Sunday, March 31, 2013

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Paul Erdős

"This week we celebrate the life of the most published mathematician in history, Paul Erdos (AIR-dosh) who was born 100 years ago on March 26," wrote Gary Antonick for The New York Times. "Dr. Erdos, who has been called the world’s greatest problem poser and solver, collaborated with over 500 mathematicians before his death in 1996." Read more at http://wordplay.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/erdos/

Here are some more articles:

The Magician of Budapest by Peter Schumer (winner of the 1999 Trevor Evans Award)  http://bit.ly/YREDNm

Reminiscences of Paul Erdös (1913-1996) by the late Melvin Henriksen http://bit.ly/15Q22CT

Paul Erdos among the Dancing Saints by Gerald L. Alexanderson http://bit.ly/15Q2jWD

Erdös Number 1 . . . for Mountain Climbing by Alfinio Flores http://bit.ly/sLjrKX

Paul Erdos: An Infinity of Problems by Ivars Peterson http://bit.ly/10MeBzN

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Correlation

In 1954 Tukey asked, “Does anyone know when the correlation coefficient is useful, as opposed to when it is used? What substitutes are better for which purposes?”

Here is Terry Speed's  musings about the same:
http://bulletin.imstat.org/2012/02/terences-stuff-correlation/

Monday, March 11, 2013

Times per second benchmark

In GNU R the simplest way to measure execution time of a piece code is to use system.time. However, sometimes one wants to find out how many times some function can be executed in one second. This is especially useful when we want to compare functions that have significantly different execution speed.
Check out this post:

http://www.r-bloggers.com/times-per-second-benchmark/

The Statistician’s New Face

If today’s statistician is going to have a new face, what was the face of yesterday’s statistician? How often do we ‘see’ the modeler or the number cruncher doing his business? How often do we see the statistician come ‘onstage’ to explain his analysis?

Here is an article by Srinivas Bhogle pondering over these:
http://bademian.wordpress.com/2013/01/27/the-new-face/

Friday, March 8, 2013

Can you name a female statistician?

Statistics are everywhere. And perhaps even more so this year, as 2013 has been hailed as the International Year of Statistics. Despite all this attention for numbers, we generally don't know a lot about the people hiding behind their computers churning them out. Some non-statisticians are now able to name at least one statistician, but, stepping it up a level, can you name a female statistician?

http://www.significancemagazine.org/details/webexclusive/4440361/Can-you-name-a-female-statistician.html

STEM Profession that Women Dominate

Do you know which major STEM field boasts as many women in the profession as men? Where almost half the college degrees - even at the PhD level - are granted to women? Where women have a significant presence in the most influential circles of the profession? We are proud that, it is Analytics. The number of women among mathematicians and statisticians equals the number of men.

http://smartdatacollective.com/metabrown/49293/stem-profession-women-dominate

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Ballad for Statistics

To celebrate International Year of Statistics Prof. A. P. Gore (Former Head, Department of Statistics, University of Pune) has composed a Ballad for Statistics in English, as well as in Marathi.

Here are the lyrics for the same:

To make it more appealing to the common public, an audio with a catchy tune has also been created. Enjoy the songs:
To download, right click and select save link as.


Details of the Audio:
Music Composer - Ashish Kulkarni.
Singers (English) - Parashar Joshi, Pooja Tatvavadi & Megha Palkar
Singers (Marathi) - Kalyani Dasakkar, Ishwari Dasakkar & Ashwini Bhargave

Do multiple choice tests really work?

Have you ever thought.. How many gatecrashers can enter a merit list through a multiple choice tests? How much would you gain or loose by random guessing? How tests with multiple correct choices reduces the scourge due to random guessing?

Have a look at an interesting conversation between Srinivas Bhogle and Rajeeva Karandikar about validity of Multiple Choice Tests:

http://bademian.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/do-multiple-choice-tests-really-work-2/