I am from the mathematics community on StackExchange. I should say that I know absolutely nothing in statistics. I have never taken a statistics course or read any book on it. I am familiar with basic probability theory though, because it is a mathematics subject. After all probability is an application of real analysis to finite measure spaces, and the subject of probability has a rigorous mathematical foundation to it. But what about statistics?   I view statistics as a way to derive quantitative results from observable data. (Please correct me if this is an inaccurate description of statistics.) This is why statistics is very valuable to scientists whose work entirely consists of observable data. But mathematics is entirely non-empirical. None of the major mathematicians of the last century, or the current one, (at least that I know of), know any statistics. This is why I am asking if you, statisticians, agree with the statement that, "statistics is a numerical branch of science, rather than mathematics".   Now I understand that statisticians use mathematics, sometimes even advanced results. But does not necessarily make them mathematics. Physicists use a lot of mathematics too, but they are not mathematicians. For them mathematics is a means to solve some other problem, it is not the math that inherently interests them.
Is stats maths or not?   Given that it's all numbers, mostly taught by maths departments and you get maths credits for it, I wonder whether people just mean it half-jokingly when they say it, like saying it's a minor part of maths, or just applied maths.   I wonder if something like statistics, where you can't build everything on basic axioms can be considered maths. For example, the $p$-value, which is a concept that arose to make sense of data, but it's not a logical consequence of more basic principles.
How is canon determined for the works set in the world of ASOIAF? Bias of maximum likelihood estimators for logistic regression What should we do with old, very popular closed questions? Motivated by the deletion of     On one hand, I disagree with these closures, because:  These questions were (and still are) very popular They have some good information in them (or at least the first one does) and it feels like bad sportsmanship to remove good information from the internet, particularly when it was contributed by your fellow users  Number 2 in particular bothers me. A lot. On the other hand, I do agree that:  The community of 10k users should be able to decide which closed questions they wish to delete on their own without me intervening These questions should definitely remain closed, because they either have an absurd # of answers, or are duplicates (though some duplicates ). Which means they are eligible for deletion … forever. These questions wouldn't survive more than 10 minutes if asked today on Stack Overflow, so in some ways they are artifacts from the past, like dinosaurs in an era of mammals.  There is some related discussion in:   While I normally favor code solutions here, I am not sure I like the idea that once a question gets 400 upvotes it should become extremely difficult to delete. It feels like mob rule. Official policy on the blog: Academic rank equivalence between the UK and the US systems How do I iterate over the words of a string? Is it possible to create bootable linux on USB drive using windows command line? How would you make a comma-separated string from a list of strings? What would be your preferred way to concatenate strings from a sequence such that between every two consecutive pairs a comma is added. That is, how do you map, for instance, ['a', 'b', 'c'] to 'a,b,c'? (The cases ['s'] and [] should be mapped to 's' and '', respectively.)  I usually end up using something like ''.join(map(lambda x: x+',',l))[:-1], but also feeling somewhat unsatisfied. Why commutator subgroup is normal to G? If $G$ is a group and $G'$ is generated by $\{xyx^{-1}y^{-1}|x,y\in G\}$, then $G'\trianglelefteq G$ and  $G/G'$ is Abelian.  At first, I thought this is easy because I thought $g[x,y]g^{-1}=[gxg^{-1},gyg^{-1}]$. But it was a mistake. I could not prove that it is also subgroup of G and $G/G'$ is abelian. I need help. How to make dot match newline characters using regular expressions Notation and the name choice for meet and join (in order theory) I have two simple questions:   From where do the names  come from? I don't see any intuition between those names in context of order theory. From where does the notation come? I have to admit, I always had an impression that notation we use is somewhat backwards... just take the look at the picture at the wikipedia!    I used this notation a lot of times and I have to admit that often I have to stop for a minute and convince myself that I'm indeed using it right. I'm hoping that learning a bit about origin and context of name choice and notation will make it easier. How do I restore .bat files association with the system (make them run when double-clicked)? Both the Romulans and the Federation have regularly violated the Treaty when it suits them. Starfleet has obviously developed and manufactured cloaking/stealth technology and the Romulans make regular excursions across the Neutral Zone. They obviously aren't declaring all-out war, so what penalties or sanctions have been imposed for violations?  -edit added for clarity-  Has either side ever 'punished' their own people for any violations of the Treaty? How can I obtain total number of points? What is the purpose of /home on a Mac? On Linux, (which I am used to), /home is the place where home folders live.  On a Mac, home is some kind of crazy mutant:  $ mount /dev/disk1 on / (hfs, local, journaled) devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse) map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse) map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)   Other than to be non-conformist, is there some purpose to this auto_home mount point?  Considering how it mucks up things that come right out of the box, there must be some wonderful thing that it accomplishes, but I can't figure out what that would be..... In the magical world (in Harry Potter) can ghosts use magic?  Can magic be used on ghosts?  Or, once they become ghosts, can they interact with magic at all? Question about Casella and Berger's proof of MLE invariance In Casella and Berger, p. 320, they have a proof of the invariance of the MLE. Let $g: \theta \mapsto \eta$ be a function. They define the induced likelihood as  $$ L^*(\eta \mid X) = \sup_{\{\theta: g(\theta) = \eta\}} L(\theta \mid X). $$  This ensures that $g$ is one-to-one with respect to the likelihood functions because if $g$ is not one-to-one, there may be multiple values of $\theta$ that map to a given $g(\theta) = \eta$.  Then they note  $$ \sup_{\eta} L^*(\eta \mid X) = \sup_{\eta} \sup_{\{\theta: g(\theta) = \eta\}} L(\theta \mid X) = \sup_{\theta} L(\theta \mid X). $$  The first equality just applies the definition of the MLE of $\eta$. However, the next inequality confuses me. They write,     The second inequality follows because the iterated maximization is equal to the unconditional maximization over $\theta$...   Can someone justify this claim or provide some intuition if the claim is supposed to obviously follow from definitions? If I wrote something in plperlu, when would that module be reloaded?  Every time the function ran?  The first time it ran?  Does the Perl DLL get unloaded if it hasn't been used in a while, and then after that it'd be another module reload? How do you make a torus 'telescope' open? So I have a torus, and I need it to "telescope" open -- kind of like Pacman's death animation, but with a torus instead of a sphere.  I'm very new to 3D modeling/animating so I really have no clue how to tackle this problem.  Any advice to help me get pointed in the right direction would be most appreciated :) switch a theme different per user role I plan to use the member plugin by Justin Tadlock  I wish to know if how could I, on the front side, auto switch to a theme according to a role status.. for example authors would have the site presented using theme 1 while editor would have the site presenter using theme 2  I would rather have 2 different theme rather than conditionals within one theme structure  Thank you in advance Often (via Google Now, or when searching for a solution to some problem), I'll open a question from a non-favourite site in the app. Sometimes, I'd like to see what else is going on in the site where the question was posted. Currently, I have one of two ways:   Via tag icon:   Click one of the tag icons beneath the title Delete the [tag] text (at which point, thankfully, the sorting changes to Active from Votes).  Via manually searching for the site, which is more cumbersome. I type in hard and Hardware Recommendations is the fourth entry (below Ask Different, Raspberry Pi and Arduino)! This more annoying for meta sites, where I have to pick Meta from the dropdown menu.   Can I pretty please have a way to head to the site directly from the question? Maybe:   the site name in the top bar could become clickable and lead to the site, or an option in the More menu?     This would be especially useful for Meta sites, where questions posted around the same time could be related. Interestingly enough, most questions that Google Now are for metas of sites I visit on occasion, but haven't pinned to the list.