Gordon Shotwell

Canada’s untapped talent: the remote hiring opportunity you’re missing

Economics

My first data job was as a data scientist at a clinical trial company in Halifax in 2015. I didn’t love the job and when I started looking for my next role, I discovered a…

Gordon Shotwell

Large language models will never be conscious

Data Science

philosophy

Many engineers who work in deep learning are worried about machines gaining consciousness. Over the last ten years there’s been an explosion in tools which use deep learning…

Gordon Shotwell

Testing dbplyr packages

R

Data Science

Data science students are often told that SQL is the most important tool to learn. This advice makes some sense given how ubiquitous SQL is in industry, but I think it’s a…

Gordon Shotwell

What MS taught me about the pandemic

Covid

Personal

I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis about seven years ago. My first symptoms were numbness in my feet which I thought were caused by tight shoes, but by the time I was…

R package build

What’s the blockchain good for anyway?

People have invested about $3 trillion in blockchain technologies globally, but it’s still pretty hard to understand the value that is being produced by this technology. Can…

Gordon Shotwell

Why the Economist’s excess death model is misleading

Data Science

Covid

The Economist has published a model which estimates that Kenyans are only detecting 4-25% of the true deaths which can be attributed to Covid. I think this is a good…

Gordon Shotwell

How to make good decisions from bad data

Data Science

Covid

Vitamin D

People often make a categorical distinction between randomized clinical trial data and other forms of data. Under this view the only information that can ground medical…

Gordon Shotwell

Why I Use R

R

Data Science

Over the last couple of years prominent members of both the R and Python communities have tried to move past the language wars and support both R and Python workflows. This…

Gordon Shotwell

Technical debt for data scientists

Data Science

Technical debt is the process of avoiding work today by promising to do work tomorrow. A team might identify that there’s a small time window for a particular change to be…

Gordon Shotwell

“Testing machine learning models with testthat”

Data Science

Automated testing is a huge part of software development. Once a project reaches a certain level of complexity, the only way that it can be maintained is if it has a set of…

Gordon Shotwell

“Advice for non-traditional data scientists”

Data Science

Education

I have a pretty strange background for a data scientist. In my career I’ve sold electric razors, worked on credit derivatives during the 2008 financial crash, written market…

Gordon Shotwell

“R for Excel Users”

Data Science

Education

Like most people, I first learned to work with numbers through an Excel spreadsheet. After graduating with an undergraduate philosophy degree, I somehow convinced a medical…

Gordon Shotwell