Data versus decisions
The Wall Street Journal ran an intriguing story last month about Netflix's management overriding recommendations coming from the company's algorithms. Analysis showed that promotions for the comedy "Grace and Frankie" were more successful when they only featured one of the two stars of the show. Apparently fearful of alienating one of their stars, Netflix's management decided to include both … [Read more...]
Google Dataset Search
Google have created a tool to make it easier to discover datasets---Google Dataset Search. One potential downside is that it requires dataset owners to provide metadata. While the Google brand means that this might get some traction, not all dataset owners are motivated to help the cause. Publication of datasets is now mandated by some funding bodies, but that doesn't mean that the datasets have … [Read more...]
Jupyter Notebooks—love ’em or hate ’em?
Jupyter Notebooks are popular with data scientists. Microsoft even offers a free, hosted, "no-install" service for Python, R and F#. However, there are some downsides to notebooks---mostly to do with software engineering best practices. Joel Grus gave a provocative talk at JupyterCon 2018 entitled "I Don't Like Notebooks". Yihui Xie then followed up with a response to Grus' talk. Both authors … [Read more...]
Python tops programming language list
Python has topped the IEEE Spectrum list of top programming languages again this year---extending its lead in the process. The sources used to compiled the list cover contexts that include social chatter, open-source code production, and job postings. Obviously that list of sources isn't an accurate reflection of what developers are doing day-to-day in organisations. Any list of top … [Read more...]