I'm encouraged by the fact that some organizations I speak to are trying to get their spreadsheet sprawl under control. However, far too many remain ignorant of the risks they are shouldering. Stratford Dick of Marsh ClearSight recently published an article describing how spreadsheets might be hurting your company. In his article he highlights the following risks. Spreadsheet development is … [Read more...]
Don’t tell me you don’t have the data
If they can follow a seal into the freezing Antarctic water, you can collect a few log entries. Really. … [Read more...]
Subjectivity in data science
An article recently published in Nature reinforces the fact that the real challenge in data science is not mastery of the technical tools, but the ability to understand and define the problem. Researchers posed the question of whether the color of a soccer player's skin is a factor in how many red cards (serious reprimands) he receives. Seems like a pretty straightforward analysis. The authors … [Read more...]
Analyzing an Isle of Man TT legend
The BBC has an article on using a sensor array to determine what makes 23-time Isle of Man TT winner John McGuinness so quick. Motorcycle riders have been tackling the 38-mile street circuit for over a hundred years. As it's run on (closed) public roads, it's an incredibly dangerous race. Riders average 212kph (132mpg) round the course---often coming within inches of stone walls and … [Read more...]
Game over—computers can beat us at Space Invaders
It appears that the singularity is here. Google Deepmind have created an adaptation of the DQN algorithm---which combines Q-learning with a deep neural network---to enable a computer to beat us at 31 Atari classics (including Space Invaders). Any other task that AI could be applied to now seems so unimportant... … [Read more...]