Mr Heckman confronted the sample-selection problem: in terms of the examples just given, for instance, the effect on the results if the workers who answered the questionnaire differed in important ways from those who did not.

ECONOMIST: Economics focus

Startups with fewer than 30 employees will be able to submit competition proposals describing their data problem and providing a sample of their data.

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With his new site, Norgard wants to solve the problem of having to sample millions of online videos to find the ones you actually want to watch.

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The first step was to figure out the dimensions of the problem, which required analyzing a sample of Examiner stories and dividing them into four categories: very good or better (20 percent of the sample), good (30 percent), acceptable (20 percent) and poor (30 percent).

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But trust me on this: This is a very, very small sample of a much larger category - much larger problem.

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Before genomics data was offered in the cloud, researchers had to download all the data for a given human sample and discard those portions not applicable to their research problem.

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Faced with the problem that DNA gathered at the scene did not match any sample in the national DNA database, they tried what is known as "ancestral DNA profiling".

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The problem was getting enough people to use the devices, leading broadcasters to complain sample sizes were too small to be reliable.

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