Susan Etlinger (September 2014) argues for the crucial role of cultivating critical thinking skills in the age of big data because “we have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past” thanks to the lightening speed at which we can process big data. She encourages data scientists to be clear about their hypotheses and methodologies so we can clearly following their thinking process and know which questions they asked, and didn’t ask, before coming to their conclusions. She also emphasizes the need to be aware of confirmation bias and cautions against making meaning of spurious correlations.

Susan Etlinger (September 2014) argues for the crucial role of cultivating critical thinking skills in the age of big data because “we have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past” thanks to the lightening speed at which we can process big data. She encourages data scientists to be clear about their hypotheses and methodologies so we can clearly following their thinking process and know which questions they asked, and didn’t ask, before coming to their conclusions. She also emphasizes the need to be aware of confirmation bias and cautions against making meaning of spurious correlations. PLEASE NOTE: The code to insert hyperlink into my RMarkdown file is bringing up an error message. I tried [Link] (https://www.b2bnn.com/2015/05/the-top-3-ted-talks-on-big-data/) and several variations thereof. After fiddling with different options for an hour, and finding no solutions online, I gave up. Please cut and paste the url.

(Note: Scroll to bottom of document for the graph of interest). This graph compares birth weights of babies born to smokers (blue, n=74) versus non-smokers (pink, n= 115) in counts. Birth weight is provided in grams (x-axis). By comparing the distributions of the two groups on the histogram, we can see that smokers tend to give birth to babies of lower weight compared to non-smokers. According to Stanford Children's Health, the term low birthweight is used to describe babies who are born weighing less than 2500 grams (http://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=low-birthweight-90-P02382). The low birth weight cutoff is indicated by the vertical red dotted line.

This dot chart displays the batting averages of the 25 top hitters from American and National Baseball Leagues in 2001 (data set from gcookbook). I wasn't sure how to rename the y axis label.