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Phoenix666 writes:

Over on the npr blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture , contributor Adam Frank has written a commentary on how he learned to love statistics.

What I loved about physics were its laws. They were timeless. They were eternal. Most of all, I believed they fully and exactly determined everything about the behavior of the cosmos.

Statistics, on the other hand, was about the imperfect world of imperfect equipment taking imperfect data. For me, that realm was just a crappy version of the pure domain of perfect laws I was interested in. Measurements, by their nature, would always be messy. A truck goes by and jiggles your equipment. The kid you paid to do the observations isn't really paying attention. The very need to account for those variations made me sad.

Now, however, I see things very differently. My change of heart can be expressed in just two words — Big Data. Over the last 10 years, I've been watching in awe as the information we have been inadvertently amassing has changed society for better and worse. There is so much power, promise and peril for everyone in this brave new world that I knew I had to get involved. That's where my new life in statistics began.

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