe.
The combination of your post and your.sig is sadly hilarious.
You sometimes need to keep old people away from the keyboard.
Patrick O'Donovan, the politician in question, is 36 years old. My father is a 70-year-old web developer. Sure, in general younger people probably understand the internet better than older people, but there are so many exceptions to this in both directions that any generalization based on age is pretty well meaningless.
belief is an arbitrary decision to insist something is true
I think that's a little too narrow a definition; the word for what you're talking about is "faith." I've often been asked if I "believe in evolution," and although the choice of words makes me cringe, the short answer has to be "yes." The longer answer is: I believe in evolution (or gravity, for that matter) the same way I believe in Philadelphia. Now, I don't know that Philadelphia exists. I've never been to Philadelphia. I've heard about it, and read about it, and seen road signs in pointing toward it, and even known a number of people who claim to have lived in it, but in answer to Ken Ham's famous question, no, I wasn't there. I have no personal proof that it exists, and yet I believe there is a city called Philadelphia. And I will insist pretty strongly that this belief is true, but there's nothing arbitrary about it.
There are alternate explanations, of course. Perhaps Philadelphia did exist up until five minutes ago, but no longer does. Perhaps there was never a Philadelphia, but someone decided there was money to be made by pretending there was, and put together an elaborate deception to convince people of it. Perhaps it's all just a mass hallucination. But the simplest and most rational interpretation of the evidence is that Philadelphia exists... which is the foundation of my belief.
So what I wrote in my previous post, "the same way you believe in gravity," may not have been quite right. What I should have said was probably something like "just as strongly as you believe in gravity," because the beliefs stem from different sources, one from faith and one from evidence. But "God created the world in six days, six thousand years ago" and "gravity exists" are both statements of belief. And if you don't understand that both beliefs are held with equal sincerity by large numbers of people, you will consistently underestimate those who hold to the former.
Yes, exactly! There are a whole bunch of things "everybody knows" that just aren't true, and until we study these things we have no real way to know which is which.
Why do we insist on speculating that animals have all of these magical abilities, like the ability to tell which way is north, ability to tell when an earthquake is coming, ability to tell when a person has cancer, etc. Humans are animals too, and yet we can't do any of these things (without tools). Frankly, I think the people who say animals can do these things are just full of crap.
Different species have different senses, and levels of senses. Your eyesight is much, much keener than a dog's, although not as good as an eagle's; your sense of smell is much better than the eagle's, but nowhere near as good as the dog's. And the way brains with very different structures process the information is different too. Is that really so difficult to believe?
To be a creationist you need to be irrational, so there cannot be a debate here.
It's a little more complicated than that. Have you ever listened to Ken Ham speak, or read anything he's written? His arguments are entirely logical, as long as you accept his premises. He starts with a certain set of assumptions (mainly the literal truth of Genesis) and reasons from there. The premises themselves are utterly irrational, of course, but that doesn't mean everything else he says is necessarily irrational as well. In fact, he has a lot in common with the generations of Catholic theologians who have built the intellectual foundation of the Church, applying their often-impressive powers of reason and debate to exploring the logical implications of a profoundly silly set of postulates. It's kind of amusing to see a fundamentalist Protestant arguing like a Jesuit, but that's neither here nor there...
Thinking that your opponents don't believe what they say they believe is almost always a mistake.
There are millions of creationists who believe, utterly and sincerely, that God created the world and everything in it in six days a few thousand years ago. They believe that the same way you believe in gravity. Of course their beliefs are "patently ridiculous"--it doesn't matter. The belief itself is real, and you underestimate that reality at your peril.
Sotomayor is generally considered one of the most liberal Supreme Court Justices, but here she is issuing a ruling that will make conservatives very happy. In other words, she made the decision based on legal principles instead of her personal ideology. Don't hold your breath waiting for, say, Thomas or Alito to do the same, ever.
In the military, everyone knows down to the penny how much everyone else makes, or at least can figure it out easily enough. You look at their rank, their time in service, and various other factors such as their current assignment, whether they live on or off base, are married or single, etc., and the number is right there. And the reward for productivity is promotion, which leads to a higher salary. This never led to any problems that I saw; and while there are plenty of aspects of civilian life I like better than being in uniform, this isn't one of them.
The tiny truck went out of vogue in the US for reasons unknown to me.
I think the explanation is pretty simple: the vast majority of pickup trucks and SUVs these days are bought as status symbols and rolling penis substitutes, not as work vehicles.
You're a year or two ahead of schedule on your talking point. You're always supposed to say there's been no global warming for (YYYY-1998) years, where YYYY is the current year. The fact that 1998 was considerably warmer than both 1997 and 1999 has nothing to do with this, of course--it's just a coincidence that you're supposed to use that particular year as the baseline. Right now you're supposed to say there's been no global warming for 15 years. Since it's almost 2014, I suppose you could push things a bit and claim 16 years, but 17 years is right out at least until next Christmas.
Of course, as of 2010 or so even this meme isn't actually true, but you know, if you're going to repeat fact-free arguments, you might want to be at least consistent about it.
You're probably right. Everyone can identify with Shakespeare's drama, for example, but his comedy falls flat for most modern audiences--the only people who really seem to find it funny are those who know a lot about the culture of the era. Assuming our words survive, they'll provide great insight for anyone centuries hence who wants to know how we thought as well as what we did.
This internet thing is recent and the 'content lasts forever' is a problem of the present generation.
Which is why in another generation or two, it won't be a problem. When everyone's embarrassing adventures in their teens and early twenties are sitting out there in easily accessed archives, the social attitudes toward such things will be very different. Facebook and Twitter posts from 2013 will be no big deal in 2033 (and yes, I'd be willing to bet they'll still be out there and easy to find).
Slashdot Mirror
The replacement the article proposes (mean absolute deviation or MAD) is also only particularly meaningful if you're dealing with a symmetric distribution, so it really doesn't address the problem you identify.
Cancer research and particle physics use data scientists. Unfortunately so does amazon.com.
Okay, since cancer research is a very large field, I can't say for sure one way or the other ... but I do know that working in bioinformatics at a major academic research center, I've never known a single person in medical research of any kind who called themselves a "data scientist." We have lots of computer scientists and statisticians, most of whom, fortunately, get along well enough to make use of each other's strengths. Regarding particle physics I have no idea, but yeah, I'm willing to bet Amazon or any other large corporation hires more "data scientists" than all the scientific institutions in the world put together--and gets exactly the kind of buzzword bingo they're paying for in return.
What other existing specialization in computer science, physics, etc,. do you feel is qualified to use Hadoop to process trillions of triple stores into a network and subsequently build highly multivariate link prediction models and evaluate their output statistically with respect to ground truth, to name but one trifling task?
As it happens, one of my colleagues runs a project which, among other things, does exactly that. His PhD is in computer science. I'm a bioinformaticist with a background primarily in biostatistics; I couldn't develop a tool like that, but I can certainly see the value in it. In general, I'm not arguing that the tasks currently getting lumped together under "data science" aren't valuable. I'm just saying that I'm not convinced they fit together into a coherent field that can meaningfully be studied in a single degree program, and attempts to make them so may well run into the problem of "jack of all trades, master of none."
Given that most of the buzz about "data science" seems to be in the business world, I'd say it's more lilkely they're corporate hacks working for the propaganda machine that's so effective on suckers like you.
If there are "data scientists" who don't understand what the standard deviation is, then they certainly shouldn't be calling themselves "data scientists," and quite possibly not scientists at all. What subjects are their PhDs in, I wonder? This doesn't do anything to reduce my skepticism that such a thing as "data science" really needs to exist.
Of course it was. :)
I'm sure he wants to crack down on people's freedom of expression, but his comments are so bizarre that I'm not at all convinced he knows what he's talking about. "Ignorant" and "evil" are not mutually exclusive, which I suppose is better for the rest of us ... Anyway, there's no need to bring age into it. Politicians of any age are much of a muchness.
Ireland doesn't really matter. It's the Midwest of the United Kingdom.
--
Only on Slashdot does an AC get modded Informative for pointing out that the LHC is in Europe.
The combination of your post and your .sig is sadly hilarious.
You sometimes need to keep old people away from the keyboard.
Patrick O'Donovan, the politician in question, is 36 years old. My father is a 70-year-old web developer. Sure, in general younger people probably understand the internet better than older people, but there are so many exceptions to this in both directions that any generalization based on age is pretty well meaningless.
I'm currently devoting nearly all of my hate to Doge. It might be the worst thing the internet has done in a long, long time.
wow, no love, much sad
Except for the problem that being a single parent is 100% an individual choice
You do not stop being a parent when your spouse or partner leaves. Which is, you know, not always your choice.
for individuals born with their reproductive systems on the inside.
But not for people with external genitalia? Right, they have no choice at all. Their sperm just magically leap out and impregnate passers-by.
Why would somebody choose to have children they can't afford? Perhaps it's because we have so many entitlement systems
Look at overall birth rates before and after food stamp programs were enacted. Go ahead. We'll wait.
that having a child guarantees a middle-class lifestyle
You actually believe this, don't you? Dear God.
and perhaps another factor is how much we privilege Mothers.
"Privilege" and "public assistance" are not really things that have much to do with each other.
belief is an arbitrary decision to insist something is true
I think that's a little too narrow a definition; the word for what you're talking about is "faith." I've often been asked if I "believe in evolution," and although the choice of words makes me cringe, the short answer has to be "yes." The longer answer is: I believe in evolution (or gravity, for that matter) the same way I believe in Philadelphia. Now, I don't know that Philadelphia exists. I've never been to Philadelphia. I've heard about it, and read about it, and seen road signs in pointing toward it, and even known a number of people who claim to have lived in it, but in answer to Ken Ham's famous question, no, I wasn't there. I have no personal proof that it exists, and yet I believe there is a city called Philadelphia. And I will insist pretty strongly that this belief is true, but there's nothing arbitrary about it.
There are alternate explanations, of course. Perhaps Philadelphia did exist up until five minutes ago, but no longer does. Perhaps there was never a Philadelphia, but someone decided there was money to be made by pretending there was, and put together an elaborate deception to convince people of it. Perhaps it's all just a mass hallucination. But the simplest and most rational interpretation of the evidence is that Philadelphia exists ... which is the foundation of my belief.
So what I wrote in my previous post, "the same way you believe in gravity," may not have been quite right. What I should have said was probably something like "just as strongly as you believe in gravity," because the beliefs stem from different sources, one from faith and one from evidence. But "God created the world in six days, six thousand years ago" and "gravity exists" are both statements of belief. And if you don't understand that both beliefs are held with equal sincerity by large numbers of people, you will consistently underestimate those who hold to the former.
Yes, exactly! There are a whole bunch of things "everybody knows" that just aren't true, and until we study these things we have no real way to know which is which.
Why do we insist on speculating that animals have all of these magical abilities, like the ability to tell which way is north, ability to tell when an earthquake is coming, ability to tell when a person has cancer, etc. Humans are animals too, and yet we can't do any of these things (without tools). Frankly, I think the people who say animals can do these things are just full of crap.
Different species have different senses, and levels of senses. Your eyesight is much, much keener than a dog's, although not as good as an eagle's; your sense of smell is much better than the eagle's, but nowhere near as good as the dog's. And the way brains with very different structures process the information is different too. Is that really so difficult to believe?
To be a creationist you need to be irrational, so there cannot be a debate here.
It's a little more complicated than that. Have you ever listened to Ken Ham speak, or read anything he's written? His arguments are entirely logical, as long as you accept his premises. He starts with a certain set of assumptions (mainly the literal truth of Genesis) and reasons from there. The premises themselves are utterly irrational, of course, but that doesn't mean everything else he says is necessarily irrational as well. In fact, he has a lot in common with the generations of Catholic theologians who have built the intellectual foundation of the Church, applying their often-impressive powers of reason and debate to exploring the logical implications of a profoundly silly set of postulates. It's kind of amusing to see a fundamentalist Protestant arguing like a Jesuit, but that's neither here nor there ...
Thinking that your opponents don't believe what they say they believe is almost always a mistake.
There are millions of creationists who believe, utterly and sincerely, that God created the world and everything in it in six days a few thousand years ago. They believe that the same way you believe in gravity. Of course their beliefs are "patently ridiculous"--it doesn't matter. The belief itself is real, and you underestimate that reality at your peril.
Meanwhile, the British Midlands have barely seen a frost this year. Your anecdote about Minnesota is worth no more than mine about England.
Everything important in the world happens in the US, didn't you know? That silly "rest of the world" thing is irrelevant.
Sotomayor is generally considered one of the most liberal Supreme Court Justices, but here she is issuing a ruling that will make conservatives very happy. In other words, she made the decision based on legal principles instead of her personal ideology. Don't hold your breath waiting for, say, Thomas or Alito to do the same, ever.
I would think that the person who made the sculpture knows best what it was meant for.
In the military, everyone knows down to the penny how much everyone else makes, or at least can figure it out easily enough. You look at their rank, their time in service, and various other factors such as their current assignment, whether they live on or off base, are married or single, etc., and the number is right there. And the reward for productivity is promotion, which leads to a higher salary. This never led to any problems that I saw; and while there are plenty of aspects of civilian life I like better than being in uniform, this isn't one of them.
The tiny truck went out of vogue in the US for reasons unknown to me.
I think the explanation is pretty simple: the vast majority of pickup trucks and SUVs these days are bought as status symbols and rolling penis substitutes, not as work vehicles.
Let those eggheads drink their own brew.
You can be pretty sure they're going to be the first to do exactly that.
Also ... "eggheads"? Really?
You're a year or two ahead of schedule on your talking point. You're always supposed to say there's been no global warming for (YYYY-1998) years, where YYYY is the current year. The fact that 1998 was considerably warmer than both 1997 and 1999 has nothing to do with this, of course--it's just a coincidence that you're supposed to use that particular year as the baseline. Right now you're supposed to say there's been no global warming for 15 years. Since it's almost 2014, I suppose you could push things a bit and claim 16 years, but 17 years is right out at least until next Christmas.
Of course, as of 2010 or so even this meme isn't actually true, but you know, if you're going to repeat fact-free arguments, you might want to be at least consistent about it.
You're probably right. Everyone can identify with Shakespeare's drama, for example, but his comedy falls flat for most modern audiences--the only people who really seem to find it funny are those who know a lot about the culture of the era. Assuming our words survive, they'll provide great insight for anyone centuries hence who wants to know how we thought as well as what we did.
This internet thing is recent and the 'content lasts forever' is a problem of the present generation.
Which is why in another generation or two, it won't be a problem. When everyone's embarrassing adventures in their teens and early twenties are sitting out there in easily accessed archives, the social attitudes toward such things will be very different. Facebook and Twitter posts from 2013 will be no big deal in 2033 (and yes, I'd be willing to bet they'll still be out there and easy to find).