John Foreman, Data Scientist
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The Perilous World of Machine Learning for Fun and Profit: Pipeline Jungles and Hidden Feedback Loops

1/5/2015

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I haven't written a blog post in ages. And while I don't want to give anything away, the main reason I haven't been writing is that I've been too busy doing my day job at MailChimp. The data science team has been working closely with others at the company to do some fun things in the coming year.

That said, I got inspired to write a quick post by this excellent short paper out of Google,  "Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt."

Anyone who plans on building production mathematical modeling systems for a living needs to keep a copy of that paper close.

And while I don't want to recap the whole paper here, I want to highlight some pieces of it that hit close to home.


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Data Privacy, Machine Learning, and the Destruction of Mysterious Humanity

2/22/2014

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Recently, I wrote an article about Disney’s new RFID location and transaction tracking technology, the MagicBand. Perhaps more magical for Walt than it is for you, the band allows Disney to track their customers’ actions inside their parks (and possibly outside). Where you walk, what you eat, when you stop to borderline-abusively yell at your kids. All that magic gets tracked.

This personal data is then used to deliver individually customized experiences to park-goers, and as a by-product, Disney gets to do all sorts of analysis on the data to figure out how to squeeze you for all you’re worth.

My personal tale with the MagicBands is one of pirates. My kids rode Pirates of the Caribbean all day, so when they saw Mickey, he talked not about Buzz or about Peter Pan but about Jack Sparrow. Bam! Big data in action. Mickey knows.

This kind of tracking is unnerving for some. Indeed, one of my post’s readers called me an asshole for so flippantly discussing the topic. 


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    Author

    Hey, I'm John, the data scientist at MailChimp.com.

    This blog is where I put thoughts about doing data science as a profession and the state of the "analytics industry" in general.

    Want to get even dirtier with data? Check out my blog "Analytics Made Skeezy", where math meets meth as fictional drug dealers get schooled in data science.

    Reach out to me on Twitter at @John4man

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