I did so because every time I've ever skimmed her blog, I've never seen anything interesting on it. Then I watched the PyCon talk linked above and it's full of "cute" things with no substance. Skimming through some other talk gave me the same feeling.
So I started digging.
In Fall 2008, she was part of Path101 (http://www.slideshare.net/path101/path-101-opportunity -- slide 3) and listed as having a PhD in Computer Science. But like prunedevir, I had to dig relatively hard to find what university she taught at. There's no CV on her blog. There are claims that she's on sabbatical, so this is REALLY strange. Availability of her information is _nothing_ like someone who is a researcher in machine learning with a PhD.
So I dug more.
As prunedevir points out, the university is Johnson and Wales. It's a technical college. And she was an _instructor_ there (google for the JWU catalog 05-06) for a few semesters before they finally upped her to assistant professor (JWU catalog 08-09, I think). And in the catalog, she's listed as having an ScM, NOT a PhD -- which makes a whole hell of a lot more sense.
I found a few slide presentations that she put together (sorry, it's a few hours later and I can't re-dig up all those links to post here) and they were all about PHP, CSS, and other web development stuff, as well as some stuff about the use of technology in education. I think most of this was from 2006-2008. You'd think the _chief scientist_ of bit.ly doing machine learning work would have been doing something else during this time -- not looking at run-of-the-mill web dev.
Her previous website (3greeneggs), archived by the Wayback Machine (http://waybackmachine.org/*/http://3greeneggs.com) shows more stuff consistent with web dev, etc, and awfully soft for a chief scientist working on machine learning.
Furthermore, here's a paged removed from her blog that Google Cache allows us to see:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hfTTGEb...
I'd probably delete it, too, if I were pulling the same act that she is.
Also, side note: in the PyCon talk she mentions that she looked up some old manuscript on statistics and it was by "A. D. E. Moyver" or something close to that. My jaw dropped. Surely she knew what she was talking about, but that name sounds suspiciously like a horrible bastardization of Abraham de Moivre -- and it was. He was exactly the guy she was talking about.
I fully realize this post comes off as hugely negative, but I hate seeing people get ahead because of repeated self-promotion and gaming the system.
Also, the Path101 slides could have been juiced up by someone other than her, OR the JWU catalog may be wrong and she really does have a PhD, but I way doubt the latter, and there's almost no doubt, for the former, that she at least would have seen the slide deck before it went out.
I wasn't going to post anything, but this whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth and the truth tastes a lot better.