Explore every episode of the podcast Casual Inference
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regression to the Mean Girls | BART for Baseball with Sameer Deshpande | 02 nov. 2026 | 01:01:07 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Sameer Deshpande join Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan with a data-driven side quest into using BART for baseball! Check out the details here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Follow along on instagram: | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | Dancing with the Stats with Grayson Weavil, Madeline Merrill, and Wesley Krieger | 26 oct. 2026 | 00:48:08 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Grayson Weavil, Madeline Merrill, and Wesley Krieger join Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan with a data-driven side quest into Dancing with the Stars stats. Check out the details here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Follow along on instagram: | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | Mixed Effects, Mixed Signals: Love Island Kissing Scores with Hannah Barton | 19 oct. 2026 | 00:47:40 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Hannah Barton joins Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan with a data-driven side quest into Love Island Kissing Scores. Check out the details here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Follow along on instagram: | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | Every Man's Causal Inference with Roger Peng | 12 oct. 2026 | 00:37:22 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Roger Peng joins Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan with a data-driven side quest into becoming an accidental business man. Check out the details here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Follow along on instagram: | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | The Marshmallow Test (Not That One) with Mattan Ben-Shachar | 05 oct. 2026 | 00:43:32 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Mattan Ben-Shachar joins Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan with a data-driven side quest into whether different colored marshmallows taste different. *Be sure to listen to the end for a surprising addendum! Check out the full process here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Follow along on instagram: | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | Election Data Web Scraping with Emily Riederer | 28 sept. 2026 | 00:42:46 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Emily Riederer (Capital One) joins Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan with a data-driven side quest into scraping election data. Check out the full process here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Follow along on instagram: | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | The Art of Web Scraping Art with Hadley Wickham | 21 sept. 2026 | 00:39:46 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Hadley Wickham (Posit) joins Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan with a data-driven side quest into building a web scraper to help acquire art. Check out the full process here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Links to content we chat about on the episode:
Follow along on instagram: | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | The Comfort of Competence and the Speed of Justice, According to Law & Order | 14 sept. 2026 | 01:13:31 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Christine Zhang (New York Times) joins Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan with a data-driven side quest into the TV show Law and Order. Check out the full analysis here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Links to content we chat about on the episode: Follow along on instagram: | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | The Work is Mysterious and Important: Severance Data | 07 sept. 2026 | 00:42:02 | |
Follow Regression to the Mean Girls on [Apple Podcasts], [Spotify], or wherever you love to listen! Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Sarah Lotspeich return with a data-driven side quest into the TV show Severance. Lucy analyzes whether Milchick really uses more complicated language than his colleagues. Check out the full analysis here: regressiontothemeangirls.com Links to content we chat about on the episode:
Follow along on instagram: @regressiontothemeangirls | |||
| Regression to the Mean Girls | Romance by the Numbers: First Sparks Across Tropes | 31 août 2026 | 00:56:48 | |
Sarah Lotspeich and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan introduce Regression to the Mean Girls, a podcast about data-driven side quests in pop culture. In this episode, Sarah analyzes 45 recent romance novels to find out how different romance tropes affect the timing of the couple’s first kiss. Check out the full analysis here: https://regressiontothemeangirls.com/ Links to content we chat about on the episode:
Follow along on instagram: @regressiontothemeansgirls Podcast feed: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/rttmg/ | |||
| Optimizing Data Workflows with Emily Riederer | Season 6 Episode 8 | 26 juin 2025 | 00:52:54 | |
Emily Riederer is a Data Science Senior Manager at Credit Risk Modeling Capital One. Her website can be found here: https://www.emilyriederer.com/ Follow along on Bluesky:
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| Combining Data & Making Effects Generalizable with Carly Brantner | Season 6 Episode 7 | 17 juin 2025 | 00:52:04 | |
Carly Brantner is an assistant professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke University and Duke Clinical Research Institute. Resources from this episode:
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| The Art of Clarity with Andrew Heiss | Season 6 Episode 6 | 29 mai 2025 | 00:49:30 | |
Andrew Heiss is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Management and Policy at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.
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| Study Critique: What Went Wrong and How We'd Do It Differently | Season 6 Episode 5 | 08 mai 2025 | 00:55:21 | |
In this episode Lucy and Ellie dig into a recently publicized paper, "Vaccination and Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Study of Nine-Year-Old Children Enrolled in Medicaid", which has gained attention after being promoted by RFK Jr. as evidence that vaccines cause autism. Ellie breaks down her Substack critique of the study. Together, she and Lucy discuss the methodological flaws and what a better version of this study might look like.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp. | |||
| From Model to Meaning with Vincent Arel-Bundock | Season 6 Episode 4 | 24 avr. 2025 | 00:45:19 | |
Vincent Arel-Bundock is a professor at the Université de Montréal, where he studies comparative and international political economy.
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| Propensity Scores, R Packages, and Practical Advice with Noah Greifer | Season 6 Episode 3 | 10 avr. 2025 | 01:22:08 | |
Noah Greifer is a statistical consultant and programmer at Harvard University. Episode notes:
Follow along on Bluesky:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp.
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| Causal Assumptions and Large Language Models | Season 6 Episode 2 | 27 mars 2025 | 00:51:50 | |
Lucy and Ellie chat about large language models, chat interfaces, and causal inference.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. Edited by Cameron Bopp. | |||
| Data Integration for Impact with Len Testa | Season 6 Episode 1 | 28 févr. 2025 | 00:44:47 | |
Lucy chats with Len Testa about a recent analysis he did which combined over 150 publicly available data sources to answer a question about the affordability of Disney World.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Starting the Conversation on Models with Alyssa Bilinski | Season 5 Episode 11 | 10 juil. 2024 | 00:48:11 | |
Alyssa Bilinski, Peterson Family Assistant Professor of Health Policy, and Assistant Professor of Biostatistics, at Brown University School of Public Health. Her research focuses on developing novel methods for policy evaluation and applying these to identify interventions that most efficiently improve population health and well-being. Episode notes:
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Flexible methods with Edward Kennedy | Season 5 Episode 10 | 26 juin 2024 | 00:38:56 | |
Edward Kennedy Associate Professor, Department of Statistics & Data Science, Carnegie Mellon.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| What Sports and Feminism can tell us about Causal Inference with Sheree Bekker & Stephen Mumford | Season 5 Episode 9 | 12 juin 2024 | 00:49:42 | |
Sheree Bekker & Stephen Mumford are Co-directors of the Feminist Sport Lab and have a book coming soon: "Open Play: the case for feminist sport", coming Spring 2025. Reaktion Books (UK), University of Chicago Press (US). Sheree Bekker: Associate Professor, University of Bath, Department for Health, Stephen Mumford, Professor of Metaphysics, Durham University A
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Observational Causal Analyses with Erick Scott | Season 5 Episode 8 | 29 mai 2024 | 00:51:42 | |
Erick Scott is founder of cStructure, a causal science startup. Erick has expertise in medicine, public health, and computational biology.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Friends Let Friends Do Mediation Analysis with Nima Hejazi | Season 5 Episode 7 | 16 mai 2024 | 00:59:06 | |
Nima Hejazi is an assistant professor in biostatistics at Harvard University. His methodological work often draws upon tools and ideas from semi- and non-parametric inference, high-dimensional and large-scale inference, targeted or debiased machine learning (e.g., targeted minimum loss estimation, method of sieves), and computational statistics.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Fun and Game(s) Theory with Aaditya Ramdas | Season 5 Episode 6 | 01 mai 2024 | 00:48:22 | |
Aaditya Ramdas is an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in the Departments of Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include game-theoretic statistics and sequential anytime-valid inference, multiple testing and post-selection inference, and uncertainty quantification for machine learning (conformal prediction, calibration). His applied areas of interest include neuroscience, genetics and auditing (real-estate, finance, elections). Aaditya received the IMS Peter Gavin Hall Early Career Prize, the COPSS Emerging Leader Award, the Bernoulli New Researcher Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Sloan fellowship in Mathematics, and faculty research awards from Adobe and Google. He also spends 20% of his time at Amazon working on causality and sequential experimentation.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Cookies, Causal Inference, and Careers with Ingrid Giesinger #Epicookiechallenge | Season 5 Episode 5 | 17 avr. 2024 | 00:46:48 | |
Ingrid is a doctoral student in Epidemiology at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Analyzing the Analysts: Reproducibility with Nick Huntington-Klein | Season 5 Episode 4 | 03 avr. 2024 | 00:45:43 | |
Nick Huntington-Klein is an Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Albers School of Business and Economics, Seattle University. His research focus is econometrics, causal inference, and higher education policy. He's also the author of an introductory causal inference textbook called The Effect and the creator of a number of Stata packages for implementing causal effect estimation procedures.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
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| Immortal Time Bias | Season 5 Episode 3 | 20 mars 2024 | 00:34:36 | |
Lucy and Ellie chat about immortal time bias, discussing a new paper Ellie co-authored on clone-censor-weights.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Targeted Learning with Mar van der Laan | Season 5 Episode 2 | 06 mars 2024 | 00:51:20 | |
Mark van der Laan is a professor of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on developing statistical methods to estimate causal and non-causal parameters of interest, based on potentially complex and high dimensional data from randomized clinical trials or observational longitudinal studies, or from cross-sectional studies.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Pros and Cons of Randomized Controlled Trials | Season 5 Episode 1 | 21 févr. 2024 | 00:17:54 | |
Ellie and Lucy kick off the season and introduce our new executive buzzer, Melita! Melita is a masters student in statistics at Wake Forest University and will be helping out with the podcast (and keeping Lucy and Ellie from using too much jargon!) Pros & Cons of RCT paper:
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Remembering Ralph B. D'Agostino, Sr. | 02 oct. 2023 | 00:49:36 | |
We are re-releasing an episode from 2021 in remembrance of Ralph D'Agostino, Sr. Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Ralph D'Agostino Sr. and Ralph D'Agostino Jr. about their careers in statistics, looking back at how things have developed and forward at where they see the world of statistics and epidemiology going. Ralph D'Agostino Sr. was a professor of Mathematics/Statistics, Biostatistics, and Epidemiology at Boston University. He was the lead biostatistician for the Framingham Heart Study, a biostatistical consultant to The New England Journal of Medicine, an editor of Statistics in Medicine and lead editor of their Tutorials, and a member and consultant on FDA committees. His major fields of research were clinical trials, prognostic models, longitudinal analysis, multivariate analysis, robustness, and outcomes/effectiveness research. Ralph D'Agostino Jr. is a professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Data Science at Wake Forest University where he is the Director of the Biostatistics Core of the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Methodologically his research includes developing statistical techniques for evaluating data from observational settings, handling missing data in applied problems, and developing predictive functions to identify prospectively patients at elevated risk for future negative outcomes. Some of his recent work includes the development of methods using propensity score models to identify safety signals in large retrospective databases. | |||
| Evidence Science with Cat Hicks | Season 4 Episode 11 | 17 juil. 2023 | 00:49:40 | |
Ellie and Lucy chat with Dr. Cat Hicks, VP of Research Insights and Director of Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight Flow, about evidence science.
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🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| M-Bias: Much Ado About Nothing? | Season 4 Episode 10 | 24 avr. 2023 | 00:38:54 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about a "Causal Quartet" and spend some extra time on M-Bias!
Lucy, Travis, & Malcom's Causal Quartet Paper Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Thinking about Targeted Learning | Season 4 Episode 9 | 11 avr. 2023 | 00:46:01 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about ENAR 2023 and Targeted Learning! Targeted Learning in R Handbook Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Prevention Strategies via the #Epicookiechallenge | Season 4 Episode 8 | 29 mars 2023 | 00:38:11 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with #EpiCookieChallenge winner, Viktoria Gastens! Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Sensitivity Analyses for Unmeasured Confounders | Season 4 Episode 7 | 14 mars 2023 | 00:38:45 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about confounding! ✍️ Lucy's new paper: Sensitivity Analyses for Unmeasured Confounders Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Randomized Controlled Trials: Efficacy versus Effectiveness, Safety vs Safetiness | Season 4 Episode 6 | 28 févr. 2023 | 01:07:24 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about randomized controlled trials, thinking about efficacy vs effectiveness and saftey vs safetiness. Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| The Value of Instrumental Variables with Maria Glymour | Season 4 Episode 5 | 10 déc. 2022 | 01:00:25 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Maria Glymour, Professor of Epidemiology & Biostatstics at UCSF and incoming chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Boston University. Maria successfully convinces Ellie and Lucy that instrumental variables can be very useful in epidemiology. Follow up: ✍️ Andrew Heiss's blog post on marginal and conditional effects for GLMMs Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Methods chat about personalized medicine and positivity in causal inference | Season 4 Episode 4 | 30 nov. 2022 | 00:51:42 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about critiquing methods research, average treatment effects, and positivity violations! Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Hot takes and logistic regression love with Travis Gerke | Season 4 Episode 3 | 16 nov. 2022 | 00:54:19 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Travis Gerke, Director of Data Science at The Prostate Cancer Clinical Trials Consortium (PCCTC). This episode has lots of hot takes and lots of love for logistic regression! Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Counterfactual Thinking: Biomarkers, Napster, and Ice-T | Season 4 Episode 2 | 04 nov. 2022 | 00:57:48 | |
Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about counterfactuals! Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Population and Biomedical Data Science with Enrique Schisterman | Season 4 Episode 1 | 13 oct. 2022 | 00:54:50 | |
In this episode Ellie Murray and Lucy D'Agostino McGowan chat with Enrique Schisterman, Perelman Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania, about the future of epidemiology. Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| What is the value of a p-value with Charlie Poole and Chuck Scales | Season 3 Episode 13 | 03 mai 2022 | 01:16:10 | |
In this episode we play the audio from a recent panel discussion co-sponsored by UNC TraCS, Duke University and Wake Forest U CTSA Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Research Design (BERD) Cores. The panelists were Charles Poole (Associate Professor of Epidemiology, UNC) Lucy D'Agostino McGowan, and Charles Scales (Associate Professor of Surgery, Duke University) and it was facilitated by Marcella Boynton (Assistant Professor, General Internal Medicine, UNC/NC TraCS). 🎥 The video of the panel can be found here 📃 The ASA Statement on p-values 📃 The American Statistician issue on p-values following the SSI conference Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| It Depends with Sander Greenland | Season 3 Episode 12 | 18 avr. 2022 | 01:27:54 | |
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Sander Greenland, Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology and Statistics at UCLA. Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| The Intersection of Industrial Engineering and Causal Inference with Toyya Pujol | Season 3 Episode 11 | 05 avr. 2022 | 01:04:34 | |
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Toyya Pujol, Operations Researcher at RAND Corporation. Follow along on Twitter:
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| The Intersection of Machine Learning and Causal Inference with Maggie Makar | Season 3 Episode 10 | 14 mars 2022 | 00:53:51 | |
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Maggie Makar, Presidential postdoctoral fellow and assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. Follow along on Twitter:
Slide link: https://bit.ly/3DnQai5 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade | |||
| Artificial Intelligence, Personalized Medicine, and Causal Bounds with Judea Pearl | Season 3 Episode 9 | 28 févr. 2022 | 00:55:03 | |
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Judea Pearl, Chancellor professor of computer science and statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Follow along on Twitter:
Slide link: https://bit.ly/3DnQai5 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
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| The history of John Snow, Cholera, and Cookies with Chris Schaich | Season 3 Episode 8 | 14 févr. 2022 | 00:48:44 | |
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with #EpiCookieChallenge winner, Chris Schaich about the epidemiologist John Snow. Dr. Schaich is an assistant professor at Wake Forest School of Medicine in the Hypertension and Vascular Research Center. Follow along on Twitter:
Slide link: https://bit.ly/3DnQai5 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade
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| Asking questions that matter, getting answers that help | Season 3 Episode 7 | 05 déc. 2021 | 01:11:46 | |
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about their Spotify Wrapped for Casual Inference, and Ellie Murray talks about causal inference for complex data with the University of Minnesota's epidemiology department. Follow along on Twitter:
Slide link: https://bit.ly/3DnQai5 Transcript (auto-generated): https://bit.ly/3y4OskQ 🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade.
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| A Casual Look at Causal Inference History | Season 3 Episode 6 | 22 nov. 2021 | 01:12:05 | |
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat about the history of causal inference, tracing the origins across disciplines from statistics to economics, epidemiology, and computer science, discussing contributions from Rubin, Robins, Pearl, and more! Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. | |||
| Hanging out in the data science trough of disillusionment with Hilary Parker | Season 3 Episode 5 | 08 nov. 2021 | 01:09:41 | |
In this episode Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Ellie Murray chat with Hilary Parker about design thinking for data analysis, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the potential data behind baby Yoda. Follow along on Twitter:
🎶 Our intro/outro music is courtesy of Joseph McDade. | |||