scientific method

Stuart Halloway of Cognitect argues for debugging with the scientific method: form hypotheses, try to falsify them, and write everything down. The talk is given to the Clojure community but applies to any language.

Physicist David Deutsch's TED talk on why science took off, arguing that good explanations are those that are hard to vary. It contrasts scientific explanation with myth.

David Beazley's PyData Global 2021 keynote, an oral history of early scientific Python. He tells how Python ended up running on a Connection Machine supercomputer at Los Alamos.

A re-upload of Rupert Sheldrake's TEDx talk The Science Delusion, which TED removed from its channel. He challenges what he calls the dogmas of modern science, including whether fundamental constants are constant.

Bertrand Meyer's ACM webcast giving a critical look at agile methods, separating good ideas from hype and from practices he thinks damage projects. It is based on his book on the same subject.

Ali Rahimi accepts the NIPS 2017 Test of Time Award and argues that machine learning has become alchemy, with practice running ahead of understanding.

A talk given at the 2011 Nammour Symposium at Sacramento State arguing that past generations were wrong about nearly everything, so we should expect to be wrong too. It tours the many surprising ways scientific beliefs have failed, drawing on pessimistic induction.

A JuliaCon talk by a NASA Launch Services Program engineer on modeling spacecraft separation dynamics in Julia. He describes replacing a Simulink-based workflow for checking launch vehicle separation requirements with Julia and ModelingToolkit, with large speedups and much shorter code.

Ron Garret's Google Tech Talk argues that quantum mechanics is no harder to understand than relativity and that popular accounts wrongly rely on the Copenhagen interpretation. He presents measurement as entanglement and explains phenomena like the quantum eraser.

A DEF CON 26 talk by investigative journalists and hackers on the fake science industry, with bogus conferences and predatory journals that give studies false credibility. It draws on a large investigation into the money behind them.

Doug Zongker's deadpan conference presentation of his famously chicken-filled paper, given at the 2007 AAAS humor session. It satirizes academic talks while showing the pitfalls of bad presentation.

Veritasium's Derek Muller gives a Perimeter Institute livestream on how AI might change teaching and learning. He draws on past technology shifts and cognitive science to argue that learning requires effortful repetition.

Ruben Meerman presents a TEDx talk on the stoichiometry of weight loss, showing with lab demonstrations where fat goes when it is lost. He argues that most of it is exhaled as carbon dioxide.

Actress Claudia Christian tells how she overcame alcoholism using the Sinclair Method, which uses naltrexone to gradually reduce cravings. She discusses fresh perspectives on treating alcohol use disorder.

Ali Rahimi's NIPS 2017 Test-of-Time award talk, in which he argues that modern machine learning has become alchemy, working without being rigorously understood. He calls for more rigor and understanding in the field.

Tom Scott's Royal Institution discourse on science communication in the age of social media, how recommendation algorithms shape popularity, and why view counts can matter more than truth. It includes a segment on parasocial relationships.

RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester explains at GDC 2017 how Ludeon framed the game as a story generator rather than a game. He covers the design methods that came out of that frame.

Freeman Dyson's 2005 Boston University talk on heretical views about science and society. He questions prevailing dogmas, including his argument that climate and CO2 are a land management issue.

A short clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson answering a question about why there are not more women in science. He describes the resistance he faced as a Black kid pursuing science and the systemic barriers many people encounter.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.

Joseph Henrich's Talks at Google presentation of his book. He argues that human success comes from collective brains and cultural learning across generations rather than individual intelligence.

A 92-minute RMIT University seminar in which Ken Stanley argues that setting an objective can block achieving it. He presents objective-less, novelty-driven search as an alternative approach to innovation and discovery, drawing on evolutionary computation.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.

Jake Vanderplas's PyCon 2016 talk shows how sampling-based methods such as simulation, shuffling and bootstrapping make statistics intuitive. His pitch is that if you can write a for-loop, you can do statistics.

Drew Berry shows scientifically accurate animations of molecular processes inside cells, such as DNA replication, at TEDxSydney.

Hillel Wayne's PyCon 2018 talk on testing beyond pytest and mypy. It introduces property-based testing with the Hypothesis library and design-by-contract with dpcontracts, and shows how to combine them with an existing test suite.

SciPy 2015 talk by Nathaniel Smith and Stefan van der Walt on choosing a new default colormap for Matplotlib. It covers why Jet misleads, how perceptual color spaces work, and how viridis was designed.

Hans Rosling and his son Ola run an audience quiz with global population, health and income data to show how wrong most people are about the world. Ola then gives four ways to get less ignorant.

Joel Grus's JupyterCon talk explaining why he dislikes Jupyter notebooks. He covers hidden state, trouble with reproducibility and testing, and how notebooks frustrate teaching. He shows his preferred workflow and what Jupyter could change.

John Kitchin shows how Emacs org-mode with Python lets researchers combine narrative, math, figures and executable code in one document. It exports to LaTeX, HTML and PDF, and he used it for papers and e-books.

Jeremy Howard defends Jupyter notebooks as a serious development environment, especially when paired with nbdev. He responds directly to Joel Grus's talk about why he dislikes notebooks, and contrasts REPL-style and notebook-style work.

Fons van der Plas introduces Pluto.jl, a reactive notebook for Julia that tracks references between cells and re-runs affected cells when code changes. The talk was given at JuliaCon 2020.

Dan Robinson, then CTO of Heap, explains how Heap runs its product analytics backend on PostgreSQL and CitusDB. It covers conversion funnels, retention and cohort queries across tens of billions of events and 50 TB of data, plus Postgres and Kafka together and the indexing strategy.

In this TED talk, Hans Rosling uses animated statistics to debunk myths about the developing world, showing how health and income have improved across countries.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in an English translation, analyzes a year of scraped Deutsche Bahn data covering every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It explores delays and how punctuality is actually measured.

Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.

Robert Erdmann, a materials scientist at the Rijksmuseum, gives a PyCon keynote on the ultra-high-resolution imaging of Rembrandt's Night Watch. He covers the automated gantry camera system, the Python software that drives it, and the large volumes of image data involved.

John Rauser's Strata 2014 keynote argues that programmers can learn statistics quickly by simulating random processes and shuffling data. He explains p-values through resampling rather than formulas.

Mark Raasveldt of CWI presents DuckDB, an embeddable analytical database described as the SQLite for analytics, in a CMU Database Group talk. He explains why it was built, what it is for, and how it works.

Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica presents at the 2016 Concordia Summit on using big data, psychographic profiling and behavioral microtargeting in elections.