The Mobilize project, which I recently joined, centers a high school data-science curriculum around participatory sensing data. What is participatory sensing, you ask?
I’ve recently been trying to answer this question, with mixed success. As the name suggests, PS data has to do with data collected from sensors, and so it has a streaming aspect to it. I like to think of it as observations on a living object. Like all living objects, whatever this thing is that’s being observed, it changes, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly.
WolframAlpha has a tool that will analyze your Facebook network. I saw this awhile ago, but HollyLynne reminded me of this recently, and I tried it out. You need to give the app(?) permission to access your account (which I am sure means access to your data for Wolfram), after which you are given all sorts of interesting, pretty info. Note, you can also opt to have Wolfram track your data in order to determine how your network is changing.
In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota has created this catalog of open textbooks. Open textbooks are complete textbooks released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license. Instructors can customize open textbooks to fit their course needs by remixing, editing, and adding their own content. Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks.
From Jasper Fforde’s latest Thursday Next novel (The Woman Who Died Alot):
The Office for Ultimate Risk is one of the many departments within the Ministry of National Statistics. Although it was originally an “experimental” department, the statisticians at Ultimate Risk proved their worth by predicting the entire results of three football World Cups in succession, a finding that led to the discontinuation of football as a game and the results being calculated instead.
Michelle Everson just announced that the March 2013 issue of the Journal of Statistics Education (JSE) is now available online. You can get to that issue from the homepage of JSE (http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/). This month, JSE also introduces some new features
Department on Research in K-12 Statistics Education
JSE webinar series (beginning June, 2013)
New Facebook group
New Twitter account
Visit JSE online and enjoy the new issue!
Our colleague and dear friend John Holcomb sent an email to Rob and I in which he asked if we had heard the phrase “Big data is the new oil”. Neither of us had, but according to Jer Thorp, ad executives are uttering this phrase upwards of 100 times a day.
Jer’s article is worth a read. While he points out in the title that big data is not the new oil, he astutely suggests that the oil/data metaphor does work to an extent.
In Emanuel Derman’s book Models. Behaving. Badly, the author lays out a Modeler’s Hippocratic Oath.
I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations.
Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.
I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so.
Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy.
