Tag Archives: slides

[Conference Report] A First Course on Statistical Thinking II: Common Flaws in News Reports

Long time no update...I should apologize for this.

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This post is about the conference report I presented last month (26th, May) in the 5th China-R Conference at Renmin University of China, Beijing.

The talk contains several intuitive examples about the misuse of numbers in news reports. Basic statistics knowledge is not hard to learn, but pretty easy to forget. In the slides, I picked some popular pieces of news which mislead the public intentionally. I aimed at telling people how to keep a clear mind - consequently you will be able to distinguish between tricks and real statistical models.

The incentive for me to deliver a presentation like this is to show students how interesting statistics could be, therefore hopefully some of them will grow more interests in this subject and hence go further in their studies. Knowledge is always easy to learn and hard to apply - but without applications, what's the point of studying? Why are you paying much a great cost (of time) on studying in school?

The original slides can be found here: http://cos.name/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/8-chenliyun-rumor.zip (in Chinese).

An easier version of this topic was presented earlier at a popular science training lecture hosted by Songshuhui.net, an NGO in China works on popular science. The full record in Chinese can be visited on their website: http://s-camp.songshuhui.net/events/s-workshop/class008_part-1/

[Conference Report] Experiments in Social Networks

Fortunately, I went to two conferences in the past month, one specialized academic conference on Complex Network held by University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and the second one was organized by my dear UseR friends and I, which was the 4th China-R Conference (Shanghai) in East China Normal University.

It was really my honor to participate in these two conferences and deliver presentations to the audience. My talk was focused on experiments in social networks, and some consequent analysis in R. As the conferences were in China, I talked in Chinese throughout. Social network is a hot topic nowadays, but experimental methods are still at the beginning stage. With social learning models, we found out a good way to test the network effects with randomized experiments.

It was also my great pleasure to meet famous scholars worldwide. In the complex network conference, a lot people from physics and computer science brought my with fresh knowledge and inspirations. In the R conference, we invited so many experienced useR and exchanged our experience of using R. It is always good to feel that many people are enjoying the convenience of R and are happy to play with data in numerous fields.

At last, here are the slides I used to assist my presentation. Sorry but they are in Chinese...

DOWNLOAD:

slides_network_experiments_R.pdf