NYU Data Science newsletter – August 17, 2015

GROUP CURATION: N/A

Hacker News is a news aggregator where visitors vote on stories. When your story gets a lot of votes it is a big deal: it can increase your audience by orders of magnitude. I analyzed 1.3 million Hacker News stories and found that when a story is submitted makes a big difference.

Matthew Coller chats with Ryan Stimson, who has been at the head of a pass-tracking project that has provided some fascinating data and conclusions. Stimson, who follows the Devils closely, also discusses New Jersey’s direction and the upcoming Western New York analytics conference.

… Twitter is a happy accident, a fortuity, a quirk. A giant quirk, to be sure. Its inventors had no idea what they were creating (see Nick Bilton’s excellent history, Hatching Twitter). Even now no one understands it. It’s an elephant surrounded by more than the usual number of blind men. One hundred and forty characters? That makes no sense, but it creates a microblogging protocol of exceeding simplicity, with particular constraints that contribute to its power — like haiku.

Twitter’s investors are getting golden eggs, but they want foie gras.

Inspired by this post, I wanted to use Google Scholar data to put nice images on my professional website (girly habit). This post explains how I combined the functions available in the R package scholar with additional analyses (partially inspired from the script available at this link, which in my case results in a cannot open the connection error message) to generate a few informative graphics.

A confluence of biological, physical, engineering, computer, and health sciences is setting the stage for a transformative leap toward data-driven, mechanism-based health and health care for each individual.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, or GA4GH, has attracted over 350 member organizations since it was formed just over two years ago. Members range from small hospitals and laboratories to major genomic centers like the Broad Institute in the U.S., BGI in China, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the U.K. ? and even a few household names like Google and Amazon. All these organizations have an interest in making DNA data easier to access and understand, whether because, like Google, they plan to house and analyze that data on a massive scale, or because they want to use it to treat patients one on one.

Unexpected events like power failure, flood and HVAC malfunction threaten large data centers and small computer rooms. So do fluctuating conditions like humidity and temperature.

Monitoring technology company Sensaphone says early detection of events and out-of-parameter conditions can ensure 100 percent uptime and save thousands of dollars in equipment, time and productivity.