I don’t understand the website Pinterest, but it looks pretty (especially on the iPad), and an undergraduate student said it was the greatest thing since Facebook, so I thought I would give it a shot. The idea is that Pinterest “lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” You organize beautiful things by creating a “board” (a page), and then adding “pins” (links to websites).
I’ve been reading and greatly enjoying Nate Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—and Some Don’t. I’d recommend the book based on the introduction and first chapter alone. (And, no, that’s not because that’s all I’ve read so far. It’s because they’re that good.) If you’re the sort who skips introductions, I strongly suggest you become a new sort and read this one. It’s a wonderful essay about the dangers of too much information, and the need to make sense of it.
In reading one of the many blogs that I read, there was a suggestion to use the Baltimore’s parking citation data to see if some makes/models of cars get citations more than others. Now parking citations are very near and dear to me since I get at least one (n ≥ 1) parking citation a year parking near the University of Minnesota–which most often also leads to my car being towed since you only have so many hours to move your car after they ticket it.
I just bought a “personal fitness tracking device.” It records my every movement. Even keeps track of when I sleep, in theory at least. So far, its pretty cool. Certainly its made me aware of how many steps I take during a day, and how rarely I meet the sacred 10,000 step goal. Today, for example, I’ve taken 8748 steps. Although, since its 9:30pm, the day is still young.
What’s frustrating is that even though its my data, it’s not “mine”.
We live in the Data Deluge, but we confess we still teach stats as if data were rare and easily-managed. But in this blog, we embrace the Deluge, an age where data and software are accessible and ubiquitous. The day of telling students to pay attention because Some Day This Will Be Good For You are over. This stuff is good for them NOW, and we need to show them why.
