Adam's Blogroll: click through to the author's blog
For The New Yorker, Angie Wang draws parallels between toddler learning behavior and training large language models, but more importantly, where they diverge.
They are the least useful, the least creative, and the least likely to pass a bar exam. They fall far below the median human standard
that machines are meant to achieve.They are so much less than a machine, and yet it’s clear to any of us that they’re so much more than a machine.
Tags: AI, children, illustration, New Yorker
Posted by in AI, children, illustration, Infographics, New Yorker
Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer have a new book out: A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication. They rewind back 400 years and discuss the beginnings of visualization, when nobody knew what a chart was. Putting this in my queue and hoping it’s back in stock soon.
Visualization still seems like a relatively new thing. It’s old.
Tags: book, history, Howard Wainer, Michael Friendly, New Yorker
Posted by in Book, history, Howard Wainer, Michael Friendly, New Yorker, Statistical Visualization
From Kim Warp for The New Yorker. Ha. Ha. It’s funny because it’s true.
It reminds me of Amanda Cox’s dress size graphic for the NYT.
[Thanks, Mike]
Tags: humor, New Yorker, weight
Posted by in Humor, Infographics, New Yorker, weight
Hannah Fry, for The New Yorker, describes the puzzle of Statistics to analyze general patterns used to make decisions for individuals:
There is so much that, on an individual level, we don’t know: why some people can smoke and avoid lung cancer; why one identical twin will remain healthy while the other develops a disease like A.L.S.; why some otherwise similar children flourish at school while others flounder. Despite the grand promises of Big Data, uncertainty remains so abundant that specific human lives remain boundlessly unpredictable. Perhaps the most successful prediction engine of the Big Data era, at least in financial terms, is the Amazon recommendation algorithm. It’s a gigantic statistical machine worth a huge sum to the company. Also, it’s wrong most of the time.
Be sure to read this one. I especially liked the examples used to explain statistical concepts that sometimes feel mechanical in stat 101.
Tags: Hannah Fry, New Yorker, uncertainty
Posted by in Hannah Fry, New Yorker, statistics, uncertainty
Alec Wilkinson, reporting for The New Yorker, profiled Thomas Hargrove, who is deep into finding serial killers algorithmically and through public data:
Thomas Hargrove is a homicide archivist. For the past seven years, he has been collecting municipal records of murders, and he now has the largest catalogue of killings in the country—751,785 murders carried out since 1976, which is roughly twenty-seven thousand more than appear in F.B.I. files. States are supposed to report murders to the Department of Justice, but some report inaccurately, or fail to report altogether, and Hargrove has sued some of these states to obtain their records. Using computer code he wrote, he searches his archive for statistical anomalies among the more ordinary murders resulting from lovers’ triangles, gang fights, robberies, or brawls. Each year, about five thousand people kill someone and don’t get caught, and a percentage of these men and women have undoubtedly killed more than once. Hargrove intends to find them with his code, which he sometimes calls a serial-killer detector.
Find out more and download data from Hargrove’s nonprofit the Murder Accountability Project.
Tags: algorithm, murder, New Yorker
Posted by in algorithm, Data Sources, murder, New Yorker