Prominent economist Graeme Blackett has been appointed the new chair of Prosper, the Scottish membership organisation and think-tank. The appointment was announced in a press-release on the Prosper website. He takes over from Joanna Boag-Thomson.

Abdolnasser Hemmati has officially been reappointed as the governor of the Central Bank of Iran, replacing Mohammadreza Farzin. Hemmati has a prominent background in both economic and political fields, having previously served in various significant roles during different administrations.

Regression analysis is a key topic in economics, data science, and computer science, but its roots go further back than these disciplines. Sir Francis Galton is credited with the term, after studying the heights of parents and their children, and noticing that those heights tended to “regress” back towards the mean. That name became associated with this type of analysis, and has stuck, even though a more accurate name might have been something like “variance analysis”.We’ve written previously about what a regression analysis is. If you’re completely new to the idea of a regression, that’s a good place to start. In this article, we’ll look more closely at this tool in the data scientist’s, economist’s and statistician’s toolbox, to understand exactly what’s happening when we run one.