Adversarial Learning

Is good data science always political? Our regularly scheduled guest had to cancel at the last minute, so Joel and Andrew decided to talk about politics. 

Topics covered include:

• the one data scientist who’s not on twitter
• how much Joel hates the xkcd cartoon
• free speech in Canada (which Joel gets very wrong, please don't @ me)
• how one (or one's bot) gets banned from twitter
• Joel getting a phone call from his kid's school
• #YarvinGate and #YarvinGate2
• how good it feels to hold a pitchfork
• loving one's neighbor vs tolerating one's neighbor
• why everyone hates Kant
• Nazi-punching
• the pros and cons of street violence
• whether companies should take political stands
• whether Shopify should power the Breitbart store
• what the hell do they even sell in the Breitbart store anyway?
• the difference between refusing to do business with customers because you don't approve them and refusing to business with customers because twitter doesn't approve of them

Our guest is Jake VanderPlas, who is a real Data Science Fellow at the UW eScience Institute, and is the author of the recently published Python Data Science Handbook. 

Topics discussed include

• BiCapitalization
• bridging the astronomy-astrology divide
• whether the e in eScience is the same as the e in eBay
• Myers-Briggs
• why Jake keeps saying “transcriptable” like it's a real word
• whether newsletters have replaced blogs
• how to talk to people at parties
• what it’s like being a data scientist in academia
• whether students still hook up in the library
• why your zodiac sign isn’t what you think it is
• whether Pluto is a planet and why people care
• teaching statistics using simulation
• how to pronounce "numpy"
• using deep learning to identify new constellations
• building an AI that chooses the right data visualization

This week's theme music has a cool Vegas swanky lounge vibe. 

Please listen to it.

Our guest this week is Sarah Guido (@sarah_guido), Senior Data Scientist at Mashable. We discuss datasets we hate, how to pronounce "La Croix", what makes "library science" a science, 9/11, data science networking, Joel's plan to build a Twitter client that automatically inserts a "clap" emoji after every word, and Mashable's "best celebrity feuds" of 2016.

Our guest this week is Andrew Therriault (@therriaultphd). We talk about data science in the big city, politics, slime in the ice machine, labor unions, how easy it is to join datasets, and whether Boston really deserves to be called Beantown.

Our guest this week is Tim Hopper (@tdhopper), the tallest data scientist. We discuss life, blogs, robots, Twitter, and other data-related stuff, but Joel keeps returning to the topic of his height.

In the first episode, Joel and Andrew cover who they are, how they met, how they got into data science, why they have a podcast, and chat about topics they have in mind, including but not limited to:

1. Politics
2. Technical tool development
3. Whether to get a PhD
4. How to get into data science
5. How to hire data scientists
6. Ethical questions in data science
7. Jake van der Plas
8. Type A vs Type B
9. Thinkpiece about why Scala is the future of data science
10. Dave Shing, AOL’s Digital Prophet, a.k.a. http://twitter.com/shingy
11. Why is Silicon Valley considered a place you need to set up shop