Host: For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics — “I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.” The rising stature of statisticians, who can earn $125,000 at top companies in their first year after getting a doctorate, is a byproduct of the recent explosion of digital data. In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of…

Host: Tracking News via Cyberspace — There are other kinds of media trackers. Cornell University researchers, for example, have developed MemeTracker, which maps the daily news cycle by grabbing repeated quotations from one million online sources. (A meme is anything — an idea, a phrase — that spreads by imitation from one person to another.) Its graphs, which can be viewed at memetracker.org, display the reports that are…

Host: When NASA Defined Long Island — Still, there’s something bittersweet about it all, particularly as Long Island gropes around for a new economic engine and a forward-looking cultural identity. In the public mind, Long Island was once Gatsby and the shore and the romance of flight. Now it’s ...what? At worst it’s Joey Buttafuoco, the most iconic Long Islander of recent decades. At best, in the vision of Thomas R. Suozzi, the…

Host: What can go wrong with a Pitot tube? — Long before the crash, Airbus had recommended that airlines replace parts, called Pitot tubes, that scoop in air to help planes measure their air speed. The company said in its new message that for now, airlines could continue flying with older Pitot tubes. [url]

Host: Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration — “Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime. “People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest…

Host: Is Facebook Growing Up Too Fast? — That’s a change that may irk users like Ms. Rabban, who don’t like how busy their pages have become. Facebook executives counter that it will help users share more information, and that they will eventually come to appreciate it, just as they have with previous changes that were initially jarring. “It’s not a democracy,” Mr. Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build…