Archive for the ‘ Statistics ’ Category
Shortly after the Giants fantastic defeat of the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI (I was a little disappointed that Eli, Coughlin and the Vince Lombardi Trophy all got off the parade route early and the views of City Hall were obstructed by construction trailers, but Steve Weatherford was awesome as always) a friend asked me [ READ MORE ]
With the Super Bowl only hours away now is your last chance to buy your boxes. Assuming the last digits are not assigned randomly you can maximize your chances with a little analysis. While I’ve seen plenty of sites giving the raw numbers, I thought a little visualization was in order. In the graph above (made [ READ MORE ]
A new study, reported in the New York Times, tracked population movements in post-earthquake Haiti using cell phone data. The article grabbed my attention because one of the authors, Richard Garfield (whom I have done numerous projects with and who has his own Wikipedia entry!), had told me about this very study just a few [ READ MORE ]
While playing Words with Friends my randomly chosen opponent played “radiale” as her first word. Since that used up all of her tiles, she received a bonus on top of all the points the word itself got, resulting in a one-move score of 53 points! Rather than being impressed I was upset at the large [ READ MORE ]
Fig. 1: This graph shows received and sent text messages by month. Notice the spike in July 2010. A few weeks ago my iPhone for some reason erased ALL of my previous text messages (SMS and MMS) and it was as if I was starting with a new phone. After doing some digging I discovered that [ READ MORE ]
For the past few weeks Time Out New York’s Dating columnist, Jamie Bufalino, has been fielding letters discussing the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual questions he answers. The readers suggested that disproportionate attention is paid to Gay and Lesbian issues compared to the Gay and Lesbian proportion of the general population. Jamie rudely called his readers “ass-wipes” and [ READ MORE ]
Drew Conway–a proud member of a collection of statisticians, machine learnists and Data Mafia Shirt predictive analytics experts in New York who have colloquially been named the NYC Data Mafia–got shirts made for the crew. The shirt features a play on the Godfather title image, complete with mariante handles. I just ordered mine and can’t wait to confuse passersby [ READ MORE ]
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that even with all the concern around gerrymandering that in reality the upcoming redistricting probably won’t have much affect on upcoming elections. Gary King is mentioned as having written a paper “that helped demonstrate the relative impotence of partisan redistricting” yet “he favors the efforts to create a statistical [ READ MORE ]
Today is World Statistics Day as declared by the United Nations. There are events all over the world including a mourning for the Canadian census. The official US event (pdf) is in Washington, DC but a bunch of New Yorkers are celebrating at the bit.ly hack.a.bit. Drew Conway has some ideas how to celebrate. Ban Ki-Moon’s (UN Secretary [ READ MORE ]
Last night, Harlan Harris and I gave a talk at the NY Predictive Analytics meetup. Despite the rain there was a good turn out and people seemed to both enjoy and benefit from the presentation. As requested I have posted the presentation for all to see. Please feel free to contact me with any questions. The [ READ MORE ]