Just a quick post here to note a few professional accomplishments…
I’ve been cooking a recipe recently of my own creation that I really like, and there isn’t much similar on the internet, so I’m sharing the recipe here. It’s a combination of two great things – hot-smoking fish with wood chips in a stovetop smoker, and the fermented flavors of Hunanese cuisine. Smoked fish and duck are common flavors in Chinese cooking. Tea-smoked duck is common on Chinese menus in America, and Chinese cookbooks have recipes like Steamed Smoked Fish with Black Beans and Chiles.
A thing that I do when I cook is to re-write the recipes I’m using (whether they’re from a cookbook or my own invention) onto a piece of paper in a very specific way. I think the approach I use is handy, so I’m describing it here in case you’d like to use it. (Or in case you need more evidence about how weird I am.) There are 4 ideas that I think are important:
This is my first new post on harlan.harris.name for a while. The occasion is a change of scenery. For about 10 years, my primary blog has been on WordPress, more recently supplemented by Medium. But WordPress and Medium are limited for technical writing, and the trend among data people recently has been to publish static sites built with Blogdown and Hugo. So that’s what this is. The technology I’m using (more on it below) lets me do fun things like trivially embed math: \(\sum_i a^2_i\), or generate plots with embedded code:
This post was originally published on Medium There’s recently been some interesting opinionated writing in the R statistical programming community about how and when to teach the abstracted, easy-to-use approaches to solving problems, versus the underlying nitty-gritty. David Robinson, Data Scientist at Stack Overflow, wrote a blog post recently called Don’t teach students the hard way first. The primary example was on the data-manipulation tools in the tidyverse, versus the underlying methods in base R, but the discussion was mostly about principles in pedagogy.
This post was originally published on Medium I recently attended two small conferences — the ISBIS (International Society for Business and Industrial Statistics) 2017 conference, held at IBM Research in Westchester County, and the Domino Data Lab Popup, held in West SoHo. I was invited to speak at ISBIS (slides here, if you’re curious), but for this post, I want to summarize some insights from other people’s talks. In chronological (to me) order… First a few talks from ISBIS that I particularly liked (note that I only saw a fraction of all the talks):
This post was originally published on Medium Occasionally when chatting with other data scientists, especially with others who are interested in integrating predictive models into production software system, the word “scaling” comes up. Not this. Although some West Coast data scientists are into this kind of scaling too. I think this is a great question, but it’s a little underspecified. There seem to be at least three qualitatively different notions of “scaling” in data science, and it’s worth the effort to clarify each of them, and address how people tackle them.
This post was originally published on Medium A particularly good way to get a little more out of professional conferences is to blog about your experiences, I think. It makes you focus your thoughts on things like “what’s the big take-away here,” and “what should I be asking people in the hallways?” Rather than just summarizing what you saw, or making snarky Twitter comments (also worth doing!), a great conference blog post is synthesis — combining insights from multiple presentations and conversations into a coherent new whole that helps clarify ideas.
This post was originally published on Medium A particularly good talk at Strata NY last year was by Brett Goldstein, former CIO of Chicago, who talked about accountability and transparency in predictive models that affect people’s lives. This struck a strong chord with me, so I wanted to take some time to write down some thoughts. (And a rather longer time to publish those thoughts…) I’m sure others’ have thought about this more and have better takes on this — please comment and provide links!
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