NYU Data Science newsletter – November 13, 2015

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Three fellows from [American Statistical Association’s] Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program offer advice and respond to questions about their experiences, views on data science, and future plans.

Policies that mandate public data archiving (PDA) successfully increase accessibility to data underlying scientific publications. However, is the data quality sufficient to allow reuse and reanalysis? We surveyed 100 datasets associated with nonmolecular studies in journals that commonly publish ecological and evolutionary research and have a strong PDA policy. Out of these datasets, 56% were incomplete, and 64% were archived in a way that partially or entirely prevented reuse. We suggest that cultural shifts facilitating clearer benefits to authors are necessary to achieve high-quality PDA and highlight key guidelines to help authors increase their data’s reuse potential and compliance with journal data policies.

Todd Park and DJ Patil are transforming the world’s biggest bureaucracy into a lean startup. Here’s a peek inside their playbook.

When Fiona Ingleby took to Twitter last April to vent about a journal’s peer-review process, she didn’t expect much of a response. With only around 100 followers on the social-media network, Ingleby — an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK — guessed that she might receive a few messages of support or commiseration from close colleagues. What she got was an overwhelming wave of reaction.

In four pointed tweets, Ingleby detailed her frustration with a PLoS ONE reviewer who tried to explain away her findings on gender disparities in the transition from PhD to postdoc. He suggested that men had “marginally better health and stamina”, and that adding “one or two male biologists” as co-authors would improve the analysis. The response was a full-fledged ‘Twitterstorm’ that spawned more than 5,000 retweets.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Marine Microbiology Initiative is investing eight million dollars over the next two years to support scientists, globally and at all career stages, to accelerate development of experimental model systems in marine microbial ecology. The international endeavor taps into the efforts of more than 100 scientists across 33 institutions with a broad range of expertise to collectively tackle the challenge of developing methods to bring experimental model systems to the ocean. The genetic tools generated in this effort will allow researchers to more easily disrupt the activities of microbial genes to understand how these organisms function in marine ecosystems and provide the capability to ask scientific questions in ways not currently possible.

Funded and promoted by secretive hedge-funder Robert Mercer, employed by Ted Cruz’s campaign, Cambridge Analytica promises a transformative new approach to identifying voters. Does it promise too much?

Biologists have long puzzled over why neurons have thousands of synapses. Now neuroscientists have shown they are crucial not just for recognizing patterns but for learning the sequence in which they appear.

Since Apple introduced its ResearchKit software in March, scientists at leading medical schools across the country have written apps to study asthma, Parkinson’s disease, autism, epilepsy, melanoma, breast cancer and other ailments. Medical experts are hopeful that using smartphones to gather health data from millions of people, with their consent, can open a window to new insights into diseases, treatments and lifestyle effects.

The Apple move was a breakthrough, but a gap remained. “You can’t just do research studies on people who can afford iPhones,” said Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science at Cornell Tech in New York.

Shortly after Apple introduced ResearchKit, Ms. Estrin, who is also a professor of public health at Weill Cornell Medical College, started trying to bring similar capability to the other major smartphone software platform, Google’s Android. She coordinated the work on a new initiative, ResearchStack, announced on Thursday.

The UK is a science powerhouse that punches well above its weight. London alone is home to four of the world’s top 30 universities. And this Government is committed to ensuring the UK is the best place in Europe to innovate, patent new ideas and start a business.

To fulfil this ambition, we need to harness the potential of new technologies. One of these is big data. From artificial intelligence to personalised medicine, we live in an “age of algorithms” that have the potential to transform our lives.

Today marks a major milestone in our country’s big data story: the launch of the Alan Turing Institute.

A recent gathering at Stanford on the emerging science of big data turned the usual gender ratio of science conferences on its head.

The biggest and baddest telescope in the world stands atop a volcanic peak in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. The Grand Canary Telescope, with a diameter of 10.4 meters, is the largest single-aperture optical telescope humans have ever built. Nevertheless, it’s not that exceptional—there are a dozen telescopes scattered around the world nearly as large. And much, much bigger telescopes will soon dwarf it.

On Wednesday, construction began on what will probably be the first of a new generation of supermassive optical telescopes. The Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT, will have seven 8.4-meter mirrors that will combine for a diameter of 25 meters. T

Pinterest and Facebook are the unlikely pioneers of artificial intelligence-led photo recognition lately, but Google and Microsoft are not far behind.

Andrew J. Majda will receive the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research. He is honored for two pioneering and seminal papers that appeared in 1983 in the area of partial differential equations.

One of the world’s leading mathematicians, Andrew Majda has made ground-breaking, fundamental contributions to modern applied mathematics by merging asymptotic methods, numerical methods, physical reasoning, and rigorous mathematical analysis. His theoretical work in the study of partial differential equations has been deep and influential. Moreover, he has applied his theoretical insights to a diverse range of practical problems in scattering theory, shock waves, combustion, incompressible flow, vortex motion, turbulent diffusion, and atmosphere ocean science. As a result, Majda’s work has had a significant impact in several areas of science and engineering.