Sunday data/statistics link roundup (11/25/2012)

1. My wife used to teach at Grinnell College, so we were psyched to see that a Grinnell player set the NCAA record for most points in a game. We used to go to the games, which were amazing to watch, when we lived in Iowa. The system the coach has in place there is a ton of fun to watch and is based on statistics!
2. Someone has to vet the science writers at the Huffpo. This is out of control, basically claiming that open access publishing is harming science. I mean, I’m all about being a curmudgeon and all, but the internet exists now, so we might as well get used to it. 
3. This one is probably better for Steven’s blog, but this is a pretty powerful graph about the life-saving potential of vaccines.  
4. Roger posted yesterday about the NY Times piece on deep learning. It is one of our most shared posts of all time, you should also check out the comments, which are exceedingly good. Two things I thought I’d point out in response to a lot of the reaction: (1) I think part of Roger’s post was suggesting that the statistics community should adopt some of CS’s culture of solving problems with already existing, really good methods and (2) I tried searching for a really clear example of “deep learning” yesterday so we could try some statistics on it and didn’t find any really clear explanations. Does anyone have a really simple example of deep learning (ideally with code) so we can see how it relates to statistical concepts?