I live in the Bay Area. The Bay Area is extremely expensive. (Source not cited.) Oppressively high housing costs have led to all kinds of fun social pathologies. San Francisco's homelessness crisis is only the most well-documented. There is also... Continue Reading →
That's Right, I Wrote A Novel Hello, prospective content consumer! I'd like to hawk you my book tell you about my comedic novel, Good Intentions. It's about an angel working at a heavenly bureaucracy that's being "disrupted" by the smartphone... Continue Reading →
I was interested in whether "woke" companies donate disproportionately to Democrats, or if their embrace of progressive causes is one big branding exercise. The answer? Kinda both! I'm unbelievably proud to say that my findings were published in this week's... Continue Reading →
I recently attended the Data Science Innovation in eLearning Conference (hosted by Udemy and Zoomi), where I gave a lightning talk on the way we're scaling up A/B testing at Coursera by empowering our university partners to run their own experiments. Check... Continue Reading →
Note: This post assumes a passing familiarity with linear regression. Aside from that, it's a highly applied intro to D-in-D regression and panel data techniques. In Due Time In one of my favorite episodes of Futurama, the universe experiences "time skips."... Continue Reading →
I wrote a post for Inside Big Data on transitioning into Data Science -- a topic I'm actually qualified to give advice on! It’s a familiar dilemma. You’ve done your research, read some books, taken some online classes – and at long... Continue Reading →
Why Even Try, Man? I recently came upon Brian Granger and Jake VanderPlas's Altair, a promising young visualization library. Altair seems well-suited to addressing Python's ggplot envy, and its tie-in with JavaScript's Vega-Lite grammar means that as the latter develops new... Continue Reading →
Note: In this post, I assume some familiarity with PyMC. If you need to get up to speed in a hurry and you're familiar with linear regression, go here for a tutorial. Alternatively, you can read for the methodological intuition,... Continue Reading →
Contextualizing My Vendetta I've been on a streak of bad flights lately. The last two, in particular, were horrible -- and not horrible in the standard "cramped seats/rubbery food/my-God-that-smell" way. Horrible due to (A) an unexplained cancellation, which turned my 12-hour... Continue Reading →
