Bryan Tong

STA 210 Extra Credit Assignment

Video: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Public Work by David Robinson

The topic of this talk, as its name suggests, is the importance and effectiveness of public

work, specifically in the statistics and data science community. David Robinson elaborates on

the benefits of collaboration when dealing with code or data science-related problems, and

expands not just on his own experience but the experience of many others throughout their

journey as data scientists.

One comment that I found particularly interesting and unexpected by David Robinson is

the statistic that a blog post will, on average, be read 10-100 more times than a published paper.

In my personal experience, I have definitely read or at least skimmed more scientific papers than

blog posts, which may simply be a result of my specific tastes, but either way I was still

surprised at this statistic. This goes to show how important it is to publicly share one’s work, no

matter how insignificant it may be, because of the possibility of it reaching so many more people

than if that information was contained only in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

This event connects to the entire use of GitHub in STA 210 this semester. One of the

fundamental aspects of this talk was to encourage collaboration and open-source ideas, which is

one of the key purposes of GitHub besides version control. In class, we have been using GitHub

in order to maintain our group’s R code, further showing how GitHub is essential in fostering

collaboration in the data science community. In addition, GitHub contains many public

repositories from a multitude of users, which allows anyone with a GitHub account to view their

code and ideas. Again, this ties into one of the central ideas of David Robinson’s talk where he

highlights how new findings and research in the scientific community largely builds upon the

ability to provide free and public access to important code and insights produced by others.

Without GitHub, a lot of code would be housed in private databases and communities, which
Bryan Tong
STA 210 Extra Credit Assignment
would significantly reduce the extent to which we are able to foster growth and innovation in this

world today.

Something new I learned is that there is a package in R, blogdown, that gives you the

tools necessary to create a blog or website in R markdown. The introduction of this package goes

to show how important and critical the rise of open-source collaboration has become, as a lot of

the blogs that are being created using this package are data-related blogs, where authors analyze

a dataset or even just talk about new advances in the data science community. By creating

blogdown, the authors are now equipping more and more people with the ability to contribute

code and insight to the community, with the hope of ultimately using the collective contributions

of as many data scientists as possible to provide the most state-of-the-art and innovative

solutions to some of the problems we face today.