The paper titled, Mindless Statistics, by Gerd Gigerenzer, makes a case for banishing the mindless “null ritual” from statistics. In this blog post, I will summarize the main points of the paper. The author starts off by emphasizing the importance of developing a statistical toolbox. Indeed statistics is a rich subject that can be enjoyed by thinking through a given problem and applying the right kind of tools to get a deeper understanding of the problem.

The paper titled, A Multi-Language Computing Environment for Literate programming and Reproducible research, gives an introduction to org-mode. In order to communicate research work to others, it is often important to mix prose and code in same document. There are many tools out there that do the job. However org-mode is one such tool that is useful for literate programming as well as reproducible-research. Be it a research environment or a pedagogical environment, the need for mixing code and prose is always present.

The paper titled, ”Active Documents with Org-mode”, gives a concise introduction to the way org-mode can be used for reproducible research. In one single document, Linux shell commands, Python code and R code are all used for analyzing base-ball statistics. Org-mode is used to produce one comprehensive documents that details all the various steps in the analysis. The following visual from the paper gives an overview of the org-mode document :

Link : What to Do at the Crossroads of Should and Must ? There are two paths in life: Should and Must. We arrive at this crossroads over and over again. And each time, we get to choose. Should is how others want us to show up in the world — how we’re supposed to think, what we ought to say, what we should or shouldn’t do. When we choose Should the journey is smooth, the risk is small

The paper titled, History of Application of Martingales in Survival Analysis, provides a nice narrative of the various scientists, mathematicians, events and concepts behind the wide-spread usage of martingales in Survival analysis. There are two major takeaways from this paper. One is of course the time line of all the developments in the field of survival analysis. The second takeaway from this paper is a good intuitive understanding of martingales + martingale stochastic integrals and their practical application in getting to asymptotic properties of many estimators.