Reading Suggestions from March 2015

Articles and Blog posts

The Epidemiology and Statistical Mechanics of Zombies by Alexander A. Alemi, Matthew Bierbaum, Christopher R. Myers, James P. Sethna Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 A research paper about zombies!

The Grammar of Data Science by Deep Ganguli: Another look into using Python vs R as a data scientist from the perspective of a Pandas to dpylr converter.

Why Most Twitter Maps Can't Be Trusted by Aarian Marshall: A look into the perils of drawing information from Twitter maps. Twitter is an easy, cheap way to make social, political, and other claims about from data from the Twitter API. However, makers of twitter maps aren't always as representative of the "real world" as we'd like.

Mapping Your Music Collection by Christian Peccei: How to make a pretty visualization of similarity measures of your iTunes music collection.

The physics of a falling slinky by Marc Abrahams: Slinkies!

Why Data Science Is the Fastest Growing Industry in Tech Right Now Even if employers don't seem to have a universal definition of what makes someone a data scientist, it cannot be argued that the field in growing, so much so that it is one of the few fields in which there are more available jobs than applicants.

Youtube Videos:

Science of that Dress Remember "the dress" that was everywhere at the beginning of the month? If you are still wondering why you see the dress one way and not another, watch this Sci Show episode to see why people can see the thing thing differently.

Computer Colors Colors on computers don't work the same way we're taught in 5th grade art class. With so much of our data/results/pictures being shown widely on computers, it's important to understand how it all works.

Written on April 1, 2015