Why dismissing AI coding tools might reveal more about your management style than the technology's capabilities.

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Published on April 12, 2025 | 7 min read

Randy Olson shows you how to beat the Original I.Q. Tester during a trip down memory lane.

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Published on March 26, 2024 | 10 min read

Randy Olson shows how to create an optimized road trip that visits the U.S. National Parks.

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Published on July 30, 2016 | 4 min read

Randy Olson shows you how to compute an epic road trip across the U.S. when you're on a limited budget.

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Published on June 05, 2016 | 12 min read

Randy Olson demonstrates why designing machine learning pipelines is difficult, and how it can be automated using TPOT.

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Published on May 09, 2016 | 8 min read

Randy Olson demonstrates how you can guess someone's age when all you know is their name.

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Published on August 14, 2015 | 3 min read

Randy Olson charts out 144 years of marriage and divorce in the U.S. to see how the institution of marriage has evolved.

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Published on June 15, 2015 | 3 min read

Randy Olson shows you how to compute an epic road trip across the U.S.

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Published on March 09, 2015 | 10 min read

Randy Olson uses machine learning techniques to find the best search strategy for finding Waldo.

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Published on February 03, 2015 | 7 min read

Randy Olson reviews a research paper that outlines what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S.

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Published on October 11, 2014 | 5 min read

Randy Olson provides code examples and explanations for a handful of beautiful data visualizations.

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Published on June 28, 2014 | 14 min read

Randy Olson analyzes over 650,000 chess tournament games to explore how chess openings have grown and waned in popularity over time.

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Published on May 26, 2014 | 7 min read

Randy Olson demonstrates a humorous yet useful way to visualize strength training progress.

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Published on April 15, 2021 | 2 min read

Randy Olson looks at the new marble racing phenomenon through the eyes of a data scientist. Do marbles have measurable "skill"?

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Published on May 24, 2020 | 10 min read

Randy Olson uses data science to learn whether batting order matters in Major League Baseball.

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Published on July 04, 2018 | 13 min read

Randy Olson shows how you can create your own traveling salesman portrait using Python.

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Published on April 12, 2018 | 3 min read

Randy Olson uses machine learning to discover how many college football teams can you watch in-person in one football season, which results in a 3 1/2 month long trip around the USA.

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Published on March 21, 2018 | 10 min read

Randy Olson revisits the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data to look at how Americans make a living based on their age.

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Published on March 06, 2018 | 2 min read

Ever wondered what industries employ the youngest and oldest people? Wonder no more. Randy Olson analyzes the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employment data to discover the oldest and youngest industries in the U.S.

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Published on March 05, 2018 | 1 min read

Randy Olson uses machine learning to figure out the best player position switches in Madden 17.

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Published on January 21, 2017 | 3 min read

Randy Olson uses machine learning to learn how Madden calculates a player's overall rating.

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Published on January 10, 2017 | 8 min read

Randy Olson explores an odd statistic about Republican-leaning states.

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Published on September 04, 2016 | 1 min read

Randy Olson analyzes trends in Python package installs to observe how the transition from Python 2 to 3 is progressing

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Published on September 04, 2016 | 4 min read

Randy Olson presents demo videos showing a new approach to image classification, where the machine scans and classifies the image the same way humans would.

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Published on August 13, 2016 | 1 min read

Randy Olson turns to the data to shed light on how long men last in bed.

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Published on May 31, 2016 | 2 min read

Randy Olson looks into the data to find out why Reddit is trying to replace Imgur.

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Published on May 25, 2016 | 1 min read

Randy Olson delves into supervision and astrology to explain why so many Japanese families avoid having children in 1966.

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Published on May 08, 2016 | 2 min read

Randy Olson explores what would happen if the trend of using "novel" and "unique" in research abstracts continues upwards.

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Published on April 04, 2016 | 2 min read

Randy Olson embarks on a nonsensical journey exploring what would happen if U.S. college tuition costs keep rising at the rate they have been.

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Published on March 26, 2016 | 4 min read

Randy Olson defends the infamous pie chart and explains the correct way to use them.

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Published on March 24, 2016 | 6 min read

Randy Olson delves into the data to show why posts get removed by the moderators of /r/DataIsBeautiful.

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Published on March 18, 2016 | 3 min read

Randy Olson delves into Reddit comment data to find out what data visualization tools /r/DataIsBeautiful OC creators use.

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Published on March 11, 2016 | 4 min read

Randy Olson highlights one example where animated data visualization outperforms static visualizations.

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Published on March 11, 2016 | 3 min read

Randy Olson revisits the popularized vaccine visualizations published by WSJ and provide a fresh look on the data.

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Published on March 05, 2016 | 8 min read

Randy Olson analyzes MMA fighters and fights in UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

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Published on February 25, 2016 | 4 min read

Randy Olson introduces TPOT, an Automated Machine Learning tool intended to be your Data Science Assistant.

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Published on November 16, 2015 | 5 min read

Randy Olson revisits the Indego bike share station usage data to find better ways to visualize the daily usage patterns.

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Published on September 05, 2015 | 2 min read

Randy Olson demonstrates how small multiples can be used to communicate data more effectively than animated GIFs.

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Published on August 23, 2015 | 5 min read

Randy Olson explores a curious correlation showing that female-dominated college majors earn less than male-dominated majors.

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Published on August 17, 2015 | 6 min read

Randy Olson analyzes Philadelphia's bike share system to explore how often the bike stations are available for use.

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Published on August 16, 2015 | 4 min read

Randy Olson shows how to recreate the famous New York Times weather charts in Python.

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Published on August 14, 2015 | 3 min read

Randy Olson demonstrates a web app for exploring trends in American baby names.

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Published on August 14, 2015 | 1 min read

Randy Olson visualizes the Indego bike share usage patterns in Philadelphia to see how the locals are making use of the bike share program.

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Published on July 19, 2015 | 6 min read

Randy Olson critiques the popular population pyramid that the U.S. census likes to use so frequently to display population statistics.

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Published on July 15, 2015 | 6 min read

Randy Olson analyzes the AI that beat all of the human records in the video game "2048" to find out how it works.

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Published on April 28, 2015 | 7 min read

Randy Olson shows how machine learning can be used to optimize walking tours in New York City and Philadelphia.

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Published on March 25, 2015 | 6 min read

Randy Olson computes the optimal road trip to experience Pure Michigan.

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Published on March 19, 2015 | 2 min read

Randy Olson shows you how to compute an epic road trip across South America.

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Published on March 14, 2015 | 2 min read

Randy Olson shows you how to compute an epic road trip across Europe.

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Published on March 11, 2015 | 2 min read

Randy Olson charts the top 25 richest living comedians to see how they made their riches doing comedy.

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Published on March 05, 2015 | 2 min read

Randy Olson revisits the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to see if Kevin is really the Center of the Hollywood Universe.

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Published on March 05, 2015 | 4 min read

Randy Olson critiques a recently popular infographic on the odd spending habits of Big Pharma companies.

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Published on March 02, 2015 | 6 min read

Randy Olson explores why Python users aren't upgrading to Python 3.

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Published on January 31, 2015 | 6 min read

Randy Olson delves into voting data to find the states that determine the outcome of the Presidential election.

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Published on January 13, 2015 | 4 min read

Randy Olson revisits an old analysis to find out what makes for a successful reddit post.

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Published on January 12, 2015 | 6 min read

Randy Olson delves into the data to find that over half of all reddit posts go completely ignored.

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Published on January 11, 2015 | 5 min read

Randy Olson charts out the films that have made and lost producers the most money over the past three decades.

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Published on December 30, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson explores whether a bigger film production budget results in more ticket sales.

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Published on December 30, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson charts the top grossing films studios in the U.S.

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Published on December 30, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson charts the top 25 most gender-neutral names in the U.S.

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Published on December 06, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson explores the role of the Black Power movement in how American babies were named in the 1970s.

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Published on December 06, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson charts out the most-viewed YouTube videos and highlights Gangnam Style's unprecedented rise to over 2 billion views.

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Published on December 04, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson delves into 6 years of reddit posting data to discern whether reddit is experiencing "upvote inflation."

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Published on November 27, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson charts the popular MMORPGs from 1998 through 2013.

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Published on November 12, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson checks if women on OkCupid follow the Standard Creepiness Rule when it comes to dating.

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Published on November 09, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson reviews more of a research paper that outlines what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S.

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Published on November 07, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson charts out where Democrats and Republicans want to see their tax dollars spent according to a nationally representative poll.

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Published on November 06, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson revisits the "evolution of chess openings" visualization to illustrate why videos and GIFs make poor visualization tools.

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Published on November 03, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson visualizes the reigns and deaths of the Roman Emperors over a 400 year period.

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Published on October 29, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson visualizes the age divide in where Americans want to see their tax dollars spent.

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Published on October 28, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson presents the interactive reddit world map.

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Published on October 27, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson attempts to revive and update the popular "ebb and flow of movie ticket sales" graphic.

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Published on October 27, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson charts the Top 25 AP Poll college football rankings to provide a historical perspective on how the top teams have fared.

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Published on October 22, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson digs into the data to find out who's responsible for gas prices at the pump.

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Published on October 17, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson analyzes over half a decade of reddit posting data to discover the most upvoted posts on reddit.

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Published on September 28, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson checks if men on OkCupid follow the Standard Creepiness Rule when it comes to dating.

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Published on September 16, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson analyzes the latest American opinion poll results to answer the question, "Who are the climate change deniers?""

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Published on September 14, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson analyzes all of the troops in Clash of Clans and discovers which ones give you the biggest bang for your buck.

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Published on September 09, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson dispels some common misconceptions about where the U.S. gets its oil from.

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Published on August 28, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson explains why we should put the myth of the smarter Atheist to rest.

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Published on August 25, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson discusses the best and worst times to have your case reviewed by a judge, based on research data.

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Published on August 24, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson charts out the IQ of students by their major's gender ratio and reveals a startling trend.

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Published on June 26, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson charts out the median male height in various countries from 1820-2013 and explains why the Dutch are so tall.

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Published on June 23, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson shows why we can only forecast the weather a few days into the future

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Published on June 22, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson charts out the accuracy of three major weather forecasting services.

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Published on June 21, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson visualizes the relative volume and value of U.S. currency in circulation from 1993 to 2013.

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Published on June 20, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson charts out the percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women (by major) and makes some startling findings.

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Published on June 15, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson explains why football referees are unfair when awarding penalty kicks.

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Published on June 14, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson visualizes how many degrees have been awarded in the U.S.A. between 1987 and 2010.

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Published on June 12, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson explains the key to Magnus Carlsen's success as a chess grandmaster.

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Published on June 07, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson charts the fastest growing and declining surnames in the U.S. according to the U.S. Census.

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Published on May 31, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson celebrates his blogiversary by analyzing 2 years of web traffic to the blog.

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Published on May 28, 2014 | 6 min read

Randy Olson analyzes over 650,000 chess tournament games to explore how common chess moves have changed over time.

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Published on May 27, 2014 | 6 min read

Randy Olson analyzes over 650,000 chess tournament games to explore how chess has evolved over time.

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Published on May 24, 2014 | 5 min read

Randy Olson analyzes over 675,000 chess games to explore the role of Elo ratings.

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Published on May 24, 2014 | 6 min read

Randy Olson breaks down the code base under the HealthCare.gov website.

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Published on May 22, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson explains why skyrocketing student enrollment is partly to blame for rising college costs.

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Published on May 21, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson outlines how the new reddit default configuration has affected the subreddits involved.

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Published on May 16, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson lists several subreddits that are rising and falling in popularity according to virality trends.

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Published on May 16, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson maps out virality trends in niche TV show and video game subreddits on reddit.

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Published on May 16, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson maps out the cycles of virality on reddit's front page.

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Published on May 16, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson maps out racial diversity in the U.S.

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Published on April 29, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson maps out the Game of Thrones-like bastard surnames of the USA.

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Published on April 27, 2014 | 0 min read

Randy Olson and Bjørn Østman use fitness landscapes to demonstrate the effect of dynamically changing environments on evolving populations.

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Published on April 18, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson and Bjørn Østman demonstrate how sympatric speciation can occur via density dependence using fitness landscapes.

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Published on April 18, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson and Bjørn Østman demonstrate the concept of "survival of the flattest" using fitness landscapes.

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Published on April 18, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson explains why it's nearly impossible to work your way through college nowadays.

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Published on March 30, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson explains why it's impossible to work your way through college nowadays.

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Published on March 22, 2014 | 3 min read

Randy Olson visualizes when posts go viral and when they fade into obscurity on Reddit.

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Published on March 22, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson visualizes US soldier fatalities from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Published on March 11, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson explains how to use Hashtagify.me and social network analysis for Twitter.

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Published on March 06, 2014 | 10 min read

Randy Olson takes a bird's eye view at the "A Song of Ice and Fire" book series by looking at the chapter titles.

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Published on February 13, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson takes a look at IMDB data to see if movies are actually longer than they used to be.

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Published on January 26, 2014 | 5 min read

Randy Olson explains how you can use technology to increase your influence on Twitter without spending a dime.

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Published on January 24, 2014 | 8 min read

Randy Olson debunks Shareaholic's claim that Reddit referral traffic is declining.

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Published on January 14, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson explores sex, drugs, violence, and cursing in films over time by looking at MPAA film ratings.

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Published on January 12, 2014 | 5 min read

Randy Olson explains how you can save yourself from getting duped by bad infographics.

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Published on January 07, 2014 | 5 min read

Randy Olson visualizes and discusses the top 25 deadliest actors of all time.

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Published on January 05, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson discusses violence in the film industry and its implications for modern society.

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Published on January 04, 2014 | 4 min read

Randy Olson visualizes and discusses the top 25 most violence packed films of all time.

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Published on January 01, 2014 | 1 min read

Is the film industry becoming more violent over time? Randy Olson explores this question by looking at the data.

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Published on January 01, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson visualizes and discusses the top 25 deadliest actors of all time.

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Published on January 01, 2014 | 1 min read

Randy Olson visualizes and discusses the top 25 deadliest films of all time.

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Published on January 01, 2014 | 2 min read

Randy Olson suggests that the data visualizations showing the sudden "polarization of the U.S. Senate" may be telling us a lie.

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Published on December 21, 2013 | 4 min read

Randy Olson interviews "reddit celebrity" Unidan about his experience teaching science to the public on reddit.

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Published on November 15, 2013 | 7 min read

Randy Olson ponders how studies using proprietary data should be handled when published in open access journals.

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Published on November 14, 2013 | 4 min read

Randy Olson interviews /r/AskScience moderator Tobias Landberg about his experience teaching the public about science on reddit.

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Published on November 12, 2013 | 9 min read

Randy Olson interviews evolutionary computational biologist Bjørn Østman about his experience giving a reddit IAmA.

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Published on November 12, 2013 | 4 min read

Randy Olson outlines why he thinks reddit IAmAs are one of the better choices for science outreach on social media.

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Published on November 04, 2013 | 3 min read

Randy Olson provides a brief overview of the Sagemath Cloud web service, focusing on the IPython Notebook live collaboration features.

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Published on November 02, 2013 | 4 min read

Randy Olson discusses a recently published paper that suggests that evolution plays a large role in shaping ecosystems than previously assumed.

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Published on July 31, 2013 | 5 min read

Randy Olson discusses why it is important to make longer runs in Evolutionary Computation and Digital Evolution research.

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Published on July 21, 2013 | 6 min read

Randy Olson discusses how and why Evolutionary Computation researchers should incorporate statistics into their research.

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Published on July 20, 2013 | 9 min read

Have you ever wondered if an AI could outplay you at Space Invaders? Randy Olson talks about an evolved AI that actually can.

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Published on June 10, 2013 | 2 min read

Randy Olson reviews a research paper that shows us how bigger groups can make more accurate decisions.

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Published on May 18, 2013 | 6 min read

Randy Olson discusses the latest research trying to understand how and why animals evolved grouping behavior.

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Published on April 24, 2013 | 10 min read

Randy Olson ponders if the Open Science movement is prone to call-outs, and whether that can be damaging to scientist's careers.

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Published on March 30, 2013 | 4 min read

Randy Olson discusses how we could replace the current scientific publishing model with a model similar to reddit.

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Published on March 24, 2013 | 6 min read

Randy Olson provides a data-driven guide to making your Reddit posts visible to the broadest audience possible.

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Published on March 15, 2013 | 13 min read

Randy Olson explores how the Reddit community has changed over time since its inception in 2005 by analyzing posts that were submitted to the various subreddits.

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Published on March 12, 2013 | 19 min read

Randy Olson discusses open source and how its philosophies could benefit the scientific process.

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Published on March 02, 2013 | 0 min read

Randy Olson demonstrates a new Python library that scrapes word frequencies from Reddit and make word clouds with them.

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Published on March 02, 2013 | 1 min read

Given the rising popularity of Twitter reporting at conferences, how do we make our presentations more accessible to Twitter?

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Published on February 17, 2013 | 2 min read

A brief report from a workshop run to teach scientists how to use IPython Notebook for scientific computing.

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Published on January 25, 2013 | 2 min read

Randy Olson shows how to use IPython's Rmagic package to seamlessly integrate R code with the IPython interface.

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Published on January 15, 2013 | 5 min read

Randy Olson discusses neuroevolution as an alternative route to Artificial Intelligence.

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Published on August 13, 2012 | 4 min read

Randy Olson discusses his insight from the other Prof. Randy Olson's book, "Don't be such a scientist."

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Published on August 11, 2012 | 2 min read

Randy Olson demonstrates how to use SciPy and pandas DataFrames to perform commonly-used statistical analyses and tests in Python.

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Published on August 07, 2012 | 11 min read

Randy Olson ponders David Eagleman's suggestion that we are taking the wrong approach to Artificial Intelligence.

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Published on June 28, 2012 | 4 min read

Randy Olson demonstrates how to use pandas DataFrames to process data from multiple replicate runs in Python.

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Published on June 26, 2012 | 5 min read

Randy Olson provides a short demo on how to use IPython Notebook as a research notebook.

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Published on May 13, 2012 | 4 min read

Randy Olson discusses the new digital research notebook provided in the IPython library.

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Published on May 11, 2012 | 1 min read