wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Comments

• [1] Karen Kaplan from Ashfield MA today September 05, 2007 - 01:22PM

  NYT article on Mr. Ayres data mining thesis claims Netflix customers like Netflix recommendations better than their own. Not me! The quantification of economics has failed, why should we believe data mining will rule? Karen

  
  
• [2] Trevor from LIC September 05, 2007 - 01:31PM

  All those quantitative hedge funds have performed really well in the stock market's recent turmoil, so there's must something to this.*

  Ah, the Virgin and the Dynamo continue their unending double-helix dance...

  *sarcasm

  
  
• [3] Trevor from LIC September 05, 2007 - 01:44PM

  William Gaddis is rolling in his grave.

  
  
• [4] chestine from NY September 05, 2007 - 01:50PM

  this is such pure BS when it comes to medicine because so much medical information is so far off and created by big pharma - you are roboticizing!

  echinacea is too broad a word - there are so many variables to all research - this is such cr-p!

  
  
• [5] Melody from Manhattan September 05, 2007 - 01:57PM

  Robotizing is right... thinking it all comes down to 'numbers' is very disturbing. You have to consider the source of anything (who has the most to gain) before you make any decision, esp. with the health care system.

  
  
• [6] Zoe September 06, 2007 - 09:50AM

  Inetersting but frankly, odd..

  Any herbalist worth their salt wouldn't tell you that Echinacea (by itself and at any stage of the cold)) will cure a cold. Didn't need to crunch numbers to discover that. (People mistake a magazine headline for fact quite often!)

  And number crunching is how all those other hedge funds/banks are going crazy(read, "losing millions/billions of dollars") with this sub-prime scandal. According to the numbers the imploding of this financial product was 1:1,000,000... or something of that order... Well, welcome to 1 in a million. (It never occured to those finance guys, that small chances do not = "never"!)

  Numbers are great (Studied math at university). They can tell us things about things in general, trends, paths. But the power of statstics to be manipulated (see anti-global warming advocates numbers on our climate) is real.

  Numbers are tools, not gods. They can't tell us anything meaningful about the anomolies that as human beings are rife in our lives and in our world.

  For example, numbers can not predict whether that 2% chance of having serious reactions to a pahrmaceutical drug will be 100% for you. When it's you... 2% safety record means very little. It is 100% for you.