1. Ability to choose what statistical tools to use.  For example, it would be great to have students who could apply significance measures, evaluate probability and its relationship to risk and know when the average is meaningful (Normal Distribution) or nearly useless (Power Laws).
2. Practical skills with data collection and manipulation tools such as text editors and spreadsheets, statistics packages (maybe something like R?) and moving data around. Because bigger data sets are so common and rich, it is not enough to know how to calculate the average of a few numbers with a calculator.
3. Experience and confidence with quantitative analysis as a basis for consistent qualitative reasoning and decision making.

I was delighted to see that the BBC production “The Joy of Stats” with Hans Rosling is now available on YouTube.  This piece does a great job of showing why and what to explore with statistics.  And Hans is entertaining.

John Stewart illustrates the same point by lining up quotes from the talking heads in the segment A Nightmare on Wall Street. (Sorry for the link out, embedding Comedy Central Flash video in WordPress stumped me.)

In a long winded comment, I take delight in making the following perverse equivalence between an honest work-ethic idiom and foolish gambling practice,

Under these optimistic assumptions, DCA [dollar cost averaging] is equivalent to the idiom: make hay while the sun shines. Downward price fluctuations are viewed as opportunities to use the same resources to make even more of a good investment. Under less certainty, this is what gamblers call doubling down–when you are loosing, bet more so when you win, you make up your previous losses.

I have advocated DCA as a reasonable investment strategy to friends of mine, but I am increasingly skeptical about the assumptions.  It is starting to seem more like doubling down and less like making hay.

I am sure Anderson and others will jump on the many errors here.  I just posted this rant in the comments section of the online version of the article…feel much better now

<rant>

The mistake seems to be not understanding that long tail statistics come from underlying dynamics. In particular, books and movies are small hits before they are big hits. The difference between the long tail and the big hits (possibly call it “tall head”) is how fast a book or movie becomes a hit and how big of a hit it becomes. It is difficult to propose a dynamic in which the bottom and middle of the distribution grow where the big hits don’t get bigger as well. Anderson never proposes such a fundamental shift in underlying dynamics.

</rant>

A sign mostly about itself.

About a year ago, I posted some self-referring python code toys.  I always find these things amusing.  I feel recursion, like Steven Wright’s humor, in my brain with a mental “clunk” and a sense of delight and awe–maybe synethetically?  I also believe that recursion is deeply related to consciousness and human-style intelligence, so the experience seems important.  Enjoy.

Hat tip: Hannah Kaiser

Colored spirals - not quite what it appears

Hat Tip: Bad Astronomy, TED Blog, James Cascio, (…nerds run in packs?)

64 Fireflies Part II from tinkerlog on Vimeo.

His [Bush's] position on stem cells was attacked as a scientific position, when in fact it’s an ethical position.

This seems to convolve “what you can know” with “what you ought to do with it”.  Bush’s stem cell policy seemed to me to place significant restrictions on finding things out based on political/social squeamishness, rather than what one can do in the practice of reproductive or therapeutic medicine.  Science is about what we can know–ethics is about what we ought to do with it.

The biggest threat to that science is the inexorable growth of the mandatory budget for Social Security, Medicare, and other programs. The growth of mandatory budget is squeezing everything.  It is squeezing science, infrastructure, renewal.

This policy chip appears suddenly in the middle of an discussion of science policy. Is this the best forum for rolling out that discussion? Or is that an attempt to manipulate emotions? That statement is severely reductive.  It reaches straight to black and white bi-value thinking by positioning a stark opposition of science vs. society (cannot fund both!).  What about society vs. the military? Or any other reductive choosing of a single competing expense?  A more systemic approach would enable more workable policies.

Speaking of scientist Jim Hansen:

He’s a controversial person because he’s one of the few scientists who’s willing to state his opinion. It makes me a little nervous because of he authority as a scientist. Whenever science is recruited in the service of opinion, it makes me very nervous. Everybody wants to use the credibility of science to bolster their opinions.  And I don’t like that.  I try to avoid getting into that trap in this office.

What is he talking about here? Which scientists don’t express their opinions? Which scientists have not had their opinions informed by their science? Which scientists haven’t fallen into the natural pattern of allowing their opinions to dictate what scientific questions they find most compelling?  How does Marburger think science works?

Science is a human endeavor.  People have values.  People have creative sparks, some of which are born out through the process of science and some which are proven to be non-sense or un-falsifiable.  That is why the discovery-explanation-review process is vital to science. Open communication, sharing results, “arguing it out” is the only way to get science done.  This quote betrays a very naive model of the workings of scientific discovery, the nature of scientific creativity and a disappointing disregard for the people and process of science.