Influential People in the "Big Data" Field

Yesterday, Haydn Shaughnnessy wrote a piece for Forbes titled, Who are the Top 20 Influencers in Big Data?

Fans of R will be delighted to see David Smith of Revolution Analytics up there at number 2!

Congratulations!

© 2012, David E. Giles

Minimizing the Length of a Confidence Interval

Right now I'm teaching an introductory course on statistical inference for Economics students. We've been dealing with confidence intervals, starting off (as usual) with one for the mean of a Normal population.

For a given confidence level, the shorter the interval is, the more "informative" it is. The question that then arises is how to make the interval as short as possible, everything else being equal? Good question!