Too Good to be True

Today's mini episode discusses the widely known optimization algorithm gradient descent in the context of hiking in a foggy hillside.

8 Jan 201614min

This episode is a discussion of data visualization and a proposed New Year's resolution for Data Skeptic listeners. Let's kill the word cloud.

1 Jan 201615min

Today's episode is a reading of Isaac Asimov's The Machine that Won the War. I can't think of a story that's more appropriate for Data Skeptic.

25 Dec 201514min

In this interview with Aaron Halfaker of the Wikimedia Foundation, we discuss his research and career related to the study of Wikipedia. In his paper The Rise and Decline of an open Collaboration Com...

18 Dec 201542min

Today's topic is term frequency inverse document frequency, which is a statistic for estimating the importance of words and phrases in a set of documents.

11 Dec 201510min

Early astronomers could see several of the planets with the naked eye. The invention of the telescope allowed for further understanding of our solar system. The work of Isaac Newton allowed later scie...

4 Dec 201541min

Today's episode discusses the accuracy paradox. There are cases when one might prefer a less accurate model because it yields more predictive power or better captures the underlying causal factors des...

27 Nov 201517min

... or should this have been called data science from a neuroscientist's perspective? Either way, I'm sure you'll enjoy this discussion with Laurie Skelly. Laurie earned a PhD in Integrative Neuroscie...

20 Nov 201540min