🪕 Come Gather 'Round People
Wherever you roam
Welcome to the eighty seventh ever issue of Monday Morning Data Science from the Fred Hutch Data Science Laboratory. We are excited to show you what we have been working on (Fresh from the Lab), plus links that we think you would be interested in (Our Weekly Bookmarks Bar). Part of the purpose of this newsletter is to start conversations, so if you have a question or there is something you would like to share with us please let us know by responding directly to this email.
Special Edition: Our Favorite Podcast Episodes
[This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money] This episode explains the 2008 financial crisis by tracing how a global surplus of investment money flowed into risky U.S. subprime mortgages. It shows how this unsustainable lending fueled the housing bubble, which eventually burst, leading to the collapse of financial markets. The episode effectively breaks down complex financial systems, making them accessible to the public through interviews with key players like homeowners, brokers, and bankers.
[Not So Standard Deviations: Design Thinking] Nigel Cross's book Design Thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work explores the cognitive processes that designers use to solve complex problems creatively. It highlights how designers approach ill-defined challenges through techniques like problem framing, iteration, and sketching, making design thinking accessible beyond professional design fields. The book uses real-world examples to demonstrate how design thinking fosters innovation and problem-solving across various disciplines.
[Casual Inference: Judea Pearl] Judea Pearl has worked on causality, and how to formally understand and model cause-and-effect relationships. He developed the causal inference framework, which uses Bayesian networks and do-calculus to distinguish correlation from causation, allowing scientists to make predictions, diagnose causes, and estimate the effects of interventions. His work transformed fields like statistics, AI, and social sciences by providing tools to reason about causal structures rather than just statistical associations.
As always you can contact us by replying directly to this email, you can contact the Data Science Lab at data@fredhutch.org, or you are welcome to join us on the Fred Hutch Data Slack Workspace. For more information about the Fred Hutch Data Science Lab, visit our website: https://hutchdatascience.org/. See you next week!
- The Fred Hutch Data Science Laboratory