Data Maven from Crunchzilla: A light introduction to statistics

Crunchzilla just launched Data Maven!

Data Maven from Crunchzilla is a light introduction to statistics and data analysis.

For too many teens and adults, if they think about statistics at all, they think it's boring, tedious, or too hard. Too many people have had the experience of trying to learn statistics, only to get bogged down in probability, theory, and math, without feeling that they were able to do anything with it.

Instead, your first exposure to statistics should be fun, interesting, and mostly easy. Data Maven from Crunchzilla is more of a game than a tutorial. To play, you answer questions and solve problems using real data. Statistics is your tool, and data provides your answers. At the end of Data Maven, you'll not only know a bit about statistics, but also maybe even start to think of statistics as fun!

Like programming, statistics and data analysis are tools that make you more powerful. If you know how to use these tools, you can do things and solve problems others cannot. Increasingly, across many fields, people who understand statistics and data analysis can know more, learn more, and discover more.

Data Maven is not a statistics textbook. It is not a statistics class. It is an introduction. Data Maven demystifies statistics. Teens and adults who try Data Maven build their intuition and spark their curiosity for statistics and data.

Please try Data Maven yourself! And please tell others you know who might enjoy it too!

Update: Six years later, Data Maven is mostly shut down, missing from crunchzilla.com if you go to it, but still available if you go directly to the URL for Data Maven. Unfortunately, Data Maven was never popular. And it seems it may have distracted from the coding lessons of Code Monster, Code Maven, and Game Maven. So now it is mostly shut down. I hope someone else will give teaching more kids and adults about statistics. It's hard to make easy and fun, and it's important, especially nowadays.

More quick links

Some of the best of what I've been thinking about lately:

• Great TED talk titled "The mathematics of love", but probably should be titled "A data analysis of love" ([1])
  
  
• Manned submarines are about to become obsolete and be replaced by underwater drones ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "No other algorithm scaled up like these nets ... It was a just a question of the amount of data and the amount of computations." ([1] [2])
  
  
• What Google has done is a little like taking a person who's never heard a sound before, not to mention ever hearing language before, and trying to have them learn how to transcribe English speech ([1] [2])
  
  
• Teaching a computer to achieve expert level play of old video games by mimicking some of the purpose of sleep ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Computers are actually better at object recognition than humans now" ([1] [2] [3] [4])
  
  
• The goal of Google Glass was a "remembrance agent" that acts as a second memory and gives helpful information recommendations in real time ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• A new trend, large VC investments in artificial intelligence ([1])
  
  
• "Possibly the largest bank theft the world has seen" done using malware ([1])
  
  
• "Users will prioritise immediate gain, and tend to dismiss consequences with no immediate visible effect" ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Crowds can't be trusted". It's "really a game of spamfighting". ([1] [2])
  
  
• SMBC comic: "All we have to do is build a trustworthiness rating system for all humans" ([1])
  
  
• Dilbert describes most business books: "He has no idea why he succeeded" ([1])
  
  
• Architect Clippy: "I see you have a poorly structured monolith. Would you like me to convert it into a poorly structured set of microservices?" ([1])
  
  
• Man kicks robot dog. Watching the video, doesn't it make you feel like the man is being cruel? The motion of the robot struggling to regain its balance is so lifelike that it triggers an emotional response. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• SMBC comic: "Are we ever going to use math in real life?" ([1])