NYU Data Science newsletter – July 22, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Central banks and financial regulators around the world continue to seek better tools to help them monitor and measure system-wide risks that have the potential to trigger financial crises with macroeconomic consequences.

To help meet this need, the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago has been awarded grants totaling $1.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the CME Group Foundation to expand its efforts to generate better quantitative models for assessing the economy’s vulnerabilities to disruptions from financial markets.

Some friends are hosting a really rad art show on Friday, and the theme is the “Missed Connections” section of Craigslist. I wanted to art something too, but being a data scientist art is hard for me. So instead, I downloaded 6,500 missed connections posts from the missed connections sections of 20 different cities (and all four main sections: w4m, m4w, m4m, and w4w). Then I trained a recurrent neural network on the corpus 🙂

The last half-dozen years have seen The American Statistician publish well-argued and provocative calls to change our thinking about statistics and how we teach it, among them Brown and Kass (2009), Nolan and Temple-Lang (2010), and Legler et al. (2010). Within this past year, the ASA has issued a new and comprehensive set of guidelines for undergraduate programs (ASA 2014). Accepting (and applauding) all this as background, the current article argues the need to rethink our curriculum from the ground up, and offers five principles and two caveats intended to help us along the path toward a new synthesis. These principles and caveats rest on my sense of three parallel evolutions: the convergence of trends in the roles of mathematics, computation, and context within statistics education. These ongoing changes, together with the articles cited above and the seminal provocation by Leo Breiman (2001) call for a deep rethinking of what we teach to undergraduates. In particular, following Brown and Kass, we should put priority on two goals, to make fundamental concepts accessible and to minimize prerequisites to research.

This time last week, the Internet wasn’t talking about cat videos or Kardashians. Instead, millions were discussing whether a piano-sized robot 3 billion miles from Earth would beam home a critical radio signal on schedule. That signal would tell us that the New Horizons spacecraft had successfully accomplished its Pluto flyby.

On July 14th 2015, NASA won the Internet. #PlutoFlyby and #NewHorizons trended on Twitter. A fresh image of our solar system’s once-ninth planet garnered hundreds of thousands of Instagram likes within hours. A New Horizons AMA skyrocketed to the top of Reddit. And the space agency’s website became the third most popular government domain, second only to the National Weather Service and the National Institutes of Health.