Data Skeptic

Nicole Goebel joins us this week to share her experiences in oceanography studying phytoplankton and other aspects of the ocean and how data plays a role in that science.   We also discuss Thinkful ...

13 Mar 201533min

This episode explores Ordinary Least Squares or OLS - a method for finding a good fit which describes a given dataset.

6 Mar 201518min

New York State approved the use of automated speed cameras within a specific range of schools. Tim Schmeier did an analysis of publically available data related to these cameras as part of a project a...

27 Feb 201516min

The k-means clustering algorithm is an algorithm that computes a deterministic label for a given "k" number of clusters from an n-dimensional datset.  This mini-episode explores how Yoshi, our lilac c...

20 Feb 201514min

Emre Sarigol joins me this week to discuss his paper Online Privacy as a Collective Phenomenon. This paper studies data collected from social networks and how the sharing behaviors of individuals can ...

13 Feb 201538min

The Chi-Squared test is a methodology for hypothesis testing. When one has categorical data, in the form of frequency counts or observations (e.g. Vegetarian, Pescetarian, and Omnivore), split into tw...

6 Feb 201517min

My quest this week is noteworthy a.i. researcher Randy Olson who joins me to share his work creating the Reddit World Map - a visualization that illuminates clusters in the reddit community based on u...

30 Jan 201529min

When dealing with dynamic systems that are potentially undergoing constant change, its helpful to describe what "state" they are in.  In many applications the manner in which the state changes from on...

23 Jan 201512min