

Engineering Statistics Handbook - brudgers
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/index.htm

======
616c
I have to say, NIST dudes are/were so underappreciated by the likes of me. Is
it just me?

I was in a LUG in the DC area and one of the dudes there was a NIST guy. His
use of Linux and Unix was not surprising, but when he would tangentially
mention what they were doing with their boxes I would always wonder: how the
hell do more people not pay attention to NIST? But maybe that is just me. I
have done a lot of sysadmin in the education industry, where we are famous for
listening to no one and being the butt of security nightmare jokes.

As someone who is weak in all post-high-school maths, and stats in general, I
have definitely bookmarked this for later. I did not care for stats until I
finally took my first true computation linguistics class, Statistical Methods
for NLP, and years of wannabe linguistics without math seemed pretty retarded
after that.

Thanks for a cool link.

~~~
loopbit
It's not just you.

I don't know how are things in the US, in Europe not many people even know
they exist. 10 years ago I was doing some work with biometric identification
and it turned out these guys had an open source system for fingerprint
recognition (including test data).

Not only they were incredibly helpful, they even sent me a couple of CDs with
all the information for free.

------
gtuckerkellogg
As good as that is, see this: [http://dlmf.nist.gov/](http://dlmf.nist.gov/),
the online companion to the truly epic NIST Handbook of Mathematical
Functions, itself the modern successor to Abramowitz and Stegun.

~~~
Bill_Dimm
That is a nice piece of work. If you click on any of the 3D graphs you can
grab them and drag to view from different angles. Very cool.

~~~
gtuckerkellogg
It (and the book on which it is based) are amazing. Virtually every older
applied mathematician has a copy of the original Abramowitz and Stegun, which
was supported by the National Bureau of Standards, prior to NIST. The
successor
([http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/mathematics/ab...](http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/mathematics/abstract-
analysis/nist-handbook-mathematical-functions)) is really an incredible
achievement. The reviews are hilarious. One notes "The book is quite heavy;
for convenience, one might be inclined to place it on a stand, as with an
unabridged dictionary". Another review begins "This is like trying to review
the bible".

The online version also lets you get LaTeX for everything, and has many other
features. But the print version is a thing of beauty.

In full disclosure, the Editor in Chief and Mathematics Editor, who devoted
the last 13 years of his professional life to the project, was my stepfather.

------
arcanus
I worked at NIST about 10 years ago, for a summer internship in the Physics
division.

Absolutely top notch scientists, some good facilities, a decent budget and
very well scoped research objectives. Management was also largely hands-off.
Great place to work.

------
bmh100
Looking at the chapter on Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), it mentions that
"EDA techniques are generally graphical. They include scatter plots, character
plots, box plots, histograms, bihistograms, probability plots, residual plots,
and mean plots."

There is another term for EDA, and it has a whole industry built around it:
business intelligence (BI). BI is focused on aggregating data from operational
systems (OLTP) and producing new systems optimized for analytics and decision
making (OLAP). Top products in this space include: QlikView, Cognos, Tableau,
Hana, etc. One can make a decent hourly rate working as a consultant in these
systems.

------
amelius
Okay, I read through the first few pages and it seems to me that this is a
difficult presentation, where facts are presented before they are explained.

~~~
ska
This is a common difference between presentation for reference and for
pedagogy.

It is extremely difficult to write well for both purposes, so good examples
are rare (c.f. Kernigan & Ritchie)

~~~
brudgers
I agree about the difficulty in serving two masters and that _The C
Programming Language_ is well written in this regard. Most authors are
unfortunately not in position to authoritatively declare portions of a subject
undefined and get away with it. K&R is not really so much a handbook as a
specification. Its strength is that it often specifies by showing rather than
describing.

------
morenoh149
This brings back memories of when I would program in R at undergrad.
Bookmarked.

------
likeachamp17
Of course most of the so-called engineers who read this site (programmers
w/out engineering degrees) have no use for stats.

