Partially Derivative

This week’s episode is dedicated entirely to Tay, the Microsoft chat bot who started her 1-day life making adorable meme jokes, and ended it praising Hitler. Tay’s demise is an ominous warning about a future dominated by amoral robot overlords, and also comedy gold!

This week we explore the future of artificial intelligence by discussing robot sex at length. Chris seems pretty into it, not that we’re judging. Also Minecraft for AI experiments and humanity’s epic triumph over the most obnoxious iPhone game ever created.

Vidya hates wedding planning, Jonathon could’ve talked about the rise of our Go-playing robot overlords, algorithmically predicting police misconduct or the biggest polling upset in political history, but instead digs into the crossword scandal of the century (here’s the GitHub repo). Chris was busy washing his hair or something, but he’ll...

We learn that millennials are staying married longer, you can go really deep down the Star Wars rabbit hole, and all your so-called allergies were made up by your parents. Also we talk to epidemiologist Eric Lofgren about how humanity can survive the zombie apocalypse.

We’re back! The latest nerdy data news, some beer, and a look how open data is used to fight crime and corruption. Jonathon is drinking Austin Eastciders, Chris is drinking a Nitro IPA, and we’re talking about corporate big brother sucking up your work data, plus Miguel Garrido’s epic, data-driven...

Data scientists are parasites, Snowpocalypse (or is it?), and an important public safety announcement from Chris about jogging and sterilization. Plus we talk to Dr. Sarah Laszlo about how she uses brainwaves like fingerprints to identify people based only on their thoughts.

Sorry for the long hiatus! The three of us have been super busy with our startup, Popily, but before we took a break we recorded a live show! Chris and Jonathon went to hang out with the amazing data science team at StitchFix, and invited Eric Colson, the company’s Chief...

Lost. In. Spaaaaaaace! Cosmology! Astrophysics! Astronauts! This week we talk with some amazing guests!

Data journalism and interactive storytelling have fundamentally changed the way we understand and consume the news. This week we’re talking to three leaders in the data journalism revolution, Martin Stabe, the head of interactive news at the Financial Times, Sisi Wei, a journalist and news apps developer at ProPublica, and...

We’re joined by sports analytics luminaries Sean Lahman, author of the Lahman Baseball Database, Trey Causey, creator of The Spread, a blog about the data science of sports, and Greg Matthews, author of openWAR, a technique for predicting the worth of baseball players. We dig into how huge amounts of data...