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 what it is telling us. He coined the term “dataContinue reading “Historical Spotlight: John Tukey”
Category Archives: History
Statistics at War
Random Chance or Not?
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 dataset. This dataset consisted of five values for each ofContinue reading “Historical Spotlight: Iris Dataset”
Miasma
John Snow
Historical Spotlight: Statistical Analysis and Human Rights
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 statistical analysis has also long played a role in documenting,Continue reading “Historical Spotlight: Statistical Analysis and Human Rights”
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 to reconcile its orientation to basic research with the needsContinue reading “Historical Spotlight: Bell Labs and Statistics”
Historical Spotlight: Jacob Wolfowitz
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 problem of atmospheric or other interference – “noise”. The weakerContinue reading “Historical Spotlight: Jacob Wolfowitz”
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 was that statisticians needed to be involved at a practicalContinue reading “Historical Spotlight: Ronald A. Fisher”
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 of Computing”) was given to three researchers, Yann LeCunn, GeoffreyContinue reading “Historical Spotlight: Alan Turing”
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 and regression to the mean are all Galton’s ideas). HeavilyContinue reading “Darwin’s Legacy in Statistics”
Good to Great
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 research team set out to find the characteristics of companiesContinue reading “Good to Great”
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 O-rings to become stiff and brittle, losing the flexibility thatContinue reading “Space Shuttle Explosion”
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 like a no-brainer, measuring it is not as easy asContinue reading “Historical Spotlight – ISOQOL”
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% correctly identified the correct answer. Rosling, who died two yearsContinue reading “Things are Getting Better”
Eli Whitney and Google
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 founders instigated economic revolutions, but also illustrate polar opposite approachesContinue reading “Eli Whitney and Google”
Deming’s Funnel Problem
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 he ended up implementing them first in Japan. The successContinue reading “Deming’s Funnel Problem”
The Evolution of Clinical Trials
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 tried a substitute: egg yolks, turpentine and oil of roses.Continue reading “The Evolution of Clinical Trials”
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 flight, but the number for any given flight is uncertain. Continue reading “Historical Spotlight: Risk Simulation – Since 1946”