All Things Data Science

Last week I released a paper entitled "The Generalized $S^3$-problem. A probabilistic view on Elvis Costello's Spectacular Spinning Songbook". You can find the pdf here . The paper is bit of a parody on statistical papers, so it shouldn't be taken too seriously. But at the same time it gives a very gentle introduction in some concepts of probability theory (Laplace, independence, the birthday paradox, ...). Enjoy!

Last week the Belgian newspaper De Morgen ran an article on drug use amongst Belgian partygoers. The headline of the article was "Partygoers use less cannabis and more cocaine" ("Minder cannabis, meer cocaïne bij feestvierders"). The graph that accompanied the article looked like this: While this is dutch, the language of drugs is universal, so I'm sure you will have no difficulty in understanding what it says. There are a couple of remarks to make on this graph: While there are small grey bars between the 3 groups, Alcohol/Cannabis, Xtc/Cocaine and LSD/GHB/Ketamine, initially I was fooled by thinking they were all using the same Y-axis. They're not, so you need to be careful to take scale into account. Secondly, at the first glance there seems to be a drop in cannabis use, but the increase in cocaine that was mentioned in the title is less clear cut (no pun intended). Thirdly, alcohol use seems to decline as well, although this is difficult to j