Tim Wilson

#292: AI Without Adult Supervision with Aubrey Blanche As Kevin McCallister once taught us: just because the house is still standing doesn’t mean everything’s under control. Everyone’s racing to adopt AI, but has anyone actually read the fine print? For t...

"We left AI home alone… what could go wrong?" 🏠🤖 For the Analytics Power Hour podcast's International Women’s Day episode, @adblanche.bsky.social joined to talk AI hype, phantom value, and how data teams can stay in control instead of handing over the keys.

analyticshour.io/2026/03/03/2...

#291: The Data Work that Lives in the Shadows We know what the work of the data practitioner is, right? It’s everything from managing data ingestion to data governance to report development to experimental design to basic and advanced analytics. ...

Soft skills & project management & guerilla data fluency training & a slew of administrative tasks. This is the sort of work that many a data worker must take on regardless of their official remit. Or, so we claim on the latest episode of the Analytics Power Hour! analyticshour.io/2026/02/17/2...

#290: Always Be Learning https://media.blubrry.com/the_digital_analytics_power/traffic.libsyn.com/analyticshour/APH_-_Episode_290_-_Always_Be_Learning.mp3Podcast: Download | EmbedSubscribe: RSSTweetShareShareEmail0 Shares

If an experiment or an analysis turns up "nothing," was it still an experiment or analysis worth doing? If it's considered through a robust lens of "learning," then it might be! Mårten Schultzberg from Spotify joined the Analytics Power Hour to discuss! analyticshour.io/2026/02/03/2...

#289: The Imperative of Developing Business Acumen That darn data. It’s so complicated and fragmented and gap-filled and noisy that no amount of time is ever enough to truly get to the bottom of all of its complexity. As a result, it’s pretty easy to ...

An analysis without business context is like an Oreo without filling. An analyst without business acumen is like a hamburger with no bun. And that's the topic of the latest episode of the Analytics Power Hour podcast. analyticshour.io/2026/01/20/2...

#288: Our LLM Suggested We Chat about MCP. Kinda' Meta, No? If there’s one thing that we absolutely knew would be coming along with the increased interest and use of AI, it would be… more acronyms! And, along with the acronyms, we pretty much could predict tha...

I've seen a lot of discussion about MCP and intriguing use cases it has enabled in this strange new AI-everywhere reality we're living in. It was fun and informative to record an episode of the Analytics Power Hour podcast trying to get a better handle on that world. analyticshour.io/2026/01/06/2...

#287: 2025 Year in Review It’s the most…won…derful…tiiiiime…of the year! And by that, we mean it’s the time of the year when we sit back, look at each other, and ask, "Where did all the time go?!" We brought back a very specia...

It's almost a wrap on 2025, so the Analytics Power Hour kept with tradition and devoted an episode to reviewing the year: the show, the industry, and, if you listen to the whole thing, why I never pursued a career as a professional singer. analyticshour.io/2025/12/23/2...

#286: Metrics Layers. Data Dictionaries. Maybe It's All Semantic (Layers)? With Cindi Howson Semantic layers are having something of a moment, but they’re not actually new as a concept. Ever since the first database table was designed with cryptic field names that no business user could possi...

Semantic layers seem to be getting a lot of play in the data world these days, so the Analytics Power Hour podcast snagged Cindi Howson from Thoughtspot for a chat about them! analyticshour.io/2025/12/09/2...

Tell me more. A human wrote a prompt to generate the ticket description? Or the ticket description was generated directly by AI triggered by... what?

Reading up on permutations by way of a slick little alpaca shepherd / wool quality example from @jwilber.bsky.social . Visually showing p-value intuition using the observed results from an RCT. www.jwilber.me/permutationt...

#285: Our Prior Is That Many Analysts Are Confounded by Bayesian Statistics Before you listen to this episode, can you quantify how useful you expect it to be? That’s a prior! And "priors" is a word that gets used a lot in this discussion with Michael Kaminsky as we try to de...

Hi, my name's Tim, and I've used Bayesian structural time series while also being befuddled as to fundamentals of Bayesian methods overall. I had a prior that the latest episode of the Analytics Power Hour podcast would clear things up a bit for me, and it did! analyticshour.io/2025/11/25/2...

#284: I Used to Think…But Not Any More As the world turns, a couple of things happen: 1) we grow and learn, and 2) the world changes. On this episode, inspired by a job interview question, the hosts walked through a range of thoughts and b...

Stick around one profession long enough, and you're bound to start telling tales of your professional past. On this episode of the Analytics Power Hour, the co-hosts all shared some of the beliefs of their earlier selves that no longer hold up today. analyticshour.io/2025/11/11/2...

#283: Good Things (Can) Come in Small Datasets with Joe Domaleski Does size matter? When it comes to datasets, the conventional wisdom seems to be a resounding, "Yes!" But what about small datasets? Small- and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits, especially, often h...

More data! More! More! Big! Yattabytes! Well, maybe not. Who's out there defending the value of small data? On the latest episode of the Analytics Power Hour, we sat down with @joedom.bsky.social to do just that! analyticshour.io/2025/10/28/2...

Napoleon’s Army Defeat Linked to Unexpected Pathogens, DNA Study Shows Disease-causing bacteria that have been recently discovered in the teeth of Napoleonic soldiers may have spurred the massive infantry’s demise during its retreat from Russia

Some newly found details about why that already thin “return” line on Minard’s famous visualization of Napoleon’s march to/from Russia got even thinner: www.scientificamerican.com/article/anci...

#282: Using (and Creating!) Data to Understand Pop Culture with Chris Dalla Riva Data does not just magically spring into existence. Someone, somewhere, has to decide what data gets created and the rules for its creation. We would claim that this often starts as a pretty simple ex...

The latest episode of the Analytics Power Hour podcast brought Chris Dalla Riva on to discuss how he listened to every #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 going back to 1958 to create a rich dataset. The parallels to the day-to-day work of the modern analyst were many! analyticshour.io/2025/10/14/2...

#281: Analytics: The View from the Corner Office with Anna Lee From spreadsheets to strategy: what does data look like from the CEO’s chair? For this episode, we sat down with Anna Lee, CEO of Flybuys and former CFO/COO of THE ICONIC, to get her view on data-led ...

“Stop giving me tables. Give me the 'so what'.” On the latest episode of the Analytics Power Hour podcast, Flybuys CEO Anna Lee shares a CEO-level view of what makes analytics teams succeed, from productive curiosity to informed pragmatism. analyticshour.io/2025/09/30/2...

Numlock Sunday: What song does everybody know? Introducing your future national anthem.

Do you know how old you are, your gender, and how much you tend to know lyrics for popular songs? Even if you don’t, this Sunday read from Walt Hickey is a fun one: open.substack.com/pub/numlock/...

#280: Dashboards Must Die! Long Live Dashboards! with Andy Cotgreave If you didn’t have a visceral reaction to the title for this episode, then you are almost certainly not in our target audience. There are few more certain ways to get a room full of analytics folk fir...

What is a dashboard? According to @acotgreave.bsky.social and his co-authors, “A dashboard is a visual display of data used to monitor conditions and/or facilitate understanding." Whether or not you're already triggered, this podcast episode is worth a listen! analyticshour.io/2025/09/16/2...

#279 – The Process(es) of Analytics (We Have Thoughts) What is "process" in analytics? On the one hand, it can be seen as a detailed sequence of minutia by which anything that needs to be repeated in the world of analytics gets carried out in a structured...

Some people see Life as just a series of interconnected processes. I'm married to one of those people. That may be how she got name-checked on this episode. Like it or not, processes underpin many aspects of the analyst's job, and that made for a useful discussion! analyticshour.io/2025/09/02/2...

Something of a #showerthought: in 30 years, a bunch of middle-aged folks will be listening to and experiencing Taylor Swift nostalgically in the same way that I'm listening to Fleetwood Mac, CCR, Heart, and James Taylor now.

#278: Is AI Good at Data Analysis? That's the Wrong Question! with Juliana Jackson Imagine a world where business users simply fire up their analytics AI tool, ask for some insights, and get a clear and accurate response in return. That’s the dream, isn’t it? Is it just around the c...

AI is changing the world! AI is going to replace analysts! Wait a minute. A LANGUAGE model is going to crunch numbers in a reliable AND useful way? Hmmm... The latest episode of the Analytics Power Hour podcast with guest Juliana Jackson thought this through. analyticshour.io/2025/08/19/2...

Numlock News: August 6, 2025 • Gerrymander, Coin Flips, Sampling By Olivia Walch

Fun and useful exploration of specific challenges of drawing district maps as the theme for today's Numlock News—@oliviawalch.bsky.social takes a day while @walthickey.bsky.social is on vacation. www.numlock.com/p/numlock-ne...

#277: ANOVA? I Hardly Know Ya'! with Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti Did you know that, upon closer inspection, many a statistical test will reveal that "it’s just a linear model" (#IJALM)? That wound up being a key point that our go-to statistician, Chelsea Parlett-Pe...

The latest episode of the Analytics Power Hour podcast was a discussion about ANOVA with @chelseaparlett.bsky.social . Don't worry. She hasn't changed her position that it's linear models all the way down! It was a fun and useful chat! analyticshour.io/2025/08/05/2...

What Are Priors in MMM – And Why They’re Difficult to Get Right (But You Need To) - Recast Priors prevent bad MMM outputs. Here’s why they matter, why they’re hard to set, and how Recast builds them right.

Very useful explanation of the role of priors (and the challenges therein) when using a Bayesian approach with MMMs. The trick is to think really hard up front, ensure that thinking is consistent and reasonable, and then...keep thinking. 😀 getrecast.com/what-are-pri...

Luckily, I have no aspirations to *win*. The races I've done are more social than anything else for me. Plus, an arbitrary way to set some sort of target.

I remember sitting down next to him at the first morning session at Superweek years ago and finding out he’d done a 12K run already.

Awesome!

a puppy is playing with a green frisbee on the grass . ALT: a puppy is playing with a green frisbee on the grass .

2-pronged: 1) run a race every month in 2025 (5K min.; so far only one has been that short), 2) half-marathon in October (w/ no walking).

I've only been injury-free for a couple of months, so it's the latter that's the tricky one: can I successfully train without reinjury?

Must've been confusion triggered during my long-hair phase? 👩‍🦰

London, England, United Kingdom | measure A loose and unaffiliated companion to #measure Slack, perhaps? Honestly... there was next to no thought put into the creation of this Strava group, which perfectly aligns with both the career and ph...

Kinda' fun. The Strava #measure group has hit 20 members. All activities, global membership. @lukascech.bsky.social is a beast... www.strava.com/clubs/measure

LOL. Well... some bits seem worth repeating? 😜