Mike Woodward's thoughts on AI, data, and analytics. I cover AI, ML, management, law, statistics, company culture, hiring, data visualization, Python, SQL and a whole bunch of other topics.
In the beginning... I first heard about the Fourier Transform in a stuffy lecture theater. I was fighting off sleep at the time and thought the whole thing was just too abstract and so did my fellow students judging by their nodding heads. Still, I was good at math and I learned what I needed to get through the exam. It's only years later that I realized how fundamental and important the Fourier…
In the beginning... Years ago, I remember someone telling me about a great website where you could connect with people in business and build your network: it was called LinkedIn. I joined, and became an enthusiastic user, even paying for Premium for a long time. But over the last few years it's really gone downhill and I see no product innovation to bring it back. This blog post is about the…
I've been doing some reading about the history of AI and I found out some things that were new to me. There's a consistent pattern of over-promising, under-delivering, and ludicrous press hype, all with disastrous consequences. There have been at least two dramatic falls in funding over the last decades, called AI winters. (Gemini's view of an AI winter) First AI Winter (1974-1980) The concept of…
How can you get to space and orbit the earth cheaply? Today, it costs $1,500-$3,000 to get 1 kg into low earth orbit (LEO), and more to go further. Is it possible to bring these prices down? The answer is, maybe. Let's have a look at some of the possible technologies and what they might cost; but first, let's talk about where space begins. Space and Altitudes There's no clear boundary between…
I was on a boring train journey the other day (yes, some trains still exist in the US) and my mind started to wander. I thought about the novel Rendezvous with Rama and rotating space habitats. I wondered about simulating gravity and some of the consequences. Here's are the results of my musings. I hope you like them. ( NASA/Rick Guidice , Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons) Some basic physics…
What's Ralph and why do you care? Ralph is all about automating the code generating process. You can use it to build small applications while you eat your lunch and build bigger applications while you sleep. Apart from the initial setup, the skills required are mostly those of a product manager; specifically, the ability to write a detailed requirements document. Why do we need another Ralph blog…
The history of AI I was looking over the history of AI and I was struck by how far ahead of the curve Arthur C. Clarke was. It's not just technical issues either, he was way ahead on the cultural impacts as we'll see. Of course, Clarke was too optimistic about when AI would arrive, but I think we can forgive him that. ( ITU Pictures , CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons) Clarke and AI in his fiction…
I saw some news about a possible movie adaptation of “Rendezvous with Rama” and it set me thinking again about the book and what I thought about it. There’s quite a lot here, so I thought it would be worth sharing in a blog post. Let’s start with some history. Arthur C. Clarke Clarke (born 1917) was the pre-eminent British science fiction writer in the mid part of the 20th century with a…
In 2018, I wrote a company blog post. As with most corporate content of this type, it was eventually deleted. But I liked what I wrote and I want to keep it, so I found it on the Wayback Machine and I'm reposting it here. Reposting it serves another purpose. My post was plagiarized by someone who claimed it as their own. I want to own my work and not have other people claim it as theirs.…
Why study the perceptron? Perceptrons were one of the first learning systems and an important early stepping-stone to most recent AI innovations. That alone would be motivation enough to study them, however the reaction of the press, and the consequences of the hype, are a cautionary tale for us in 2026. I'm going to share with you the why and the how of the perceptron, with some of the…
Accelerating learning with AI? Recently, I've been learning a new LLM API from a vendor. There's a ton of documentation to wade through to get to what I need to know and the vendor's examples are overly detailed. In other words, it's costly to figure out how to use their API. (Gemini) I decided to use code gen to get me up and running quickly. In the process, I found out how to speed up learning,…
Building Business Apps - Cursor vs. Replit For a while now, I've been very interested in using AI to build BI-type apps. I know you can do it with Cursor, but it requires a strong technical background. I've heard people have had great success with Replit, so I thought I would give it a go. I decided to build the same app in both Cursor and Replit. It's a kind of battle of the tools. (Gemini.) For…
A happy siren accident I was searching the web for something, and by a happy accident of mistyping, I found a completely unrelated and wonderful event. What I saw inspired this blog post. I'm going to write about sirens, those loud things that scare you into taking your safety seriously. (World War II British siren, Robert Jarvis, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported…
Important, but overlooked Power is a crucial number to understand for hypothesis tests, but sadly, many courses omit it and it's often poorly understood if it's understood at all . To be clear, if you're doing any kind of A/B testing, you have to understand power. In this blog post, I'm going to teach you all about power. Hypothesis testing All A/B tests, all randomized control trials (RCTs), and…
Whiskey prices and age of the single malt I was in a large alcohol supermarket the other day and I was looking at Scotch whiskey prices. I could see the same single malt at 18, 21, and 25 years. What struck me was how non-linear the price was. Like any good data scientist, I collected some data and took a closer look. I ended up taking a deeper dive into the whiskey market as you'll read. (Gemini.…
Just show me what's relevant! Weather forecasting in the US has got really bad for no real reason. I'm not talking about the accuracy, I'm talking about the way the data is presented. Oddly, it's the professional weather sites that are the worst. Here's what I want. I want a daily view of the weather for the next week. I want temperature highs and lows, chances of rain/snow when and how much, and…
Code generation is good enough for data science use I gave a talk at PyData Boston on using Cursor for data science. Here's the talk.
Small is the new large I've been talking to people about small language models (SLMs) for a little while now. They've told me they've got great results and they're saving money compared to using LLMs; these are people running businesses so they know what they're talking about. At an AI event, someone recommended I read the recent and short NVIDIA SLM paper, so I did. The paper was compelling; it…
Distributions, distributions everywhere There are a ton of distributions out there; SciPy alone has several hundred and that's nowhere near a complete set. I'm going to talk about one of the lesser known distributions, the Skellam distribution, and what it's useful for. My point is a simple one: it's not enough for data scientists to know the main distributions, they must be aware that other…
Goals are Poisson distributed? I've read a lot of literature that suggests that goals in games like football (soccer) and hockey (ice hockey) are Poisson distributed. But are they? I've found out that it's not as simple as some of the papers and articles out there suggest. To dig into it, I'm going to define some terms and show you some analysis. The Poisson distribution The Poisson distribution…
Some poetic background 'Ozymandias' is one of my favorite poems; I find it easily accessible and the imagery very evocative. As you might expect, I've dug into the background a bit. There are some interesting stories behind the poem and I'm going to tell you one or two. (Gemini) Here's the background. The poem is the result of a friendly wager between Horace Smith and Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817.…
What is sonification? The concept is simple: you turn data into sound. Obviously, you can play with frequency and volume, but there are more subtle sonic things you can play with to represent data. Let's imagine you had sales data for different countries and the data went up and down with time, you could assign a different instrument for each country (e.g. drum for the US, piano for Germany,…
Hype and reality I've been using AI code generation (Claude, Gemini, Cursor...) for months and I'm familiar with its strengths and weaknesses. It feels like I've gone through whole the hype cycle (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle ) and now I'm firmly on the Plateau of Productivity. Here are some musings covering benefits, disappointments, and a way forward. (The Japanese art of…
This is a short blog post to share some thoughts on how to reduce AI token consumption and improve user response times. I was at the AI Tinkerers event in Boston and I saw a presentation on using AI report generation for quant education. The author was using a generic LLM to create multiple choice questions on different themes. Similarly, I've been building an LLM system that produces a report…
Moving quickly Over the last few months, I've become very interested in rapid prototype development for data science projects. Here's the key question I asked myself: how can a data scientist build their own app as quickly as possible? Nowadays, speed means code gen, but that's only part of the solution. The options The obvious quick development path is using Streamlit; that doesn't require any…