Ivan Alvarez

Applied research manager at @thomsonreuters. Formerly @BBC/@UCBerkeley/@UniofOxford/@UCL.

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

@micahgallen @nicolaisucks I was about to comment that Bokeh can absolutely do this, but this example is much better than the one I came up with :)

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

Excellent example on how to do geotag data visualisation right, allowing it to enrich a story (source in Spanish).
https://t.co/oVWuYq1SIL

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

@katestorrs @AlasdairClarke Thanks! Just to clarify, I will shortly be data scientist with BBC, not a data journo! Closer to what we already do anyway ;)
Another resource I liked is Cracking The Tech Career and associated books - good overview of industry expectations, skill valuations, career planning, etc

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

@katestorrs @AlasdairClarke Re: (b) For datasci specifically, good resources are LeetCode, HackerRank, Codecademy. There are a zillion online ML courses, too many to list. One popular option to transition from academia to industry are bootcamps. Heard good things, but don't have direct experience.

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

@katestorrs @AlasdairClarke That would be me (hi Kate!). For (a) the skillset required is entirely dependent on the job. The skills profile for e.g. SWE is completely different from prod manager, or policy consultant. Look at job adverts for tech companies, they are usually specific on what is expected.

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

Delighted to announce I will shortly be joining @bbcdatalab as Senior Data Scientist. Looking forward to new challenges, tinkering with data, and serving the huge and varied audiences the BBC reaches every day!

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

Really nice paper by Ethan Duwell, @EricaWoertz and others at the DeYoe Lab showing evidence in favour of dual population receptive field in albinism. Raises some interesting questions about the spatial level at which retinal inputs get disentangled.

https://t.co/ILKaLDujeG

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

This one has been a long time coming, our paper Altered visual population receptive fields in human albinism, is now out in Cortex🎉🎉

https://t.co/FSn9L5qHJx

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

New blogpost! Because I was bored, I decided to model my local climbing wall as a graph network.

https://t.co/nqsNohcCU7

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

@katestorrs Possibly. As far as I understand, the smoke over São Paulo is a rare occurrence, but unclear if it’s symptomatic of more intense fires. There is some satellite data on total area burnt by the fires, but it’s not super up to date. I’m intending to look at it, if I find the time!

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

New blogpost! Time to delve into the data and see if the ongoing 2019 fires in the Brazilian Amazon are truly exceptional. #AmazonRainforest #Brazil #AmazonFire #dataviz

https://t.co/pEOm9MqZWb

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

Our new paper Normative Cerebral Cortical Thickness for Human Visual Areas, is now published in NeuroImage 🎉🎉

https://t.co/L5CNvbt49G

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

Clinical studies looking at cerebral cortical thickness typically have small sample sizes, but what is the true range of variability in CT? We crunched a large HCP dataset to derive normative values across human visual areas. Pre-print here:

https://t.co/78RsoiJhkQ

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

New blogpost! This time I looked at Eurovision and how we can map disagreement between juries and the public to spot trends in public opinion in large datasets.

https://t.co/hhXOcaghEh

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

New blogpost! Some hard data on just how rare airplane crashes are, why you shouldn’t pick airlines based on safety record, and why if you absolutely -have- to be in a plane crash, you want to do it with Dagestan Airlines.

https://t.co/TAAiKlyDGS

[Saad Jbabdi @SaadJbabdi]

Late xmas read - hope you enjoy it! https://t.co/NeNzbCzyXK

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

New blogpost! So just how wrong are the UK election polls?

https://t.co/WeNE4KQX1V

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

New blogpost! Would giving everyone $1000 in the US for voting fix democracy or break the economy?

https://t.co/TAAiKlyDGS

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

@fiddleBrain some don't want to engage, and we should respect that. It's about opening doors to everyone, and who wants to come in, comes in

[Ivan Alvarez @ivan_a_alvarez]

@jodyavirgan in the unlikely event you are running low on @FiveThirtyEight podcast material, check out China as a bellwether state.