Tuesday night was quite spectacular for Nate Silver. I’m referring not to my suspicion that the oft-bespectacled, apparently liberal-leaning statistician was pleased with the outcome of the presidential race – though there was that – but rather the accompanying mighty boost to his career as his highest likelihood prediction of the election results proved spot…

This post first appeared on Bittersweet Notes. I managed to score last week’s issue of absurdist scientific humor publication The New England Journal of Medicine, which includes a hilarious note on “Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates.” As I continued reading the issue and failed to see the humor in such knee-slappers as “Fibulin-3…

At its heart, the field of statistics deals with determining what inferences can be drawn from data. Causality, bias, significance, and experimental reproducibility are its lifeblood, and one doesn’t have to wander too many pages into a standard introductory statistics textbook before encountering these issues. Most readers of this blog will not have too much…

There is no such thing as unstructured data. There, I said it. Structure is inherent in the definition of data. No structure means no information means no data. Like “clearly misunderstood,” “unstructured data” is an oxymoron. Some have proposed “semi-structured data” to overcome this logical issue, but this alternative is no less discriminatory. Whatever part…

Google will learn just a tiny bit more about me (and you, the reader) from this post, enabling the search engine giant to (probabilistically) increase its bottom line through better targeted advertisements. You’re welcome, Google. A hugely transformative data revolution is upon us. Machine readable information is being generated and captured at an astounding and…