The Raid (on Rebekah Jones's home)

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

Itā€™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 Iā€™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 thatā€™s the case then all scientists are data scientists, since all scientists are concerned with data of some sort.

Iā€™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 donā€™t care to argue if they are data scientists or not, mostly just pointing out that geography isnā€™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 donā€™t be impressed by anyoneā€™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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Itā€™s sort of ETL but I donā€™t think she did the E or T parts. I canā€™t be sure exactly what she did but Iā€™m pretty sure her job was ā€œthe GIS personā€. In the emails between her and her superiors, the tasks sheā€™s asked to do involve what data is displayed on the dashboard and how itā€™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 Iā€™m not meaning to imply sheā€™s totally useless or anything. Itā€™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 Iā€™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 Iā€™m sure that weā€™d be happy to look at Osterā€™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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Sheā€™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 Iā€™m reading it wrong but that seems to be what sheā€™s saying.

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

Why does Prof. Oster refuse to use The COVID Monitorā€™s data? How can she justify covering up the 1.5 trillion COVID cases that have been linked to schools?! Whoā€™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.

Iā€™m clearly a bad judge of character so I will defer.