Q 01/05

The Student's t-test, a staple of data analysis, was devised to monitor beer quality at which brewery?

A) Carlsberg

B) Guinness

C) Heineken

D) Whitbread

Answer · why

B) Guinness

Guinness preferred its staff to publish under pen names, so William Sealy Gosset signed his 1908 paper as Student. His test was built for judging barl...

Q 02/05

Which famous Victorian drew rose-shaped polar area diagrams of soldiers' deaths in a Crimean War hospital?

A) Florence Nightingale

B) Isambard Kingdom Brunel

C) Mary Seacole

D) Edwin Chadwick

Answer · why

A) Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale's charts made a grim point: ten times more soldiers died of disease than of battle wounds. She went on to become the first female...

Q 03/05

Hadoop, the big-data framework, was named by creator Doug Cutting after his young son's toy of which animal?

A) Giraffe

B) Kangaroo

C) Elephant

D) Penguin

Answer · why

C) Elephant

Elephant it was: Doug Cutting was working at Yahoo when he borrowed the toy's name. The software had begun life inside Nutch, an open-source web searc...

Q 04/05

Scientists renamed 27 human genes by 2020 because which software kept turning symbols such as MARCH1 into dates?

A) SPSS

B) MATLAB

C) Stata

D) Excel

Answer · why

D) Excel

Excel read MARCH1 as 1-Mar and SEPT2 as 2-Sep, a problem geneticists first reported in 2004. The naming committee finally changed MARCH1 to MARCHF1 an...

Q 05/05

Kaggle's 'start here' contest for machine learning beginners asks who survived which maritime disaster?

A) Titanic

B) Lusitania

C) Britannic

D) Andrea Doria

Answer · why

A) Titanic

Titanic passenger records are the raw material. The challenge, subtitled Machine Learning from Disaster, is pitched as a first project for getting fam...