September 6, 2016

Briefly

  • A preview of Cathy O’Neil’s book about data science and its potential dangers, coming out tomorrow.
  • A map of the world’s languages — showing the difficulties in definition, since all the Chinese languages are lumped in together when probably equally distinctive languages from different countries are given separately.
    languages
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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    steve curtis

    Thats the issue with some european languages as well. What is know as standard italian(or Tuscan) is a distinct language from ‘northern italian’ group of dialects. Simliar to Spain with Spanish and Catalan. Its best to think of the names as being language families in the broad sense

    8 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      Yes, but Chinese is more diverse than that — it’s more like the entire set of Romance languages

      8 years ago