On July 4, 1826, U.S. Independence Day, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third presidents of the U.S., both died within hours of each other. Adams and Jefferson personified opposing factions in U.S. politics, with Adams favoring a strong central government and…
Can you identify this wildflower, photographed in a Massachusetts field? And also identify its significance in the history of statistics? This is the Blue Flag Iris, also called the Veriscolor Iris, and it is one of three Iris species that make up the famous (in statistics) Iris…
As more information arrives about the Coronavirus, researchers point more and more to airborne particles and aerosols as the mechanism of spread. Photographic images of a sneeze, such as this one from Lydia Bourouiba at MIT (source here), have been seen by many. It turns…
John Snow is popularly regarded as the founder of the field of epidemiology, with his famous study of cholera in London. Snow plotted cholera cases for a neighborhood served by two wells, and found that nearly all clustered around one of the wells, the Broad…
Artificial intelligence and analytics have gotten some bad press recently, from the role that social media has played in fracturing and heightening divisions in democratic society to the “big brother” role that data mining and image recognition have played in China’s suppression of minorities. But…
95 years ago, Bell Labs was founded as a joint project of AT&T and Western Electric. Its primary mission was R&D for its parents’ fast-growing telecommunications businesses. Since that time, Bell Labs became a fabled American research institution, but also suffered the vicissitudes of trying…
World War II was a crucible of technological innovation, including advances in statistics. Jacob Wolfowitz, born a century ago (1920), looked at the problem of noisy radio transmissions. Coded radio transmissions were critical elements of military command and control, and they were plagued by the…
In 1919, Ronald A. Fisher was appointed as chief statistician at the agricultural research station in Rothamsted, a post created for him. His work there resulted, in 1925, in the publication of his classic Statistical Methods for Research Workers. An important message of his book…
80 years ago, in 1939, Alan Turing began work on the code-breaking system that would eventually prove key in helping Britain survive the German submarine threat in the Atlantic. Last month, the Turing Award in computer science prize (sometimes referred to as the "Nobel Prize…
Charles Darwin, the most famous grandson of the Enlightenment thinker Erasmus Darwin, published his ground-breaking theory of evolution, “The Origin of Species,”160 years ago. Another grandson of Erasmus, Francis Galton, became one of the founding fathers of statistics (correlation, the “wisdom of the crowd,” regression…
In 1994, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, former and current Stanford professors, published the best-seller Built to Last that described how "long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise." It sold over a million copies. Buoyed by that success, Collins and a…
In 1986, the U.S. space shuttle Challenger exploded several minutes after launch. A later investigation found that the cause of the disaster was O-ring failure, due to cold temperatures. The temperature at launch was 39 degrees, colder than any prior launch. The cold caused the…
25 years ago the International Society of Quality of Life Research was founded with a mission to advance the science of quality of life and related patient-centered outcomes in health research, care and policy. While focusing on quality of life (QOL) in healthcare may seem…
In the visualization below, which line do you think represents the UN's forecast for the number of children in the world in the year 2100? Hans Rosling, in his book Factfulness, presents this chart and notes that in a sample of Norwegian teachers, only 9%…
This weekend (12/8/2018) marked the 253rd anniversary of the birth of Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin. And 20 years ago, Google received its first big infusions of capital from, among others, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Both Eli Whitney and the Google…
W. Edwards Deming's funnel problem is one of statistics' greatest hits. Deming was a noted statistician who took the statistical process control methods of Shewhart and expanded them into a holistic approach to manufacturing quality. Initially, his ideas were cooly received in the US and…
Boiling oil versus egg yolks One early clinical trial was accidental. In the 16th century, a common treatment for wounded soldiers was to pour boiling oil on their wounds. In 1537, the surgeon Ambroise Pare, attending French soldiers, ran out of oil one evening. He…
Simulation - a Venerable History One of the most consequential and valuable analytical tools in business is simulation, which helps us make decisions in the face of uncertainty, such as these: An airline knows on average, what proportion of ticketed passengers show up for a…
It is 100 years since R A Fischer introduced the concept of "variance" (in his 1918 paper "The Correlation Between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance"). There is much that statistics has given us in the century that followed. Randomized clinical trials, and the means…
Casting back long before the advent of Deep Learning for the "founding fathers" of data science, at first glance you would rule out antecedents who long predate the computer and data revolutions of the last quarter century. But some consider John Tukey (right), the Princeton statistician…
Python started out as a general purpose language when it was created in 1991 by Guido van Rossum. It was embraced early on by Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page ("Python where we can, C++ where we must" was reputedly their mantra). In 2006,…
April 27 marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Karl Pearson, who contributed to statistics the correlation coefficient, principal components, the (increasingly-maligned) p-value, and much more. Pearson was one of a trio of founding fathers of modern statistics, the others being Francis Galton and…
Ever wonder why, in World War II, ships in convoys were safer than ships traveling on their own? Most people assume it was due to the protection afforded by military escort vessels, of which there was a limited supply (insufficient to protect ships traveling on…