The Magic of Data Science: How I Turned Art Into Real Data
As data scientists, people think we’re magicians. When they have a problem to solve, they’ll just bring it to us and we’ll wave our magic wand and suddenly they’ll have the perfect model for what they need. Oh, what’s that? You need data to be able to do that? Wave that magic wand again and I’m sure it’ll appear.
I Stole a Wall Street Trick for Data Science
Ever wondered why comparing Google Trends across countries feels impossible? I stumbled across this problem when I wanted to use google trends data to understand what it is that drives people.
I thought it’d be an interesting video on multilinear regression, that I’d grab the google trends data for motivation and some other clever terms and off we go, but boy was I wrong.
I Used Maths to Prove Google Trends SUCKS!
What motivates people, passion, purpose, or just a good cup of tea?
I asked a colleague about Brazil: football, beaches, carnivals. Fair enough, but not very “UK winter.” Even simple things like tea vary by culture, clearly I don’t drink it, she does.
So maybe motivation isn’t universal after all… maybe it depends on where you are.
Using Heart Rate Data to predict the best jump scare
It's a spooky season. That gave me a terrible, wonderful idea: let’s make my colleagues watch those jump scares scenes while we track their heartbeats. For research. And maybe for laughs. We’ve got sensors, timestamps, and a playlist designed to ruin office friendships. Let’s find out who screams first and what the data says.
AI horror is already here!
Artificial intelligence, it’s amongst us, whether we choose it to be or not, it’s in our homes, on our phones and in our daily lives. But in films Ai is less Siri? And more serial killer From murderous robots to big brother style overlords, Horror loves to imagine what could go wrong with this type of technology, sparking a new or potentially an existing fear into all of us. But how much of this is just popcorn fiction and how much could actually happen?
Saving Halloween with Data Science (Starring Bart Simpson)
It's spoooooky season which means warm jumpers, pumpkin spice and the terrifying treachery of the Simpsons Treehouse of horror! And Bart's pretty good at coming up with spooky stories at this point, but is he any good at trick or treating? Let's use data science to find out.
Creating the PERFECT horror movie!
What makes a horror movie good, jump scares, plot, or something harder to define?
We’ll use data science to find out. By building a dataset of scares, pacing, runtime, and ratings, we can turn “fear” into something measurable.
Less guessing. More evidence. Let’s do some Evil Work.
Google Trends Is Misleading You
Also featured on Towards Data Science (Editor’s Pick)
Google Trends. What a gift to society this is. If not for google trends, how would we have ever known that more Disney movies released in the 2000s led to fewer divorces in the UK. Or that drinking Coca Cola is an unknown remedy to cat scratches.
Wait, am I getting confused by correlation vs causation again?
What even is AI?
Everywhere you look, something is labeled AI. I see it every day in stores, on apps, in ads. But here’s the problem: a lot of it isn’t really AI at all. And that raises the real question: do we even know what AI actually is, or how much of it we really want in our lives? UK research shows public trust in actual AI is declining: concerns are rising, like using AI to assess welfare eligibility, where worry jumped from 44% to 59% in just two years.
My hardest Pokemon battle was with the data
The Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) first launched in Japan on October 20, 1996, with its original set of 102 cards. It’s wild to realize Pokémon is actually as old as I am. I still remember being a kid and seeing those first cards and decks hit the shelves—the rush of opening a new pack, the thrill of pulling a secret rare, and that urge to collect them all. If only my mom had known what those cards would be worth today, she probably would’ve thought twice before threatening to toss them out! So now, it’s time to answer the question: was it ever really worth opening those packs, or should we have just kept them sealed all these years?
Does ChatGPT make you stupider?
Imagine a future where machines do everything for us, and humans slowly atrophy. Like WALL-E, but real.
We’re not there yet, but something closer is already here: AI like ChatGPT. And it’s not just tasks we’re outsourcing… it might be our thinking.
Is this a new era of human ingenuity, or intellectual decline? The research is starting to raise concerns.