Posts filed under Careers (39)

The Herald has a story on the happiest countries in the world.  This is a sensible thing to measure, but it’s hard to know if you have got it right, or whether the differences between countries just reflect differences in responding to survey questions. At least it was from a real survey.

Another recent survey result was the US companies with the happiest employees.  Pfizer was on top of the list.  Pfizer is perhaps more notable recently for its layoffs, with the last round just this week, so the survey has been greeted with a certain bemusement in some parts of the internet.  The provenance of these data is a bit dubious:

To reveal the top happiest companies, CareerBliss analyzes thousands of independent employee-submitted reviews. 

Post a quick company review to nominate your company for next year!

and, yes, this means it’s just a self-selected bogus poll.

They say it’s the sexiest job of the 21st century.  Perhaps if people are calling statistics “data science” they will stop calling it “business intelligence” (via)

The current issue of the journal Science has an editorial on the importance of statistics, and on the increased demand for statisticians in the `Big Data’ future.  The writers, Marie Davidian and Tom Louis, call out the need for increased funding in graduate programs — it hasn’t kept up with inflation, let alone with demand.

They also note

The future demands that scientists, policy-makers, and the public be able to interpret increasingly complex information and recognize both the benefi ts and pitfalls of statistical analysis. It is a good sign that the new U.S. Common Core K-12 Mathematics Standards introduce statistics as a key component in precollege education, requiring that students be skilled in describing data, developing statistical models,making inferences, and evaluating the consequences of decisions.

Here, at least, New Zealand is ahead of the game.

Stuff has an interesting story on self-publishing and how e-books and Amazon make it easier.  I’m in favor of anything that produces more good books, but I would like to give two warning notes, one statistical and from my experience, and one non-statistical and from other people’s experience.

The statistical warning note is that most books on Amazon don’t sell much, if at all.  I have a book, a graduate text in a minor area of statistics, for which Amazon gives me sales data.  This book sells 2-4 copies a week through all North American bookstores (and so less than that just through Amazon). Even so, it has never been out of the top 10% of Amazon’s sales rank, it usually is at about the 95th percentile, and sometimes makes it into the top 1%.   Nearly all books on Amazon sell less than this.

The non-statistical warning note is that the self-publishing industry is historically noted for having a lot of scams.  A bit of Google due diligence is useful before you spend money on things.

The New York Times has another article about the importance of `big data’ in the modern world:

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

and in the UK, the Graudian’s DataBlog is asking “What is a data scientist?”, motivated by a conference in Califoria on “Making Data Work“.

The NALP has released data on starting salaries for US lawyers in 2011, and the distribution is really weird.

Usually we expect salary distributions to be skewed, with a long upper tail, but in this case there are two modes: a large group earning around $45k and a smaller group earning about $160k. The mean income is about $80k, the median is about $60k, and neither is a good summary of what someone is likely to make.

The distribution didn’t always look like this. Twenty years ago, starting salaries for lawyers had a more familiar skewed distribution, with a single mode around $30k.

Over the twenty-year period, the income at the lower mode has rised by about 50%, but US median household income has roughly doubled, and the CPI has increased by about 65%.  Some law graduates are raking it in; most are not, and they nearly all have to pay off huge sums in student loans.

In reality the figures are probably worse than this for the majority: there’s a lot of missing data.  As Paul Campos puts it “People without salaries are reluctant to report their salaries”

Here’s the final poster we sent out to schools around the country this week:The Magic of numbers:

The other posters sent out may be found here and here.

As a follow-up to my earlier post about the posters we sent out to schools, it may also be of interest to read more of our students’ stories about where they’ve ended up and how they use statistics.

Read stories such as Sammie Jia‘s:

“I’m a biometrician; I analyse data for the plant and food scientists at the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research. This involves designing statistical experiments for research, analysing and interpreting the data, summarising the results and making suggestions to the scientists based on my findings.

“At the moment I am working with the scientists investigating how the kiwifruit disease Psa spreads in vines. I’m also looking at how a test group of consumers liked a new type of kiwifruit – modelling human behaviour is fun! I know my work makes a contribution to New Zealand horticulture, and that feels good.

Read more »

It’s that time of year again when students all around the country are figuring out what they’re going to do next year.

Our department has produced a series of posters for careers advisors showing where you can end up working thanks to statistics.  There’s some fascinating stories in there – from astrostatistics to sports statistics, from research wind energy to insurance.

Go see the posters (PDF)