Yes, I think "application logic" would be good. The problem with "business logic" is that it's domain-specific too; an awful lot of interesting algorithm development and implementation is taking place outside the realm of what would normally be considered business applications. Games are one example; scientific programming is another. In both cases, many of the principles that are useful in business programming can be usefully applied, but the purpose of the final application is very different.

Back when execution was a legal punishment for theft and public hangings were popular entertainment, pickpockets were known for circulating in the crowds.

I think what's missed is that "no drama" Obama is a pragmatist first. I think he feels genuine empathy and believes (for obvious reasons) in civil rights, but in office has been willing to sacrifice little in the name of idealism. Guantanamo, for example; I think he would have liked to close it but found out how political impossible it was unless the detainees disappeared somehow. In fairness, in the wake of 9/11 and a ridiculously reactionary right it's been pretty hard to do much for civil liberties without an avalanche of criticism for beign soft and withering blame for any terrorist acts (Benghazi). But at bottom I think pragmatism, political and leadership, explains most of his choices. I wish he'd tried to be more inspirational and led in a direction that might last for generations, but I settle for (partially corrupt but historically huge) health-care reform.

I can imagine better alternatives, but I worked for Obama because I saw considerably worse. You don't have to pick sinners and saints in these things, sometimes both sides are deficient. Just try for what's best for the time being. If I tried to confront the true enormity of what we're doing out there rather then try for incremental change, i think I'd implode. I don't think much of the "idealists" attacking Obama on morally correct grounds but without a realistic path to improvement. That's just ego.

Obama won't make any grand stands on privacy or civil rights generally (gay marriage is an exception, but I think the financial incentive there was pretty big). It's a rare politican who would, unfortunately. I hope the people will.

"They laughed at me, you know, at the Institute. They called me mad!"

The hypoxia research lab where I work has a USAF hypobaric chamber dating back to the early 1950s, still perfectly functional. So not quite that old, but pretty impressive when you think about it.

I know you're joking, but quite seriously: one liter of water weighs one kilogram. (This is no longer exact since the units have been more precisely defined, but it's close enough.) So if you know what a two-liter bottle of soda feels like, you know roughly what two kilos feel like. Figuring out what 48000 such bottles feels like might be a bit tougher, but at least it's a point of reference.

To be fair, economics has contributed a lot to the growth of statistics as a field of study. Due to various historical quirks, econometrics developed as almost a separate field from statistics for decades, and economists have often looked at statistical problems with a fresh eye, and had insights that people working in the mainstream of statistics and biostatistics might have missed. In my own work, biostatistics-flavored bioinformatics, I've often found myself referring to the econometric literature.

I have no idea if any of this applies to Taleb, though. Certainly TFA doesn't strike me as a particularly profound example of statistical reasoning ...

The replacement the article proposes (mean absolute deviation or MAD) is also only particularly meaningful if you're dealing with a symmetric distribution, so it really doesn't address the problem you identify.

Okay, since cancer research is a very large field, I can't say for sure one way or the other ... but I do know that working in bioinformatics at a major academic research center, I've never known a single person in medical research of any kind who called themselves a "data scientist." We have lots of computer scientists and statisticians, most of whom, fortunately, get along well enough to make use of each other's strengths. Regarding particle physics I have no idea, but yeah, I'm willing to bet Amazon or any other large corporation hires more "data scientists" than all the scientific institutions in the world put together--and gets exactly the kind of buzzword bingo they're paying for in return.

As it happens, one of my colleagues runs a project which, among other things, does exactly that. His PhD is in computer science. I'm a bioinformaticist with a background primarily in biostatistics; I couldn't develop a tool like that, but I can certainly see the value in it. In general, I'm not arguing that the tasks currently getting lumped together under "data science" aren't valuable. I'm just saying that I'm not convinced they fit together into a coherent field that can meaningfully be studied in a single degree program, and attempts to make them so may well run into the problem of "jack of all trades, master of none."

Given that most of the buzz about "data science" seems to be in the business world, I'd say it's more lilkely they're corporate hacks working for the propaganda machine that's so effective on suckers like you.

If there are "data scientists" who don't understand what the standard deviation is, then they certainly shouldn't be calling themselves "data scientists," and quite possibly not scientists at all. What subjects are their PhDs in, I wonder? This doesn't do anything to reduce my skepticism that such a thing as "data science" really needs to exist.

Of course it was. :)

I'm sure he wants to crack down on people's freedom of expression, but his comments are so bizarre that I'm not at all convinced he knows what he's talking about. "Ignorant" and "evil" are not mutually exclusive, which I suppose is better for the rest of us ... Anyway, there's no need to bring age into it. Politicians of any age are much of a muchness.

The combination of your post and your .sig is sadly hilarious.