Historical Spotlight: John Tukey

The statistician John Tukey is regarded by some as the father, or at least one of the fathers, of data science.  Before Tukey, statistics meant inference (p-values, ANOVA, etc.) and models. Tukey brought to the discipline a whole new perspective: exploring the data to see…

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Statistics at War

World War 2 gave the statistics profession its big growth spurt. Statistical methods such as correlation, regression, ANOVA, and significance testing were all worked out previously, but it was the war which brought large numbers of people to the field as a profession. They didn’t…

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Random Chance or Not?

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…

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Historical Spotlight: Iris Dataset

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…

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Miasma

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…

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John Snow

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…

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Historical Spotlight: Bell Labs and Statistics

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…

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Historical Spotlight: Ronald A. Fisher

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…

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Historical Spotlight: Alan Turing

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…

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Darwin’s Legacy in Statistics

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…

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Space Shuttle Explosion

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…

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Historical Spotlight – ISOQOL

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…

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Things are Getting Better

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%…

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Historical Spotlight: Risk Simulation – Since 1946

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…

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Early Data Scientists

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 (below), the Princeton statistician…

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Python for Analytics

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,…

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