If you’re bad at Viz, like me, there’s hope for us — I’ve got a confession to make, I’ve got the artistic and visualization skills of a turnip. It’s not that I’ve ever lied to myself and pretended that I was good at it-I almost always rely on very simple everyday tools and get by decently. But on a very recent team…

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this. — Special thanks to the person on twitter who messaged me with this question and is letting me use it as a starting point of a post. Poking at real scenarios is real fun, and I can always take a bit of creative liberty in anonymizing details. Here’s their (paraphrased) problem…

What you can do when you actually collect email data — Last week, we jumped off the deep end into just about every last scrap of data that could be collected from email. We noted that there are lots of little caveats and limitations in the fundamental technology. But we didn’t have time to go into how to actually use the…

Black boxes are hot again — Hats off to Vicki for sparking the motivation to write this, I’m always open to ideas and suggestions for topics to write about *hinthint*

Work has conditioned us to — Earlier last week I was seriously thinking about discussing how data people need to be very cautious about what they’re saying in public about COVID-19. There is a lot of contextless data and charts bouncing around that acts like a magnet to us data folk. The temptation is high to…

Some people are learning data science quickly without realizing it — These days, while doing my best not touch my face, I’m watching the world at large take a crash course in basic data analysis. Since teaching data literacy is a big part of my job, I pay a bit more attention to people learning about data in my daily life…

Don’t expect to land the title easily, heck, don’t even go for the title — For some reason, I’ve been asked about becoming a Quantitative UXR multiple times in the past couple of months, apparently because of the post I wrote a year ago about how I wound up being a Quant UXR. …

We seriously don’t need that sort of nonsense — This weekend, Medium’s Byzantine article recommendation algorithm decided to recommend me an article about being a “10x data scientist”. My initial reaction was “what in the absolute f — -?”. I’m not linking to it since that would be rewarding the bad behavior of a self-aggrandizing twit (it takes a…

It’s not every day we can watch an expert explaining how hard counting is — Today, amidst the growing global buzz of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus outbreak that is currently centered in China, I spotted this wonderful twitter thread about a number: R0, “R naught”, the basic reproduction number. …