Every two weeks, we find the most interesting data science links from around the web and collect them in Data Science Briefings, the DataMiningApps newsletter. Subscribe now for free if you want to be the first to get up to speed on interesting resources.
- Big data: Getting a better read on performance
Interesting McKinsey study on the benefits of Big Data, which match those of earlier technology cycles, but companies must scale up their data-analytics skills to reap the gains.
- Data scientists mostly just do arithmetic and that’s a good thing
Basecamp’s data scientist argues that, in business, there is actually a very small subset of business problems that are best solved by machine learning; most of them just need good data and an understanding of what it means that is best gained using simple methods.
- Has a rampaging AI algorithm really killed thousands?
Ars Technica recently accused a metadata-driven, machine learning system of killing thousands of innocent people. The Guardian picked the story apart and concluded something very different.
- The Mistakes Companies Make With Big Data
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Hilary Mason and Andreas Weigend on making the most of all that information.
- Gravitational Waves in Jupyter!
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration recently made the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of two black holes merging. This tutorial shows you how to recreate the results, spectrograms, and sound files yourself and is complete with code and links to the data.
- A 19-year-old made a free robot lawyer that has appealed $3 million in parking tickets
Hiring a lawyer for a parking ticket appeal is not only a headache — it can also cost more than the ticket itself. Depending on the case and the lawyer, an appeal (a legal process where you argue out of paying the fine) can cost between $400 to $900. But with the help of a bot made by British programmer Joshua Browder, 19, it costs nothing.
- Luna: Visual and textual functional programming language
An interesting new programming language in which you can design, prototype, develop and refactor any application simply by connecting visual elements together.
- Graphing when your Facebook friends are awake
Creepy? Yes. Funny? That too.
- Using reinforcement learning in Python to teach a virtual car to avoid obstacles
An experiment in Q-learning, neural networks and Pygame.
- Highly Effective Data Science Teams?
“For all its hype, Data Science is still a pretty young discipline with fundamental unresolved questions. What exactly do data scientists do? How are data scientists trained? What do career paths look like for data scientists? Lately, I’ve been thinking most about a related question: What are the markers of a highly effective data science team?”
- The Ethical Data Scientist
“People have too much trust in numbers to be intrinsically objective.”
- Records: SQL for Humans
Writing SQL can be frustrating with standard tools. Records is a very simple, but powerful, Python library for making raw SQL queries to most relational databases. Includes lots of options for working with the results.
- How To Write Data-Driven Stories: Five Core Narratives
Fantastic article about how to approach data-driven storytelling. The focus is journalism but anyone using data to make a point in their writing or business will find the five core narrative types intesting.
- Click on the image painted by a human!
Think you can spot an AI? In this visual Turing test, you will be shown 10 pairs of pictures. In each pair, one is painted by a human and another is generated by an AI algorithm based on a photo and a style of a painter. Click on the picture painted by a human. Good luck!
