Category Archives: Data Science

Junk Charts: A Tour

Kaiser Fung’s “Junk Charts” blog is full of treasures, including ones related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Evelyn wrote a post about the blog back in 2017. Please join me on a tour of a few of the posts Fung has … Continue reading

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Sustainable Mathematics

On September 20, 2019, a series of strikes around the world demanding action against climate change began as part of Global Week for the Future. It inspired me to look into ways mathematics contributes to the growing challenge of sustainability. … Continue reading

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Uncovering ‘What if?’ and ‘Why?’ in the A.I. era

Artificial intelligence, which has been extensively developed in the last few decades, cares about the power of a machine to copy intelligent human behavior.  As humans, we make decisions every day that rely on the cause and effects of our … Continue reading

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Introducing Vanessa!

Starting this month, Vanessa Rivera Quiñones (@MissVRiveraQ) will be co-editing the blog with me! She received her Ph.D. in mathematics this year from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and she’s currently looking for a job in Belgium. Last year, … Continue reading

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On Technology And Harm

Fictional stories about putting too much trust in technology often involve armies of killer robots. But what if some of today’s real threats of improperly checked technology are less thrilling but nevertheless harmful or even deadly? On the bit-player blog, … Continue reading

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Seeing The Future From The Past

I just finished reading The Signal and the Noise, a book about predictions by the American statistician and blogger turned big time data journalist Nate Silver.  I highly recommend it.  The book came out in 2012 and there was some … Continue reading

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The Fat Tech Cat Diet

Like much of the world, I seem to live in a permanent state of vexation about technology, privacy, and how to survive in a world where so many access points are guarded by hungry algorithm crunching data trolls. This is … Continue reading

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Un-Junking your Charts

Junk Charts is a blog by Kaiser Fung, who describes himself as “the Web’s first data visualization critic.” People have been criticizing and prescribing solutions for misleading data visualization for a long time. (How to Lie With Statistics was first … Continue reading

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That Neural Net That Predicts Sexual Orientation

A neural network is one way to achieve machine learning. Modeled after the human brain, a neural net teaches a computer how to do some task by processing a huge set of training data. The data passes through the network … Continue reading

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Best of the Bots

A slew of paint colors named by a neural network, including such gems as “turdly” and “rose hork,” made it big last week, with mentions in Ars Technica, The AV Club, and even The Atlantic. But for the story straight … Continue reading

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