Episode description

Welcome to "Behind The Data". We all know that data is all around us -- it powers every algorithm, predictive model, and AI tool that is revolutionizing our lives. But where does it come from? Who collected it? How do we know if it's any good? For every dataset shaping our lives, there is a person or team making impactful decisions about what to track and how to track it that we are barely talking about. In this show we go behind the data to understand the stories and incentives behind how all this data came to be, why it matters for our lives, and how we can play a role in shaping it going forward.

Starring Andrea Jones-Rooy, Dhrumil Mehta

Andrea Jones-Rooy: www.datascienceneedsyou.com, www.instagram.com/jonesrooy

Guest Dhrumil Mehta: https://dhrumilmehta.com, https://twitter.com/datadhrumil

Materials referenced in the show:

Example polling tracker (the current version is not one that Dhrumil and I worked on): https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/

Nate Silver article, "The Media Has a Probability Problem", FiveThirtyEight

Harry Enten article, "Fake Polls are a Real Problem", FiveThirtyEight

Harry Enten article, "Trump is Just a Normal Polling Error Behind Clinton", FiveThirtyEight

Dhrumil's polls LLM: http://pollfinder.ai