Data Science

The Attorney General of the United States announced that the government had confirmed that the Equifax hack was the work of the Chinese military. As we enter the age of AI-assisted warfare, it’s important to unpack some of the underlying issues. Continue Reading →

Everyone wants to work for your company. You receive hundreds of resumes every day. There are simply too many for humans to read. So, like many companies, you use a service that ingests the resumes and uses AI to score potential candidates against job descriptions. From your perspective it is the perfect use case. It’s fast. It’s efficient. And the candidates who make it through the system are pretty high level. This sounds awesome – but what happens to the candidates who don’t make it through the system? Continue Reading →

If data-driven storytelling were only about data, then every original show on Netflix or Prime Video should be a smash hit. But Netflix, Prime Video, and every other original production done by the “data rich” tech organizations have about the same production-to-hit ratio as professionally programmed old-fashioned, “data poor” networks. How can this be? Shouldn’t the data-driven programmers be better at predicting what stories will best fit an audience? What actor or actress will resonate? What music will work better? What story arc? Or at least knowing what an audience might be more likely to want? Continue Reading →

Weather forecasting is tough. Very tough. It requires immense amounts of data and it is computationally intensive. But Google has published a paper that suggests that AI can use simple radar data to "nowcast" the weather with remarkable short-term accuracy. Continue Reading →

While I was out at a meeting, my meticulously neat wife armed herself with a feather duster, donned protective pink rubber gloves, and viciously, mercilessly straightened, organized, and dusted the desk in my home office. My desk was clean, but the results were suboptimal. Continue Reading →

Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, announced that Twitter will no longer accept paid political advertising. He tweeted his reasons, “This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.” Continue Reading →

There are two basic camps in the world of marketing: numbers camp and pretty pictures camp. I live in both camps, and you should too. If you live in the numbers camp, I’m going to confirm what you already know. If you live in the pretty pictures camp, buckle your seatbelt, because this is going to be a fast, bumpy ride. Continue Reading →

Are data-poor organizations doomed? We’ve been running a data science experiment over the past few months. We were shocked, but not surprised by what we learned. Continue Reading →

For about 200,000 years, we have relied on our eyes and ears to separate truth from lies and fact from fiction. Even if we ignore the rise of fake news, technology is on the verge of making it impossible to know if what we are seeing and hearing is real or fake. Here’s a roundup of what’s new, what’s next, and what you can expect in time for the 2020 election. Continue Reading →

Shelly Palmer talks with Paula Newton about big tech regulations and breaking up big tech corporations like Google and Amazon on CNN’s Quest Means Business. Airdate: June 14, 2019. Continue Reading →