About

“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” Ronald Coase

I’ve been working with data for nearly too decades. Even before there was such profession called “data scientist.”

While destine took me down the path of data science and mathematics, that was not my first option. My dream job was to be a journalist. Except, I was born twenty years too late. By the time I got to college, it was a dying profession.

One thing going for me is that data is not a standalone discipline; it is an amplifier for other fields. I was working in property management when I was first exposed to data analysis.

As my career progressed into the military, I took my knowledge with data and apply to many different operational domains to solve complex challenges. Across all my roles, a central theme emerged: most data problems are not analysis problems.

When someone would ask me why a resident was moving out, I quickly discovered nobody recorded why anyone left. The question was answerable in principle and not in fact, and the useful thing you can do is say so early rather than produce a confident-looking answer from data that cannot support one.

Why Investigative Data Journalist?

The idea of investigative data journalist steams from the idea that I don’t just take a dataset and apply a algorithm and expect to provide me with the desirible answer.

Instead, I investigate the background, the root of the problem, and handle the data with much care to listen to what it has to say.

But most importantly is communicating the methodology, the data, and the results in a simple way that everyone can understand. That gap between having an answer and landing it is what I went back to school for: a master’s in journalism and communications, and now a doctorate in data science, in progress, on how findings get communicated.

So the writing is not a byproduct of the analysis. It is where the analysis becomes real, and it gets the same scrutiny. I work in English and Portuguese.