In episode 2 of "The Orthogonals" Shaun and David spoke to Peter Ellis. Peter is a Director and Chief Data Scientist at Nous Group, an international management consultancy operating in 10 locations across the UK, Australia and Canada. He also writes the Free Range Statistics blog, a great place to see cutting-edge techniques applied to real-world problems, all with reproducible code. But you'll never guess what his undergraduate degree was (hint: requires long fingernails on one hand only!)

We spoke about scraping emojis from tweets, why Drew Conway's Venn diagram is still relevant in 2020, and becoming a data scientist to argue with economists.

You can find Peter on Twitter @ellis2013nz or on his Free Range Statistics blog.

In the first episode of season 2, "The Orthogonals", Shaun and David speak to Andrea Jones-Rooy.

Andrea is a social scientist specializing in complexity.  She has written a book and several research papers on complex systems, and regularly contributes articles to media outlets on (you guessed it!) complexity — plus data science, international relations, diversity, and uncertainty. She is also a standup comedian and circus performer. The whole thing is confusing, but basically she’ll do whatever it takes to get people to pay attention to social science & complexity. Andrea earned her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

We discussed why you shouldn't do a political science PhD to become a data scientist, how a political science PhD will benefit you in data science if you happen to have one, finishing a PhD thesis in a Thai restaurant, and what skills are missing from most data science courses and what to do about it.

In this teaser episode of the Half Stack Data Science podcast, the hosts David Asboth and dr Shaun McGirr recap the first six episodes of the podcast and introduce the upcoming season 2: The Orthogonals