Viewing profile — twstws

The example was a little clunky, but I don't find it misleading. A biplot of two normalized variables is elliptical, if the variables are correlated. This particular hand-drawn exa…

It's not dimensionally invalid if you remove the dimensions via normalization.

Each variable is standardized to mean = 0, standard deviation =1. If you reject this as arbitrary, you are rejecting correlation analysis as a whole - this is exactly the same stan…

In most cases each variable is standardized to put them all on a comparable scale.

> we can't determine if a computed result is actually a sought result or its reflection/negative That's not how I'd explain it. The 'sought result' and its reflection are not two d…

Good point. I do think the frequency of cases where the only option is private fund raising is much reduced under public systems.

I suspect it is because those with the means to move are generally doing well enough to avoid the failings of the US system.

I can't understand how Americans, who have the least efficient, most expensive health care system in the world, are so quick to write off public healthcare. The idea that governmen…

Except for the US, most of the developed world does, via public health care. It's not perfect, but better than the alternative.

This is truly a wonderful story. But it makes you wonder how many others in a similar situation weren't so fortunate. I lived in the US for two years, and I never understood the av…

I expect quinoa will be selected for environmental tolerance first. Given how difficult it is to grow in th US, top priority would be getting consistent high yield in North America…

True, to a point. Debunking one of these in a class is a good exercise. Preparing a lesson takes time, though, especially when you have to respond to something out of the blue. You…

This bothers me as a former professor, because these fringe ideas undermine teaching and waste time. Imagine trying to present a lesson on evolution, and one of your students bring…

He makes the argument on his website: http://www.macroevolution.net/human-origins.html#at_pco=cfd-... 1 people think hybrids are sterile, but they're not 2 people think hybrids don…

This. The author makes the absurd claim that because many hybrids are fertile, any hybrid could be fertile. Using hybridization between two closely related birds to support the not…

The thing I find most depressing about these crackpots is that some otherwise productive scientist has to spend an evening debunking their nonsense. And it still doesn't stop. I ta…

This is silly. Debian also provides rolling releases, testing and unstable. The release cycle is slow only if you ignore the constant development of Debian Sid.

This was hard for me to read. I spent four years waiting to adopt a child.Did almost a year of training and home visits, then waited. And waited. Why does it take so long? Because …

> There's no such thing these days as a real musician, Dave was part of a dying breed of people who got into music because they love what they do, not because they want to be famou…

I don't know what this has to do with bayes vs frequentist. I am not arguing that the data do not have a probabilty distribution. I am arguing that it is better to show all the dat…

I think the default should be the method that displays the most information. Why hide information if you don't have to? In the case of one dimensional data, a dotplot shows the rea…

> The difference between deep red and orange is a lot bigger than the difference between dark blue and slightly less dark blue. That may be true, but is it better? Does the scatter…

If your data can be displayed without points overlapping, a scatterplot can display all the information, while a density plot will always display only a summary of the data. The la…

The superiority of your hexbin follows from setting the density too high for the scatter plot. With points this dense, opacity of 5 or lower is necessary to see the uneven distribu…

1 paren moved and all line breaks and indentation removed. This is intentionally obfuscated. Is there any language that is easy to read when you put five lines of code together lik…