My Dad has the most interesting job in the world. He is a data scientist.

My name is Daniel and I am in 4th grade. This week, parents were invited into my school to tell us about their work. After careful consideration, I allowed my father to come, although I was a bit worried about it. After all, if he gave a bad presentation, I would look bad too. Fortunately, he did quite well. Some of my friends said they thought he had the most interesting job of all, because he works in so many different fields and finds out so many interesting things.

My father brought in a debit card, a coke bottle, a box of pain killers, a receipt from a supermarket, one of my school milk bottles and a lottery ticket. He explained us that all these items are connected to statistics and his job as a data scientist.

Filling the Coke bottle

In the production plant, Coke is put into bottles. Engineers regularly monitor whether the filling machine puts exactly one litre into each bottle. If the amount is too much, the bottle might overflow and become sticky. If it is too little, the people who buy it will be cross. Engineers produce line charts to see whether the amount stays the same.

Is there enough money in the ATM?

My father also worked on a project where they analysed the withdrawal amounts at ATMs. This is important to make sure that there is enough money in the ATM when people want to withdraw it. There are some ATMs in shopping malls that have to be filled several times a day! Others are only filled a few times a week. My father said that one of the most frequent withdrawal amounts is £90, because people want lots of £10 notes instead of a larger note.

Does medication work? Is it safe?

When I had the flu last year, I was given some medicine. I didn’t like it, but it helped. Pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of time finding out whether medicine really cures the illness. My father worked in that area before he joined SAS and told us that they also did a lot of research into the side effects, to make sure that medication does not harm us.

Getting milk to school before 8am

Now I know why he took my bottle of school milk before the lesson started! My father explained to us that we can only get fresh and cold milk at school before 8 am if the delivery truck follows the shortest route. Wow! There are so many schools in our district and so many different routes the truck could take, it must be really complicated to calculate the best route.

Counting all the trees in Austria?

Every 10 years, the woodland data collection takes place in Austria, because it is important to know whether the area of woodland is increasing or decreasing. The investigators also document the type and health of the trees. It turns out, though, that they don’t really count every tree in Austria. My father explained that instead, they sample selected areas, by looking at spots with a diameter of around 8 meters, regularly spread across Austria. The state of the wood is documented in these spaces, then data scientists use these numbers to estimate the overall state of the woodlands in Austria with statistical methods.

I like cookies and apple juice

My father has also done analyses for supermarkets, for example, to find out which products are often bought together and whether there is any weekly pattern. He says that they probably also know that I am allowed to buy my favourite cookies on Saturday when I shop with my parents!

My grandfather once won € 100 in the lottery

In lotteries and casinos, you can (sometimes) win money. My grandfather was once very lucky when he won € 100 and took all his grandchildren out for dinner. He also said, though, that he had bought plenty of other lottery tickets that had not won prizes! My father says that statistical methods are used to distribute the winning amounts amongst the tickets so that is profitable for the lottery but still appealing for the people who buy the tickets.

Repairing machines before they are broken?

South of Vienna there is a large refinery. It is really impressive. Maintenance engineers have to make sure that all the machines and pipes there work safely. My father explained that the engineers are sometimes advised to go to areas that are close to where they are working and exchange parts at another machine that is still working perfectly, because it is expected to break down in a few weeks. This reduces the travel cost of the engineers and makes sure that the machines can operate without a problem.

The most dangerous dinosaur

We also did some statistical experiments in the classroom. We rolled two dice over and over again, and recorded the sum. We found out that the possible sums do not occur equally often, but make a graph that looks rather like a triangle. We also made a living scatterplot with my dinosaur top trumps cards and saw that there was a relationship between the size and the danger of the dinosaur.

My father has the most interesting job in the world! He is a data scientist. He works with supermarkets, trees, coke bottles, lotteries, and helps to deliver our school milk.

Next time I visit my father at the SAS office, I know what interesting things all the people are doing there.

The father’s view

This is now more than 10 years ago, but I really enjoyed my session at my son’s primary school. I still remember how carefully I prepared because Daniel was very clear that I should not make him look bad. Children are a challenging audience because they let you know immediately if they find the presentation or session boring. We adults are much more polite at conferences ;-). It is, however, a real pleasure to see children’s enthusiasm. Their questions can often give you new inspiration because they are not influenced by any business background or framework. I can highly recommend the whole experience.

On a more serious note, understanding analytics use cases is not always easy for professionals outside the statistical or data communities. We often ask data scientists to make their findings easier to understand, but I think business sponsors have a role to play too. By thinking about their use cases in the simplest way to solve a business problem, analytics becomes an active tool, not just something the specialists do. I encourage business sponsors to learn the way Richard Feynman recommended; explain it to a complete novice. https://fs.blog/2012/04/learn-anything-faster-with-the-feynman-technique/