My Professional Background

I obtained a PhD in Statistics from the University of Warwick in 2013, my thesis title was “Uncertainty in Changepoints in Time Series” ¹. I’m delighted that Dr Little Alex Horne recently became associated with my alma mater through the Taskmaster Education scheme.

I have 10 years of industry experience as a Research Scientist/Data Scientist at Amazon and Samsung, predominantly demand forecasting at scale for products. From this experience, I have some experience on running projects at scale, with rigor (automation, repeatability) and compromises that need to be made (whether it be technical, monetary, mental).

My Personal Motivation

There are a variety of personal reasons why I am starting The Median Duck.

Perhaps optimistically, I want to (stealthy) educate others of analytics to the general public in a fun and amusing manner. Statistics is not taught particularly well in the UK, often seen as a boring number crunching and often a medium to lie. Add to this, I want to instill best practices and the graft work that I have experienced over my years, and that are often overlooked in courses and textbooks (importance of good quality data, automated workflows, etc.).

I made the somewhat brave decision to become self employed at the start of 2024, and have various ventures in the work to provide some income and keep me entertained on a daily basis (piano teaching, piano performance, admin for my housing association). The Median Duck is one of these ventures.

I don’t expect this venture to be a money maker (major or minor), but I do want to retain my engagement in the data science and statistics field. Add to this, my “imposter syndrome” often wants me to relearn the basics.

I do have some aspirations to potentially go into data journalism through data science and analytics and this venture may provide some experience and build up a portfolio of work.

Finally, I do not claim to be a full expert and entirely knowledgeable about the analysis I will be covering². However I’m always eager to learn new topics and also educate others; I believe I am an educator and teacher at my core. My passion for Taskmaster and prior experience with the analytics field thus makes The Median Duck this the ideal vehicle.

My Taskmaster Journey

My Taskmaster journey properly started during 2020 (and the global pandemic), when the Series 2 task “order something without using certain words” was recommended to me on YouTube. Once I watched this task, I was hooked and consequently went down the Taskmaster rabbit hole and binged whatever series were available.

However, prior to this, I was initially quite dismissive of Taskmaster. I had previously associated “Taskmaster” with “Ticketmaster” and thus erroneously thought it was going to be a dull show in which extortionate ticket scalping would occur. How wrong I was…

Since 2020, I have watched each series of Taskmaster (mainly UK) near the time of broadcast, and consumed Taskmaster adjacent material (the podcast, comedians appearances on other comedy shows etc.).

I have also unofficially (and jokingly) assigned myself the title of “Taskmaster Representative of the Pacific Northwest” as I have referred numerous friends and colleagues about Taskmaster and also informed them of when the next series is broadcasting.

These are a Few of My Favourite Taskmaster Things…

• Favourite Task: Ringtone Choreography (S4E4)
• Favourite Series: Series 4 or 5.
• Favourite Contestant: Victoria Coren Mitchell³
• Favourite Quote(s): “Friendship is Truth”
• Degrees of Separation to Alex Horne (to my knowledge): 3