Welcome to the fifty fourth 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.
Our Weekly Bookmarks Bar
[Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?] This piece, featured in The New Yorker, presents an amusing comparison between a toddler's emerging language abilities and advancements in artificial intelligence, notably large language models. The author insightfully tracks the evolution of their child's speech, humorously referring to the youngster as a "small language model." The title hints at a whimsical exploration of how children acquire linguistic skills, potentially mirroring how AI algorithms learn to comprehend and produce human speech.
[Playmeans: Inclusive and Engaging Data Science through Music] This article by Davit Khachatryan discusses the use of music as a tool to engage a diverse range of students in data science. The author introduces "Playmeans", a web application that allows students to learn data science while exploring their favorite music. This approach aims to make data science education more accessible and engaging for students from various cultural, socioeconomic, and professional backgrounds.
[Thanksgiving Pie [Charts] A data scientistโs guide to Thanksgiving โ with code to make your own Thanksgiving pie charts] This article discusses the high consumption of turkey and pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, suggesting it could be renamed as "Pie Day". The author uses Python to create pie charts from a 2015 dataset acquired from data.world to illustrate these points. The data shows that 92.6% of those polled celebrate Thanksgiving, and 88.2% of them have turkey as their main dish. Despite the common usage of turkey, the article points out that pumpkin pie outnumbers turkey with over 50 million pies consumed on Thanksgiving.
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