Category: math
-
Greater data science, part 1: the discipline
This is part of an open-ended series of marginalia to Donoho’s 50 Years of Data Science 2015 paper. Donoho compares “data science” (or “data analysis”, a term he inherits from John Tukey) to statistics in terms of three foundational conditions, quoting Tukey: Let’s call these three core conditions content, structure, and (a means of determining) validity. Anything with an answer…
-
As random as I oughta be
From John D. Cook‘s Probability Facts twitter feed, discovered the infamous RANDU, and this absolutely marvelous quote: One of us recalls producing a “random” plot with only 11 planes, and being told by his computer center’s programming consultant that he had misused the random number generator: “We guarantee that each number is random individually, but we…
-
pair programming
I discovered last week that Java does not have a Pair<X,Y> generic class because of Reasons. That’s annoying, but surprising to me. Scala, for example, supports heterogeneous typed tuples (including a 2-tuple, of course), and of course my beloved Python does as well (though type enforcement in Python is, well, weak). I’ve also been learning…