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Read the Classics!
I have recently read a book about the history of statistics, and the author made me aware of several books by R. A Fisher, or, to give his full name, Sir Ronald A. Fisher, Sc.D., FRS, one of the giants of the field.
Fisher produced three books in particular that are the main source of his fame. These are “Statistical Methods for Research Workers”, “The Design of Experiments”, and “Statistical Methods and Scientific Inference”, and all three are available in an omnibus edition for a reasonable price.
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Sonya Peter’s Face
Recently I was contacted on Facebook by a good-looking girl called Sonya Peter, roughly at my age. Like me, she is working at ETH Zurich and she even has a common friend with me. Also her taste of music matched mine quite well. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t remember meeting her. Continue reading
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The Value of Scientific Presentations
In conferences, I often come across science that is great. Results are amazing, people have done something that was thought not to be doable, or they have built a system that has incredible properties.
However, that same science is often presented in a way that makes it clear that the presenter has more confidence in his science than in the presentation.
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Johnny Still Can’t Encrypt
There once was a very good article about user interface issues in PGP 5.0, called “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt“. In this year’s Usenix Security Symposium (Simply called “Security” by those in the know), there was an article called “Why (Special Agent) Johnny (Still) Can’t Encrypt“, and I, being a fan of the former paper, immediately downloaded and read the latter, especially because it had won an outstanding paper award. Continue reading
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Stats Tip #4: Make Use of Unparametric Tests
In statistical hypothesis testing, you often have the choice between tests that assume a certain distribution of the underlying data and tests that don’t make these assumptions. For example, when evaluating a drug trial, you can choose between, e.g., the t-test, which assumes that the experimental data is normally distributed, or the Mann-Whitney U test, otherwise known as the Wilcoxon rank-sum test, which makes no assumption about that distribution. As Rebecca Black might say, “which test should you take?”
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Stats Tip #3: Bonferroni? No Thanks, I Don’t Like Pasta!
Ravioli, Spaghetti, Bonferroni, Canneloni, Lasagna. All delicious products made from semola di grano duro. Add tomato sauce, put some grana on top, serve with Chianti. (Or Teroldego if, like me, you’ve spent some time in the Trentino.) Mjam! Continue reading
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Stats Tip #2: Don’t Bin (If You Don’t Have To)!
In a paper, published at a peer-reviewed conference, the authors wished to test the hypothesis that their univariate data was distributed according to an exponential distribution. They didn’t get it quite right. Continue reading
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Collaborative Network Troubleshooting in Practice
In my last article, I discussed the theoretical benefits of MPC for collaborative network security and how basic MPC primitves can be optimized for practical performance. In the last article of this series for now, I’d like to report on our experiences from applying MPC protocols to real network traces of six SWITCH customers. Continue reading
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World IPv6 Day
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 was World IPv6 Day. The event was an opportunity for participating content-network operators to test their IPv6 readiness, as well as to increase general community awareness of IPv6, and of the slowly ongoing transition. Another goal of IPv6 Day is to “shift the baseline”, as heise did last year: once network operators and content providers see that IPv6 doesn’t break everything (or, more realistically, fix those minor things which do break), they’ll leave it on, and the post-June 8 world will have a little more IPv6 in it. Continue reading
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