It’s not the algorithm's fault that society is racist
For five years the British government used a racist algorithm in order to help determine the outcome of visa applications. Last week they announced that it “needs to be rebuilt from the ground up”.
“The Home Office’s own independent review of the Windrush scandal, found that it was oblivious to the racist assumptions and systems it operates. This streaming tool took decades of institutionally racist practices, such as targeting particular nationalities for immigration raids, and turned them into software. The immigration system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up to monitor for such bias and to root it out.”
Using statistics, Pandas, BeautifulSoup and AWS to identify value bets
Last year I built a football betting model (algorithm) in Python to help me make data-driven predictions and to identify betting opportunities in t he English Premier League (EPL).
This year I re-built the system from the ground up to find betting opportunities across six different leagues (EPL, La Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Serie A and RFPL).
After completing my last model in late December 2019 I began putting it to the test with £25 of bets every week. Unfortunately, I only managed to fit in eight weeks of betting before COVID-19 cut the EPL short.
The good news is…
Great piece! We've all been forced to become integrators of home and work life in these challenging times. I think that to make work part of our lives is imperative to our wellbeing as long as work is something that we enjoy
And a Brief History of Wellbeing
I’ve got a tonne of work to do and I only seem to have the energy to refresh the BBC News front page???
This isn’t how I wanted to spend the last thirty minutes but I feel completely burnt out after a difficult week at work.
Burnout runs rife in the modern office and it’s costing the world approximately £255 BILLION POUNDS A YEAR.
Sometimes it’s difficult to pull ourselves away from our work (physically and mentally) and we get caught in an environment that’s detrimental for us. …
Get the edge over your friends in the fantasy premier league
I’ve used all sorts of resources to try and predict the outcomes of football matches using Python.
One of my favourites is Fantasy Football Scout’s lineup predictions. The website is updated in advance of every gameweek with their most up to date predictions and additional team news.
The following tutorial shows you how to build a simple web-scraper in Python to extract these lineups.
1. Scrape ALL the HTML
To scrape the HTML and to prepare it for parsing we’re going to use two popular Python libraries: Requests and Beautiful Soup:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoupAn ECS Cluster That Scales With Your Needs
This article aims to provide clear examples and instructions on how to develop a dynamic ECS (Elastic Container Service) module with Terraform.
‘Dynamic’ because the Terraform can easily scale up to handle more services and tasks as they are required.
Valuable life lessons from a month of sobriety
Inspiration
I felt inspired to give the sober October challenge a try after my party-loving friend Michael told me that he was going to do the same. The rules are simple: stay sober for an entire month.
I have no idea when I was last sober for an entire month, but it’s definitely long enough for me to not even want to work it out…
Now although Michael only lasted a measly three days. I managed to get through the entire month completely sober and learned a valuable lesson on the way.
I realised that I need to learn how to…
The argument for an internet with borders
The internet inspired us to imagine a world without borders, where data could be shared freely amongst states and everyone was treated equally.
However, the reality of a borderless internet has pushed China, Russia and America into a new cold war. China and Russia have tarnished the definition of ‘internet sovereignty’ with their totalitarian laws and bills, whilst America’s first amendment has had ramifications in every corner of the world.
The global internet is undermining the sovereignty of any country that fails to realise the crux of the problem, a cyberspace without government.
Cyberspace Without Government
A cloud-deployed solution to gather data about music
Infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform) will become the fundamental backbone of a wide range of companies spanning across multiple sectors in the coming years.
The fundamental principle is that running the code deploys cloud infrastructure. This allows entire IT business solutions to be deployed at the click of a button. It also allows anyone to deploy a tool to analyse your favorite songs on Spotify.
If you’re already familiar with Terraform and Python — the final solution can be found here and this is its architecture:
The Social Dilemma highlights the unintended consequences
There are only two industries that call their customers users: Illegal drugs and software.
— The Social Dilemma, Netflix 2020
When we think about robots taking our jobs and rising up against us we think of some futuristic dystopian machine like this:
But the reality is that the robots already run the world and it looks like this:
Liam Hartley
www.liamhartley.co.uk ~ data privacy, data ethics , data engineering, data science and life
