devilsdounut's comments

devilsdounut | 10 years ago | on: Biomedical superstars are signing on with Google

Not sure 50k-90k for PhDs from top programs is really the case anymore. Companies hiring for data-science type jobs have always been pulling from the pool of quantitative PhDs, and as a result the pharma/genomics companies have been forced to raise salaries. Pure bench scientists would potentially have that kind of range, but anything quantitative is going to be much higher. This being said, there is a huge gap between those purely experimental scientists and the quantitative ones who have many non-science options.

devilsdounut | 11 years ago | on: Why Topological Data Analysis Works

I'd love to see a success story of this type of analysis outside of their canned examples. I keep seeing them use the same datasets over and over again without any real benchmarks to state of the art. Its amazing how a data product is being sold without any empirical studies or benchmark datasets.

Ayasdi seems successful to me in that it has a lot of flash and their results make intuitive sense, but I don't understand how a practicing data scientist would use this.

devilsdounut | 11 years ago | on: CrowdMed: We've solved hundreds of the world's most difficult medical cases

This brings up a big issue with this type of gamification. If someone prescribes a solution which has a superficial short term effect (think painkillers, etc), they may be rewarded in 'points' (e.g. money) because the patient is able to see a direct effect. This would reward treating symptoms rather than the underlying problem and could result in sub-optimal treatment. Unless this website is planning on adjusting rewards based on long term effects on the order of years, I'm not sure how this would be avoided.

EDIT: etc, as in et cetera

devilsdounut | 11 years ago | on: Which Is Closer: Local Beer or Local Whiskey?

I like Mathematica... while their magic functions don't exactly work for much outside of their demo's, it gives good fodder for open source projects to eventually borrow from. IPython would not be where it is right now with its killer notebook interface and interactive plots if it were not for them borrowing some key ideas from Mathematica.
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