T-Shirts!!
The Becoming a Data Scientist tees are ready to sell! I ordered a couple myself before posting them for sale, to make sure the quality was good. They came out great!! And if you order from Teespring before MarchApril 1 using this link: Becoming a Data Scientist Store – Free Shipping, you’ll get free shipping on your order! The design is a combination of those submitted to our contest by Amarendranath “Amar” Reddy and Ryne & Alexis.
PyData DC 2016 Talk
I just got back from PydataDC, where I learned a lot, had fun, and met a bunch of awesome people! I’ll definitely write about it more later, but I wanted to share my slides here since I told the attendees they could find them on my website. I got good feedback on the talk, and I’m so glad that my message resonated with some people! The talk was recorded and video should be out within a few weeks! Here are the slides: Becoming a Data Scientist – Advice from my Podcast Guests and the slide notes. Update 10/26: Here is the recording of my talk, with a playlist of other talks from PyData...
Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Episode 13: Debbie Berebichez
In this interview, we meet physicist Debbie Berebichez, who you might recognize from her TEDx talks, her appearances in Discovery Channel’s Outrageous Acts of Science and other TV shows! Debbie grew up in Mexico City and was discouraged by her family and teachers from studying science, but later went on to become the first Mexican woman to get a PhD in physics from Stanford, and is now Chief Data Scientist at Metis Data Science Bootcamp in New York.
Podcast Audio Links:
Link to podcast Episode 13 audio
Podcast’s RSS feed for podcast subscription apps
Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Episode 12: Data Science Learning Club Members
Verena, David, Kerry, and Anthony are members of the Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast Data Science Learning Club! They appear in the order in which they joined the club, and each discuss their starting points before joining, their participation in the activities, and advice they have for new data science learners.
Podcast Audio Links:
Link to podcast Episode 12 audio
Podcast’s RSS feed for podcast subscription apps
Podcast on Stitcher
Podcast on iTunes
Podcast Video Playlist:
Youtube playlist of interview videos
More about the Data Science Learning Club:
Data Science Learning Club Welcome Message
Becoming A Data Scientist Podcast Episode 01: Will Kurt
Note: The video is the interview only. The audio podcast has the intro, interview, and data science learning club activity explanation.
In this episode we meet Will Kurt, who talks about his path from English & Literature and Library & Information Science degrees to becoming the Lead Data Scientist at KISSmetrics. He also tells us about his probability blog, Count Bayesie, and I introduce Data Science Learning Club Activity 1. Will has some great advice for people learning data science!
Podcast Audio Links:
Link to podcast Episode 1 audio
Podcast’s RSS feed for podcast subscription apps
A Challenge to Data Scientists
As data scientists, we are aware that bias exists in the world. We read up on stories about how cognitive biases can affect decision-making. We know that, for instance, a resume with a white-sounding name will receive a different response than the same resume with a black-sounding name, and that writers of performance reviews use different language to describe contributions by women and men in the workplace. We read stories in the news about ageism in healthcare and racism in mortgage lending.
Data scientists are problem solvers at heart, and we love our data and our algorithms that sometimes seem to work like magic, so we may be inclined to try to solve these problems stemming from human bias by turning the decisions over to machines. Most people seem to believe that machines are less biased and more pure in their decision-making – that the data tells the truth, that the machines won’t discriminate.