On Data Literacy and the Blogosphere

 I am a keen follower of the blog aggregator about the R programming language and Data Science named R Bloggers. It is a very resource to look for all about the possibilities of this statistical programming language that is a standard in the field, and specially for the more advanced researchers. It has got some steep learning curve, so it is advisable to learn a lot about statiscal concepts and reasoning before diving in this language. It is also important to know about programming. But the open source commitment by the developers of the language and the wide community of users provides for a nice open and plentiful trove of resources.
I receive e-mails form R Bloggers every single day of the week. And every day, be it  a weekday, Saturdays, Sundays or Holidays, there is always good posts, with some about a  new technique, another about a new perspective other on a relevant resource or innovative way of dealing with R and its main applications and so on... Not admissible to miss.And today was one of those days when I found an article from R Bloggers that caught my attention again. This time the name of the blog and the article title were the triggers.  After reading the content of the post I thought I should share and reproduce part of it, for it is about the importance of Data Literacy, knowledge about statistics and what this means for the XXI Century. We are living through an age where the knowledge of these subjects is increasing, but where the mismatches as to what society needs to know and what it really knows about the subjects in question are also increasing. And this is having wide economic impacts as companies and organizations started complaining about these mismatches. On a counterfactual tone, if there is a mismatch, there is also as never before all the resources needed to bridge all the gaps, and if this isn't happening with the desired frequency, then the reasons may be of a different nature than a statistical regularity or anomaly; it is perhaps more of a human nature contradictory anomaly that we may be talking about...Nevertheless let us dive a little deeper in the post and after we will be concluding with some remarks.

Lord's paradox in R

(...)

 

Concluding remarks

This was a post from the Blog that I found through R Bloggers aggregator. The Blog is called Data Literacy - the blog of Andrés Gutiérrez. The name of the blog caught my attention, as well as its epigraph by Herbert G. Wells. The important point to mention here:

• Data Literacy is an important topic of study where the resources available are cheap to access. Nevertheless the learning is hard and the computing framework of the R programming language is a steep one
• Leaning statistics may be a nice way to learn how to think about the complex reality surrounding us from every corner that we want to look upon. It is full of paradoxes such as the one presented in this post. But I think it is with this kind of hard reasoning and problem solving mindset that we better prepare ourselves to any challenge
• The open source community around Data Science and the R programming language may compensate for the shortcomings of our often enough contradictory human societies

Farewell to the data science community around aggregators such as R Bloggers. 

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