Tag: Data science

Notes on the book “Becoming a Data Head”

Below are notes that I took when reading Alex J. Gutman and Jordan Goldmeier's book "Becoming a Data Head - How to Think, Speak, and Understand Data Science, Statistics, and Machine Learning". The notes simply aim to summarise the parts of the book that most attracted my attention, sometimes reworded or reorganised, and don’t necessarily … Continue reading Notes on the book “Becoming a Data Head” →

Lessons from what happened before Snow’s famous cholera map changed the world

Anyone who studies any amount of the history of, or the best practice for, data visualisation will almost certainly come across a handful of "classic" vizzes. These specific transformations of data-into-diagram have stuck with us through the mists of time in order to become examples that teachers, authors, conference speakers and the like repeatedly pick … Continue reading Lessons from what happened before Snow’s famous cholera map changed the world →

Kaggle now offers free public dataset and script combos

Kaggle, a company most famous for facilitating competitions that allow organisations to solicit the help of teams of data scientists to solve their problems in return for a nice big prize, recently introduced a new section useful even for the less competitive types: "Kaggle Datasets". Here they host "high quality public datasets" you can access for free. … Continue reading Kaggle now offers free public dataset and script combos →

Beware! Killer robots swim among us

In a further sign of humanity's inevitable journey towards dystopia, live trials of an autonomous sea-based killer robot made the news recently. If all goes well, it could be released into the wild within a couple of months. Here's a picture. Notice it's cute little foldy-out arm at the bottom, which happens to contain the necessary ingredients to … Continue reading Beware! Killer robots swim among us →

From restaurant-snobbery to racism: some perils of data-driven decision-making

Wired recently wrote a piece explaining how now OpenTable, a leading "reserve a restuarant over the internet" service, was starting to permit customers to pay for their meal via an app at their leisure, rather than flag down a waiter and awkwardly fiddle around with credit cards. There's an obvious convenience to this for the … Continue reading From restaurant-snobbery to racism: some perils of data-driven decision-making →

Data science vs rude Lego

Data science moves onwards each day, helping (perhaps) solve more and more of the world's problems. But apparently there's at least one issue for which we don't have a great machine-learning/AI solution for just yet - identifying penises made out of Lego. Indeed this is apparently the problem that plagued the potential-Minecraft-beater "Lego Universe" nearly … Continue reading Data science vs rude Lego →

Behind the scenes of the FiveThirtyEight UK general election forecasting model

Here in the UK we're about to go to the polls to elect some sort of government in just a few weeks. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight team are naturally on the case in providing their famously accurate election forecasts.  They were kind enough to explain again the methodology being used in this blog post by Ben Lauderdale. Go … Continue reading Behind the scenes of the FiveThirtyEight UK general election forecasting model →