Morning Headlines 3/31/14

Maryland set to replace troubled health exchange with Connecticut’s system

Maryland’s $125 million health insurance exchange website is being called “broken beyond repair” and will be shut down and replaced by the Deloitte-built system that Connecticut is successfully using.

Morgan Stanley Reveals Stocks on Takeover Target

Cerner is included in a Morgan Stanley report which looks at financial and market sector data to predict which companies are acquisition or takeover candidates this year.

Big data: are we making a big mistake?

A Financial Times article explores the state of ‘big data,’ warning that building larger datasets does not guarantee that statisticians will unlock exciting new answers from them. To illustrate that ‘big data’ comes second to good data, the article cites two presidential polling surveys from the Landon vs. Roosevelt 1936 election. One poll surveyed 3,000 voters and correctly predicted that Roosevelt would win, while the other surveyed 2.4 million voters and incorrectly predicted that Landon would win. The 3,000 sample-size survey called the election correctly because the researchers focused their efforts on building a clean and unbiased sample set, rather than building a massive sample set and assuming its size would correct for any statistical bias.

Medical First: 3-D Printed Skull Successfully Implanted in Woman

A 22-year-old woman in the Netherlands is the first person to receive a 3D plastic scull implant. The woman suffered from a condition that was causing her skull to thicken, leading to severe headaches and total loss of vision. Once the replacement skull was implanted, the woman’s vision returned and her and headaches stopped.