Stephen J. Dubner: Whenever somebody does something so much better than everybody else whether it’s a competitive thing or otherwise, it’s natural to ask well what do they do that’s so different? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tq00PyPHP4 ]]>
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Birds and Frogs
Freeman Dyson at the AMS Einstein Public Lecture in Mathematics (October 2008) on “Birds and Frogs“:
“Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.”
Birds can walk in the mud at their OWN wish, but ALAS frogs can’t fly even if they want ! Where are the 21st century Birds who have the “Vision + Courage” to guide us, statisticians, and save us from the brink of extinction?
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Brilliant Brillinger
PDF, Video] : “Be passionate about your career. I have been throughout mine. Some people snicker at the idea of a passionate statistician, but they don’t know what we do. You will experience joy and discouragement, but please treasure diversity be angular, question authority, don’t be afraid to ask “What happens if I don’t?”, protest injustice, do not give in, learn mathematics, look for the simplest solution, take risks, have fun, put on the sunscreen, and fix the Leafs.”
“Don’t be well-rounded, be angular”
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“anti-disciplinary” approach to problem-solving by Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, I came across this paper [link], written by Dr. Brian Uzzi, distinguished professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and colleagues. They reported some universal patterns of creative high-impact work (spanning all scientific fields) based on the analysis of 17.9 million research papers. Some of the finding are worth sharing:
“Our analysis of 17.9 million papers across all scientific fields suggests that the highest-impact science draws on primarily highly conventional combinations of prior work, with an intrusion of combinations unlikely to have been joined together before“, i.e., “the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge”. Probably the most famous example of all time E=mc^2. They also pointed out “research within narrow boundaries is unlikely to be the source of the most fruitful ideas”
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Time to change the rules of the game
Nature article reminds us the importance of Nonparametric Exploratory Modeling (Data + Science NOT Science + Data) attitude where Scientists ask questions about the validity of the Statistical findings or in other words as the article suggests “The numbers are where the scientific discussion should start, not end.” But unfortunately “The basic framework of statistics has been virtually unchanged since Fisher, Neyman and Pearson introduced it.” Isn’t it high time “to change how statistics is taught, how data analysis is done and how results are reported and interpreted. “]]>