Rachel, one of the organizers of Columbia’s Life After Statistics, reflects on lessons learned from the conference and gives respects to a fellow statistician who was lost the night of.

As one of the organizers of the event, Life After a Statistics Doctoral Program (a conference organized by the doctoral students in Columbia’s Statistics Department), I was excited to be invited to guest post on Nathan’s blog but then realized that my perception of the event would be so different than that of an attendee that perhaps I shouldn’t. Two post-docs from Columbia’s Statistics department, Matt and Kenny, agreed that they would post and they did — once on Andrew Gelman’s blog and once on Nathan’s.
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The time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.

— H.G. Wells, Mankind in the Making, 1904

[Thanks, Jan]

Forbes, with the help of Mavin Digital, ranked and mapped cities based on the seven deadly sins – lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.

For each sin we stretched our imagination to find a workable proxy–murder rates for wrath, per capita billionaires for avarice–then culled the available data sources to rank the cities. Some of the results were surprising: Salt Lake City as America’s Vainest City. Some were not: Detroit as America’s Most Murderous.

It’s always good to remember to take these with a grain of salt, since you don’t really know much about the metrics used and how useful these metrics really are. Usually, rankings like these involve a lot of assumptions about the data.

They are of course still interesting and fun to look at though. Apparently, I moved from one America’s most gluttonous cities to one of the most violent and lustful.

This past Friday, Columbia University stat graduate students hosted a symposium on careers for students in statistics. Kenneth Shirley, a stat post doc, was nice enough to write this guest post about the conference so that we can all learn from it. There were two panels – academic and industry – including representation from Google, AT & T, and Pfizer.

Yesterday’s conference at Columbia about career opportunities for Statistics Ph.D. graduates was a great success. It was organized by the graduate students in Columbia’s Stats department and advertised on the web here:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/career_conf08/

Andrew Gelman made some opening remarks, and then there were two panel discussions, each with five professional statisticians. The first panel consisted of academic statisticians, and the second panel consisted of industry statisticians. Here are some comments I found interesting.
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Transactions Graph, by Burak Arikan, is a piece placing personal transactions in network graph. Each node represents a transaction while connections (or edges) shows a relationship between transactions based on time and spending category. The thicker the edge the greater the total of the two connected transactions. Viewers are also able to scroll through time to watch how transactions evolve.
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Stefanie Posavec, maps literary works at the Sheffield Galleries On the Map exhibit. There are several parts to Stefanie’s piece mapping sentence length, writing style, and structure. From the looks of things, it looks like the parsing process was manual and involved a lot of highlighting and circling of things. I could be wrong though. For some reason, long and manual labor makes me appreciate things more.
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Check out this lovely use of Chernoff Faces by Steve Wang of Swarthmore College. This method of visualization was developed by none other than mathematician-statistician-physicist Herman Chernoff in 1973. These faces were designed on the premise that people could easily understand facial expressions. With that in mind, Chernoff used facial characteristics to represent multivariate data.

If you like, you can make your own Chernoff faces with this R library.

Energy consumption grows more and more concern, and with the popularity of Mr. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, just about everyone is at the very least, semi-aware of energy consumption. These 21 visualizations and designs were created to increase that awareness, so that maybe, a few more people will turn off the light when they leave a room. I think Peter Crabb said it best (which I borrowed from Tiffany Holmes’ ecoviz paper):

[P]eople do not use energy; they use devices and products. How devices and products are designed determines how we use them, which in turn determines rates of energy depletion.

Here they are – 21 dashboards, ambient devices, games, and calculators. Read More

I just signed up for an EverNote account, which lets you store all of your notes online from all of your devices – tablet, paper, mobile phone, laptop, PDA.
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Chris Harrison put together a series of Internet maps that show how cities are interconnected by router configuration. Similar to Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns, Chris chose to map only the data, which makes an image that looks a lot like strands of silk stretched from city to city. With these maps, viewers gain a sense of connectivity in the world – and as expected the U.S. and Europe are a lot brighter than the rest.
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Let me introduce you to the greatest data visualization of all time. FlowingData readers, greatest data visualization of all time. Greatest data visualization of all time, FlowingData readers. It will blow your mind and affect you to your very core. I haven’t felt this way since 1987 when I first started to walk.

…and OF COURSE the YouTube embed isn’t working, so I guess the link will have to suffice. Ladies and gentleman, be prepared to get up and dance. Here is the greatest visualization that you will ever see. You can thank me in the comments.

Congratulations, Cody, the winner of a brand new copy of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information!

Thank You Everyone

Thank you to everyone who left comments and participated in this celebratory contest over the past ten days and for all of the congratulatory wishes. I read every single comment and it only confirms my belief that FlowingData readers are awesome. My favorite discussions were those around the Google API and the redesign of Dolores Labs color cloud. I was also amused by the introduction of the term statcore by Dibyo.

I had a lot of fun running this contest, and really felt like there was this excitement revolving around data. That makes me happy. I hope that now, even though there’s no prize up for grabs, that all of you will continue to leave comments and add to the conversation. Interacting with all of you is one of my favorite parts about FlowingData.

Also, thanks a lot to Andrew, Kaiser, and Tony for helping me promote the contest.

More Contests Ahead

On that note, seeing how this contest was so successful, you should look forward to more contests ahead. I’m thinking end of April. Maybe Tufte’s second book? Or maybe a movie. I don’t know, what do you guys think should be the prize for the next FlowingData contest?

Thanks again, everyone. Here’s to the start of a good week.

P.S. Don’t forget to tell your friends! We’re still working towards 5,000.

Nexus, by Ivan Kozik, lets you explore your Facebook social network and find out what your friends have in common. Nexus kind of caught me off guard, because it actually does a decent job of showing you commonalities. I was expecting something like Friend Wheel or Friends Density, which are Facebook bling more than anything else.
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I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5. I’ve been due for an upgrade for quite some time now, but I kept putting it off due to fear. The upgrade took about 10 minutes and everything seems to have gone smoothly (other than losing the functionality of my popular post plugin). If you see any weirdness or catch any bugs, please let me know. Thanks!

This just might be nerdy statistics overload even for me. A group from the John Hopkins biostatistics department has created parodies of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Baby Got Back and MC Hammer’s Too Legit To Quit. For your listening pleasure – Baby Got Stats and Too Logit.

The songs are in MP3 format, so you can put them on your iPod and play them over and over and over again. One play-through was enough for me, but clearly, it’s only a matter of time before this biostat group hits main stream.

[via Freakonomics]

Update: Here’s the video version for your viewing pleasure.

Wondering what statistics is for? This is what.

Data are a whole lot of meaningful patterns. We can generate data indefinitely, we can exchange data forever… we can store data, retrieve data and file them away. All this is great fun and maybe useful, maybe lucrative, but we have to ask why. The purpose is regulation and that means translating data into information. Information is what changes us. My purpose is to effect change – to impart information.

Platform for Change by Stafford Beer

A quick reminder – there’s just three more days to put in your contest entry to win Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Leave a comment on any FlowingData post after March 19 to this Sunday March 30. I’ll announce the winner on March 31. Good luck!

Here’s the original contest announcement for those who missed it.

If I’ve learned anything about designing information graphics, it’s that attention to detail and small changes make a mediocre graphic into a really useful and usually more attractive one. It’s what sets New York Times graphics apart from those in other publications and especially those in academic papers. Something like a short annotation can add context or a line shifted slightly to the left can make data look less cluttered.
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While we’re on the topic of what you plan to do with your PhD in statistics – UCLA department of statistics recently announced that it is looking for a new professor.

Applications and nominations are invited for the position of Professor of Statistics, any level (tenure-track Assistant Professor, tenured Associate Professor or tenured Full Professor), in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The position targets candidates with high quality research, a strong teaching record, and with expertise preferably in one or more of the following areas: Environmental Statistics, Social Statistics, and Spatial Statistics. Qualified candidates must have a Ph.D. in Statistics or Biostatistics. The position is effective July 1, 2009.

UCLA department of statistics is one of the best stat programs in the country with a talented faculty and really cool students. Albeit, I might be a little biased, but still. If you’re interested, go for it; or if you know anyone who might be qualified, do them a solid and forward them the information.

Statistics graduate students at Columbia University are hosting a symposium on careers for PhDs in statistics.

Current confirmed speakers include industry statisticians at Google, AT&T Labs-Research, National Institutes of Health, and Pfizer, Inc and academic statisticians from statistics, marketing, and biostatistics departments at Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University.

The Symposium will be held at Columbia University in New York on April 4, 2008 from 1-5pm. A wine and hors d’oeuvre reception will follow so that there will be ample time to chat informally with our guests, and a student mixer after that is also in the works.

The conference is free and they’re offering a $40 travel reimbursement for students who would like to attend. Consider going if you’re in the area. It should be interesting. Here’s the online registration.

If anyone actually does end up going, let me know. I’d love for you to share your experience here. For the current and future stat PhDs or masters students, what are you doing or planning to do with your degree? Other than framing it, I’m still searching for my answer.

[via Statistical Modeling]