Sunday data/statistics link roundup (5/13)

1. Patenting statistical sampling? I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court who threw out the Mayo Patent wouldn’t have much trouble tossing this patent either. The properties of sampling are a “law of nature” right? via Leonid K.
2. This video has me all fired up, its called 23 1/2 hours and talks about how the best preventative health measure is getting 30 minutes of exercise - just walking - every day. He shows how in some cases this beats doing much more high-tech interventions. My favorite part of this video is how he uses a ton of statistical/epidemiological terms like “effect sizes”, “meta-analysis”, “longitudinal study”, “attributable fractions”, but makes them understandable to a broad audience. This is a great example of “statistics for good”.
3. A very nice collection of 2-minute tutorials in R. This is a great way to teach the concepts, most of which don’t need more than 2 minutes, and it covers a lot of ground. One thing that drives me crazy is when I go into Rafa’s office with a hairy computational problem and he says, “Oh you didn’t know about function x?”. Of course this only happens after I’ve wasted an hour re-inventing the wheel. If more people put up 2 minute tutorials on all the cool tricks they know, the better we’d all be.
4. A plot using ggplot2, developed by this week’s interviewee Hadley Wickham appears in the Atlantic! Via David S.
5. I’m refusing to buy into Apple’s hegemony, so I’m still running OS 10.5. I’m having trouble getting github up and running. Anyone have this same problem/know a solution? I know, I know, I’m way behind the times on this…