One of the things that makes data science hard is that it has a foundation in statistics, and one of the things that makes statistics hard is that it can run counter-intuitively. A great illustration of that is the Monty Hall Problem. Month Hall was a US game show host who presented a show called “Let’s Make a Deal” …

Having won this week’s award for the longest blog title here at Black Marble, I’d better get on with the actual post. Every data scientist is going to have to work with large data files at some point in their careers, and right now, the de facto standard for doing so is Hadoop. There are lots of ways to gain access to …

Last time, we spoke about how critical thinking was an aspect of data science that was often over looked. In this post, we’re going to examine some of the fundamental building blocks of critical thinking: claims, explanations and inferences. Claims Firstly, claims. Claims are really just assertions: The crime rate has …

Hello there, my name’s Gary Short. If you’re a follower of Black Marble news, you’ll already know that I’ve recently joined the company as Head of Data Science, with the task of creating a flourishing Data Science Practice within the company. And that is all I plan to say about that. With the traditional “first post …