Sunday data/statistics link roundup (12/2/12)

1. An interview with Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle. I’m not sure I’d agree with the characterization that all data scientists are: creative, curious, and competitive and certainly those characteristics aren’t unique to data scientists. And I didn’t know this: “We have 65,000 data scientists signed up to Kaggle, and just like with golf tournaments, we have them all ranked from 1 to 65,000.” 
2. Check it out, art with R! It’s actually pretty interesting to see how they use statistical algorithms to generate different artistic styles. Here are some more. 
3. Now that Ethan Perlstein’s crowdfunding experiment was successful, other people are getting on the bandwagon. If you want to find out what kind of bacteria you have in your gut, for example, you could check out this. 
4. I thought I had it rough, but apparently some data analysts spend all their time developing algorithms to detect penis drawings!
5. Roger was on Anderson Cooper 360 as part of the Building America segment. We can’t find the video, but here is the transcript. 
6. An interesting article on the half-life of facts. I think the analogy is an interesting one and certainly there is research to be done there. But I think it jumps the shark a bit when they start talking about how the moon landing was predictable, etc. I completely believe in the retrospective analysis of knowledge, but predicting things is pretty hard, especially when it is the future.