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PODCAST

Data Skeptic

The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.

technology mathematics

All Episodes

09:07

[MINI] Anscombe's Quartet

Data Skeptic ·

2015/06/12

This mini-episode discusses Anscombe's Quartet, a series of four datasets which are clearly very different but share some similar statistical properties with one another. For example, each of the four plots has the same mean and variance on both axis, as well as the same correlation coefficient, and same linear regression. The episode tries to add some context by imagining each of these datasets as data about a sports team, and why it can be important to look beyond basic summary statistics when

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30:49

Proposing Annoyance Mining

Data Skeptic ·

2015/06/09

A recent episode of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe included a slight rant by Dr. Novella and the rouges about a shortcoming in operating systems. This episode explores why such a (seemingly obvious) flaw might make sense from an engineering perspective, and how data science might be the solution. In this solo episode, Kyle proposes the concept of "annoyance mining" - the idea that with proper logging and enough feedback, data scientists could be provided the right dataset from which they can

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23:19

Preserving History at Cyark

Data Skeptic ·

2015/06/05

Elizabeth Lee from CyArk joins us in this episode to share stories of the work done capturing important historical sites digitally. CyArk is a non-profit focused on using technology to preserve the world's important historic and cultural locations digitally. CyArk's founder Ben Kacyra, a pioneer in 3D capture technology, and his wife, founded CyArk after seeing the need to preserve important artifacts and locations digitally before they are lost to natural disasters, human destruction, or the

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10:24

[MINI] A Critical Examination of a Study of Marriage...

Data Skeptic ·

2015/05/29

Linhda and Kyle review a New York Times article titled How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage. This article explores research about what correlates with the likelihood of being married by age 26 by county. Kyle and LinhDa discuss some of the fine points of this research and the process of identifying factors for consideration.

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44:35

Detecting Cheating in Chess

Data Skeptic ·

2015/05/22

With the advent of algorithms capable of beating highly ranked chess players, the temptation to cheat has emmerged as a potential threat to the integrity of this ancient and complex game. Yet, there are aspects of computer play that are measurably different than human play. Dr. Kenneth Regan has developed a methodology for looking at a long series of modes and measuring the likelihood that the moves may have been selected by an algorithm. The full transcript of this episode is well annotated and

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10:26

[MINI] z-scores

Data Skeptic ·

2015/05/15

This week's episode dicusses z-scores, also known as standard score. This score describes the distance (in standard deviations) that an observation is away from the mean of the population. A closely related top is the 68-95-99.7 rule which tells us that (approximately) 68% of a normally distributed population lies within one standard deviation of the mean, 95 within 2, and 99.7 within 3. Kyle and Linh Da discuss z-scores in the context of human height. If you'd like to calculate your own z-score

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34:47

Using Data to Help Those in Crisis

Data Skeptic ·

2015/05/08

This week Noelle Sio Saldana discusses her volunteer work at Crisis Text Line - a 24/7 service that connects anyone with crisis counselors. In the episode we discuss Noelle's career and how, as a participant in the Pivotal for Good program (a partnership with DataKind), she spent three months helping find insights in the messaging data collected by Crisis Text Line. These insights helped give visibility into a number of different aspects of Crisis Text Line's services. Listen to this episode to

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35:22

The Ghost in the MP3

Data Skeptic ·

2015/05/01

Have you ever wondered what is lost when you compress a song into an MP3? This week's guest Ryan Maguire did more than that. He worked on software to issolate the sounds that are lost when you convert a lossless digital audio recording into a compressed MP3 file. To complete his project, Ryan worked primarily in python using the pyo library as well as the Bregman Toolkit Ryan mentioned humans having a dynamic range of hearing from 20 hz to 20,000 hz, if you'd like to hear those tones, check the

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27:23

Data Fest 2015

Data Skeptic ·

2015/04/28

This episode contains converage of the 2015 Data Fest hosted at UCLA. Data Fest is an analysis competition that gives teams of students 48 hours to explore a new dataset and present novel findings. This year, data from Edmunds.com was provided, and students competed in three categories: best recommendation, best use of external data, and best visualization.

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15:47

[MINI] Cornbread and Overdispersion

Data Skeptic ·

2015/04/24

For our 50th episode we enduldge a bit by cooking Linhda's previously mentioned "healthy" cornbread. This leads to a discussion of the statistical topic of overdispersion in which the variance of some distribution is larger than what one's underlying model will account for.

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13:27

[MINI] Natural Language Processing

Data Skeptic ·

2015/04/17

This episode overviews some of the fundamental concepts of natural language processing including stemming, n-grams, part of speech tagging, and th bag of words approach.

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31:56

Computer-based Personality Judgments

Data Skeptic ·

2015/04/10

Guest Youyou Wu discuses the work she and her collaborators did to measure the accuracy of computer based personality judgments. Using Facebook "like" data, they found that machine learning approaches could be used to estimate user's self assessment of the "big five" personality traits: openness, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. Interestingly, the computer-based assessments outperformed some of the assessments of certain groups of human beings. Listen to the episode

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15:50

[MINI] Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Data Skeptic ·

2015/04/03

This episode explores how going wine testing could teach us about using markov chain monte carlo (mcmc).

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11:29

[MINI] Markov Chains

Data Skeptic ·

2015/03/20

This episode introduces the idea of a Markov Chain. A Markov Chain has a set of states describing a particular system, and a probability of moving from one state to another along every valid connected state. Markov Chains are memoryless, meaning they don't rely on a long history of previous observations. The current state of a system depends only on the previous state and the results of a random outcome. Markov Chains are a useful way method for describing non-deterministic systems. They are

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33:15

Oceanography and Data Science

Data Skeptic ·

2015/03/13

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 where Nicole and I are both mentors for the Introduction to Data Science course. Last but not least, check out Nicole's blog Data Science Girl and the videos Kyle mentioned on her Youtube channel featuring one on the diversity of phytoplankton and how that changes in time and space.

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18:07

[MINI] Ordinary Least Squares Regression

Data Skeptic ·

2015/03/06

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

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16:56

NYC Speed Camera Analysis with Tim Schmeier

Data Skeptic ·

2015/02/27

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 at the NYC Data Science Academy. Tim's work leverages several open data sets to ask the questions: are the speed cameras succeeding in their intended purpose of increasing public safety near schools? What he found using open data may surprise you. You can read Tim's write up titled Speed Cameras:

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14:20

[MINI] k-means clustering

Data Skeptic ·

2015/02/20

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 crowned amazon's biological processes might be a useful way of measuring where she sits when there are no humans around. Listen to find out how!

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38:37

Shadow Profiles on Social Networks

Data Skeptic ·

2015/02/13

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 unintentionally reveal private information about other people, including those that have not even joined the social network! For the specific test discussed, the researchers were able to accurately predict the sexual orientation of individuals, even when this information was withheld during the

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17:32

[MINI] The Chi-Squared Test

Data Skeptic ·

2015/02/06

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 two or more categories (e.g. Male, Female), a question may arise such as "Are women more likely than men to be vegetarian?" or put more accurately, "Is any observed difference in the frequency with which women report being vegetarian differ in a statistically significant way from the frequency men report

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