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Using Checksum to Guess Message Length: Not a Good Idea!

A question posed by one of my colleagues: can a checksum be used to guess message length? My immediate response was negative and, as it turns out, a simple simulation supported this knee-jerk reaction.

Goto

For a moment this morning I was regretting the fact that R doesn’t have a goto statement, but then…

Making Sense of Logarithmic Loss

Logarithmic Loss, or simply Log Loss, is a classification loss function often used as an evaluation metric in kaggle competitions. Since success in these competitions hinges on effectively minimising the Log Loss, it makes sense to have some understanding of how this metric is calculated and how it should be interpreted.

2015 Data Science Salary Survey

The recently published 2015 Data Science Salary Survey conducted by O’Reilly takes a look at the salaries received, tools used and other interesting facts about Data Scientists around the World. It’s based on a survey of over 600 respondents from a variety of industries. The entire report is well worth a read, but I’ve picked out some highlights below.

Evolution of First Names: Fashionable and Popular Names

Last week I took a high level look at the trends in children’s names over the last century. Today I’ll dig a little deeper and examine the ebb and flow in popularity of some specific names.

Visualising James Bond movies

I spent a decent chunk of my morning trying to figure out how to construct a sparse adjacency matrix for use with graph.adjacency(). I’d have thought that this would be rather straight forward, but I tripped over a few subtle issues with the Matrix package. My biggest problem (which in retrospect seems rather trivial) was that elements in my adjacency matrix were occupied by the pipe symbol.

Evolution of First Names: Changes over the Last Century

In light of recent developments, a bit of work that I did almost two years ago has become rather relevant.

LIBOR and Bond Yields

I’ve just been looking at the historical relationship between the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and government bond yields. LIBOR data can be found at Quandl and comes in CSV format, so it’s pretty simple to digest. The bond data can be sourced from the US Department of the Treasury. It comes as XML and requires a little more work.

Guy Kawasaki on Personal Branding

Kelsey Jones of Search Engine Journal interviews Guy Kawasaki of Canva. The key take-home message is that maintaining a personal brand is vital even if you are permanently employed. Specifically, it’s important to keep a visible record of who you have worked for and your personal successes.

Data Scientists: Respect in the Workplace?

Data Scientists are often among the best educated and most experienced on a team. Are you getting the respect you deserve?

Data Science Teams

And even that insanely curious data scientist, if he or she insists on working alone, won’t be able to produce the most valuable insights. Those come from high-performing teams combining individuals who are individually curious and naturally creative, but also collaborative in their approach to the art and science of experimentation. A great data science team is like a jazz quartet, where individuals are always riffing off of one another, and each takes the music to a new and unexpected place. Josh Sullivan, Get the Right Data Scientists Asking the "Wrong" Questions, Harvard Business Review, 2014