Earlier this year, I attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research, in Boston. I was asked beforehand if I wanted to be a conference blogger, and for some reason I said I would. This meant I was able to publish posts on the conference’s WordPress web site, and was also obliged to do …

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On Monday, October 28th, 2013, I gave a 5-minute Ignite talk entitled “Why a Data Community is Like a Music Scene” at an event associated with the Strata conference. Here’s the video: And here are the acknowledgements and references for the talk: Data Community DC How Music Works, by David Byrne my slides for the …

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A topographic map of Washington in 1791 by Don Alexander Hawkins. I live on the top edge of the map, on one of those hills. I’m a generally happy user of DC’s Capital Bikeshare system – just renewed my annual membership today in fact. But I don’t use it as much as I’d like to, for one critical reason. I live on top of …

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And, we’re back! After being off-line for several weeks, this site is now live again! I can’t imagine you missed it. Here’s what happened. Let’s start at the beginning. In 2003, ICANN added .name to the list of top-level domains (like .com, .edu, etc.). The idea is that individuals would use it for personal sites and …

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For those people (or, more likely, 0 or 1 persons) who follow this blog to catch up on my professional thoughts: I’ve been doing a little bit of writing on the Data Community DC blog. Here are all my posts over there: http://datacommunitydc.org/blog/author/harlan/ I’d definitely encourage you to read everyone else’s …

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I recently gave a presentation on communication issues around the terms “Data Science” and “Data Scientist”, based in part on a survey that I did with my Meetup colleagues Marck and Sean. The basic idea is that these new, extremely-broad buzzwords have resulted in confusion, which has impacted the ability of people …

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My newish cooking club had a dinner yesterday with the theme American Beer. I was tasked with dessert, and came up with this recipe for Pretzel Whoopie Pies. They turned out extremely well, so I thought I’d share the recipe here. Sources: About.com Southern Food (basic whoopie pie recipe) Southern Living (Stout …

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I just returned from the useR! 2012 conference for developers and users of R. One of the common themes to many of the presentations was integration of R-based statistical systems with other systems, be they other programming languages, web systems, or enterprise data systems. Some highlights for me were an update to …

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As I’ve discussed here before, there is a debate raging (ok, maybe not raging) about terms such as “data science”, “analytics”, “data mining”, and “big data”. What do they mean, how do they overlap, and perhaps most importantly, who are the people who work in these fields? Along with two other DC-area Data Scientists, …

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On last week’s Build and Analyze – a great podcast nominally about iOS development, but actually more about just living a tech-geek lifestyle – Marco talked a lot about the rumored “Apple TV” and whether it could actually be a groundbreaking product. He concluded that it probably couldn’t. Most people wouldn’t dump …

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