The Raid (on Rebekah Jones's home)

geography is a legit data science though, and plenty of geography phds have coding skills.

It’s a science involving data. ā€œData scientistā€ is a specialist field under the domain of computer science, involving expertise in programming focused around data analysis and machine learning. Though I’m sure the reporters calling her a data scientist have no idea what it means.

Yeah, referring to a geographer as a ā€œdata scientistā€ would be really weird. If that’s the case then all scientists are data scientists, since all scientists are concerned with data of some sort.

I’ve heard the term thrown around where processing huge, hard to analyze data sets are a big part of the work. Certainly lots of geographers are doing that. I knew a lot of geography grad students when I was in graduate school and at first I was all wait this is a real thing and then they start talking about their work. A lot of them seemed like pretty good programmers and very computer savvy. Definitely don’t care to argue if they are data scientists or not, mostly just pointing out that geography isn’t necessarily a joke degree.

Although one thing that graduate school taught me is that ANY degree can be a total joke and for sure don’t be impressed by anyone’s letters that come after their name.

Not that Jones has any letters coming after her name, apparently her lol PhD is ā€œin progressā€

I mean, the process that you described is literally ETL. Maybe Data Engineer is a more accurate title in your eyes? Then again, I know for a fact that the work associated with the Data Scientist title can vary widely between organizations from basic ETL and analysis, to deriving models from big data for ai/ml. So, this is pretty much just a a boring semantics point.

Worth noting I have a bachelors in geography, have worked as a GIS Analyst, DevOps Engineer, Software Engineer, and Site Reliability Engineer. So I probably have a little bit more sympathy for title inflation.

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It’s sort of ETL but I don’t think she did the E or T parts. I can’t be sure exactly what she did but I’m pretty sure her job was ā€œthe GIS personā€. In the emails between her and her superiors, the tasks she’s asked to do involve what data is displayed on the dashboard and how it’s displayed. The behind the scenes collation and transformation of the data is happening elsewhere.

By all accounts she was pretty good at that part of her job btw, so I’m not meaning to imply she’s totally useless or anything. It’s just that to me, ā€œshe built the COVID dashboard from scratchā€ implies a bit more than competently using off-the-shelf mapping software to do what she was directed to do.

does anyone else find it disturbing that this dude is clearly adopting the universal ā€œgetting blown under the deskā€ posture?

https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1343565605941751815

computer, enhance

No kink shaming

Data scientist is the latest catch-all meaningless buzzword industryspeak job title like business analyst was twenty years ago.

As a data scientist I’m enjoying this conversation

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Shots fired.

https://twitter.com/georebekah/status/1344067350216265729?s=21

Might be nice if our team of detectives can dig into Emily Oster.

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I doubt an economics professor at Brown would put out a paper or data table as embarrassing and nonsensical as the Jones paper you linked to. But I’m sure that we’d be happy to look at Oster’s work as soon as you respond to the criticism we gave you when you solicited critiques to the Jones paper you linked to.

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She’s not the villain in this drama no matter how bad her math is

Yeah, um, blaming Oster on this raid is some straight-up bullshit.

Not the raid. Where did you get that?

Maybe I’m reading it wrong but that seems to be what she’s saying.

https://twitter.com/GeoRebekah/status/1344067354599239681

Why does Prof. Oster refuse to use The COVID Monitor’s data? How can she justify covering up the 1.5 trillion COVID cases that have been linked to schools?! Who’s behind her wicked agenda?? DETECTIVES, ASSEMBLE!

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Information questioning motives and methods of Dr Oster is up thread.

Not refuted yet. I just note that we have some detectives in this thread that are good at digging up information on people.

I’m clearly a bad judge of character so I will defer.