Statistical significance, null hypothesis, and illusions
Why does the toothpaste commercial want you to know that 9 out of 10 dentists approve their product?
This article addresses statistical significance, a popular convention in modern empirical science and statistics.
Although numbers form the heart of statistics, only when an interpreter converts the problems of math to usable formulations in language, it can be put to any real use. This makes statistics a double-edged sword. On the one hand, numbers have a concrete meaning. One slip of interpretation, they turn your world upside down.
If you are a business intelligence expert, you definitely have experienced it at work. Absolute numbers tell you less than percentages and percentages tell you less than the percentages compared to last year. …
Getting Started
Everything you need for your first spark program
I am a python programmer who started to work with PySpark a couple of months ago and realized that it is quite a “big” deal. I really had to work at collecting and understanding some basic terms in order to write my first program in spark. Ergo, I decided to compile this guide for my peers.
This is a condensed article for starting with PySpark if you are making the jump from Python. It is aimed at answering beginners' questions and cleaning out some jargon.
Spark Basics — What is Spark?
Spark is a software application that enables you to handle big data by allowing you to access computational resources from multiple computers. …
There is humor in numbers, harness it
Udacity courses are cool but did you ever try not being stressed and loving the living devil out of learning for work? Last week I made a dapper presentation about some key insights into (a secret) current situation of the factory to my Boss who has no eye in the field of analytics but a lot of experience in planning how to run a factory. I would have paid good coin to see the look on his face which told me “I’m one hundred percent listening, this curve makes so much sense and this presentation is not at all boring”. Turns out, there is a lot more to the field of analytics than just being really good at math and understanding data. …
Like right now.
I cannot wait to see
How being old would be
Whether I will hold up until the end
Or would I sooner be free?
I want to know which parts I’d remember
and what never deserved my time
I’d like to see who stuck longer
And who was never to be mine
I want to know if my old man
is standing by my bedside
watching me as I wake up,
thanking heavens I’m alive.
I want to see if in future
the leaves still fall to the ground
Or will there be metal birds
that don’t ever make a…
Time to rethink them to show some respect.
On the face of it, every social media business has only our best interests in mind. They all want us to be rich, famous, and mentally healthy. Every now and then, we also get a survey about how you are feeling about the app, complete with smileys, custom videos, and balloon emojis.
Is that enough though? Here are some addictive features which hint that the app-makers don’t really care. There must definitely be ways of rethinking these features to not harm the user.
Email notifications without content
Why do the apps care enough to tell you via email that you have a notification, but not enough to give you the information without you having to click? …
Movies: Where books go to die.
Working day
7:00 PM to 2:00 AM.
Job
Anything that pays over 1 cent.
Book
The unfinished draft on your desktop, that will be backed up to the cloud “really soon”.
Bestselling author
That guy who wrote what you “definitely could have”.
Self
That dapper guy in the mirror who is sure going to be bestselling.
Others
Face-holes yapping unsolicited advice.
But mostly about a coconut
So here is what to sell instead
Think about the last time you bought a piece of cake.
Step 0: You wanted a cake.
You imagined that spongy, juicy, sweet something that would melt the moment some tongue-juice lays its hands on it. Your brain led you by tongue to the bakery.
You went to the store. You looked in the glass.
You saw that smooth, bald, creamy icing work on layers of oozy sponge, cut through the cross-section, separated by thin chocolate-vanilla cream layers.
You pointed and said “That one”.
Lesson 1
Nobody, EVER, went to the store for cake thinking about icing.
Don’t look for excuses, look for solutions
Chapter 1 — The making of you
Off the bat — Childhood emotional abuse is real. It is hard to get over. Your childhood conditioning plays a huge role in the person you become.
That off my chest, I’d like to continue speaking.
This story is not from a lack of empathy. I spent enough of my life wallowing in my sadness and pain. There was a point in time when not a day went by without panic attacks.
“If only it hadn’t been this way!”,
“If only I didn't get bullied”,
“ If only my parents did this or that”.
When I say “enough of my life”, I don’t mean a year. I mean decades. That moment when I found out that there is this guy called Freud, I opened a pandora’s box. …
