On the purported “stanford phd” on the second linkedin page: here are the 1500 or so stanford phds from 2008: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&f%5Bgenre_ssim%5D%5B%5D=Thesis%2FDissertation&per_page=100&range%5Bpub_year_tisim%5D%5Bbegin%5D=2006&range%5Bpub_year_tisim%5D%5Bend%5D=2010&search_field=dummy_range&view=list&range%5Bpub_year_tisim%5D%5Bbegin%5D=2008&range%5Bpub_year_tisim%5D%5Bend%5D=2008&commit=Apply

and here are the 32 published by the CS dept: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bauthor_other_facet%5D%5B%5D=Stanford+University.+Computer+Science+Department&f%5Bgenre_ssim%5D%5B%5D=Thesis%2FDissertation&per_page=100&range%5Bpub_year_tisim%5D%5Bbegin%5D=2008&range%5Bpub_year_tisim%5D%5Bend%5D=2008&search_field=dummy_range&view=list

I actually checked 2006-2010. No Cordan.

Granville is a blowhard – his comments on primes are laughable (“prime factorisation via data analytics”), and his suggestion that one might use a “fast” calculation of pi to generate pseudorandom numbers shows a deplorable lack of computer science knowledge (any first year CS student could prove that that cannot cost less than O(n) time per random number extracted from the sequence – and O(n) space to track the state required to calculate a sequence of length n – whereas there are plenty of existing (good) generators that are O(1) in each).

I’ve occasionally landed on one or another of his “data science inventions” (eg: “hidden decision trees”) which, on close inspection, have turned out to be either pedestrian (insofar as his descriptions can be deciphered) or garbage.

Kudos on your diligent expose and factual tone throughout. It makes the facts impossible to ignore.

I’m pretty sure that problematic vaccination article is still up under Vincent Granville’s name (which is good since he actually wrote it).

Thanks for the positive feedback!

Wow! Thanks for reporting the incident!

Them emailed back today… they deleted him! Both the personal and company profile.

…wow!! I guess nothing should surprise me anymore on this site.

“I don’t mind if my neighbor’s 8-year old kid is in a wheelchair and will never walk or talk and requires lots of medical care and special education (it’s my neighbor’s problem, not mine, I never mentioned such kids should not be allowed to live)” – what if he had a child that was wheelchair-bound himself, would he see him or her as a “problem”??

Yeah totally terrible that he posted that under a fake woman’s account. I notice the comment about discrimination still being “allowed” for women. No wonder he used “feminist” as an insult in his rant against me.

I’m glad to create a sane space! The thing that upset me the most about Data Science Central is that prominent people in the community were/are sharing their posts, and therefore the site is ranked highly in search results and seen as a “centralized resource” for newcomers to data science, and newbies (like I was) will subscribe to the site (like I did) and be turned off by it after slowly realizing it’s not valuable content to a new data science learner, and often downright “bizarre” as you said. The last thing I want to happen is women that want to join this profession get turned off by seeing “leaders” in the industry talk like he does! (or actually think a female data science blogger, seen as respected with so many connections on DSC, would write a thing like that!)

Anyway, thanks for the info! And welcome :)

Thanks again.

Here’s Amy’s DSC profile from archive.org for posterity:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150315040635/http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profile/Amy
The LinkedIN profile wasn’t archived.

There was this gem from the same post…a comment from “Data Science Girl.” The screen shot was of poor quality so I just grabbed the text:

“Just to clarify – I do not condone eugenics. If this is what you think, then I guess I did not express myself clearly. My point was about debunking the myth that anti-vaxers are the only ones being egoist (by being careless about spreading deadly diseases), offering a different perspective and showing that indeed, pro-vaxers are just as egoist because of the consequences discussed in my article.

Also, I guess it applies mainly to US, where the handicapped lobby is very powerful and non-handicapped kids in schools are discriminated against handicapped ones (in terms of tax dollars allocated per kid). Severely handicapped are entitled by federal law to much more expensive educational services and funding in public schools. Why spend all this money on kids who will never talk or read or write, rather than on African American kids who are disproportionally found in under-funded school districts? The issue is compounded by the incredibly high cost of healthcare in US. While it is now politically correct to say that you don’t want to pay high insurance premiums because of smokers, it is not politically correct to say that you don’t want to pay high insurance premiums because of people who generate huge health expenditures over many years. Yet that’s how it works with car insurance: you cause many accidents, you pay more.

I don’t mind if my neighbor’s 8-year old kid is in a wheelchair and will never walk or talk and requires lots of medical care and special education (it’s my neighbor’s problem, not mine, I never mentioned such kids should not be allowed to live), but I do mind if I have to pay for this, via taxes (special education) or increased health insurance premiums (though I did not have health insurance till now, but now it’s mandatory and everyone pays the same except smokers, woman and older people, for whom discrimination is still allowed). That’s the flip side of the coin that few people see.”

Utterly bizarre. And as a mother to girl on the Autism Spectrum, “her” swipe at Special Ed funding fully engaged my rage station.

Thanks again for shining a light…and thanks for giving those screen shots a permanent home. I’m following you on Twitter and just subscribed to your Women in Stats/Data Science list. Best of luck to you and thanks for creating a sane space…haters gonna hate!

Wow, you’re right, he totally deleted “Amy” and that article… maybe all of her articles? She was formerly listed as one of the top bloggers on the site. I guess he decided not to keep posting under her name now that the cat was out of the bag about her being a made-up person.
http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profile/Amy

The vaccination article still comes up in the site’s search results at the moment (as does Amy’s profile link), probably because the metadata is indexed, but when you click through, the links are dead. Her name is still on the “top DSC bloggers” list here, but the links are broken:
http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/200-top-bloggers-on-data-science-central

Wowwwww….. look what happened to Amy Cordan’s LinkedIN profile! He took away the name, the fake PhD and fake activities and everything… I wonder how those 50 people feel that endorsed Amy and now look like they’re endorsing “Data Geek” with no profile!
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=262678435

Here are screenshots from a year ago when I first posted about this:
https://www.becomingadatascientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/amy_cordan_1.png
https://www.becomingadatascientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/amy_cordan_2.png
And now:
https://www.becomingadatascientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/amy_data_geek.jpg

This sure is confirmation that we were correct about “her”!

Hi Tangentgirl,

Thanks.

Yes I have seen that post before and I couldn’t believe that he was basically saying that if we didn’t vaccinate, the “weaker” children would die and we would have a lower incidence of autism, etc., while also criticizing the analysts. And while saying that *they* make data scientists look bad – ugh. I have chalked it up to the general craziness and sketchiness that is so often displayed on the site. There is similar “sketchy analysis” that will generate the “are you really going to post this on a public site?” related to tax evasion and other disconcerting topics. Worse, he posts it under “fake Amy”, probably so if the controversial topic creates a negative reaction, he can just blame “her” and take it down. Don’t be surprised if your DSC account gets suspended or your twitter account gets blocked by @datasciencectrl. His method of dealing with those that disagree with him appears to be “silence the naysayers”.

Thanks for sharing the screenshots. You linked to your whole twitter account, and the tweets there will move down your timeline, so I’m going to post the full links to the tweets with the images below.

Renee

Screenshots of anti-vaccination article from Tangentgirl:
https://twitter.com/derivative_of_f/status/619742869268488192
https://twitter.com/derivative_of_f/status/619742971458531330

Sorry you had to go through this! Something about DSC and Vincent always rubbed me the wrong way. Then they re-tweeted a post regarding vaccines that made my jaw drop (I have a recently acquired M.S. in Biostatistics and am a Public Health fan girl). I went back to show the post to a friend and the post, and all signs of “Data Science Girl” were gone. Screen shots at https://twitter.com/derivative_of_f