A personal interest I have is the ethical and sustainable production of food. I’ve been a member of and helped run Community Supported Agriculture groups, and my wife and I currently purchase the majority of our meat from a group of upstate NY pastured-livestock producers who sell their products through CSAs. It’s an …

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For a project I’m working on at work, I’m building a predictive model that categorizes something (I can’t tell you what) into two bins. There is a default bin that 95% of the things belong to and a bin that the business cares a lot about, containing 5% of the things. Some readers may be familiar with the use of …

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I recently attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research, aka “INFORMS Analytics 2011”, conference in Chicago. This deserves a little bit of an explanation. INFORMS is the professional organization for Operations Research (OR) and Management Science (MS), which are terms describing …

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Neil Saunders has an interesting (to me) blog post up this morning, with the title “Dumped on by data scientists.” He uses the use of “data scientist” in a Chronicle of Higher Ed article to rant a little bit about the term. For Neil, it’s redundant, as the act of doing science necessarily requires data; it’s insulting, …

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I was recently given the opportunity to re-present my ggplot2 talk, which I originally gave to the NYC R Meetup, to the DC R Meetup group. The Meetup was held co-located with the Predictive Analytics World conference in Alexandria, VA. (More on my thoughts on PAW below…) Contentwise, I made only small changes, changing …

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The Meetup phenomenon, which is now substantial and longstanding enough to be more of a cultural change than a flash in the pan, continues to impress me. Even more so than tools like LinkedIn, Meetups have changed the nature of professional networking, making it more informal, diverse, and decentralized. Last night, …

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As more and more people get smartphones that can play MP3s or streamed music, like the iPhone or Android phone like the upcoming HTC Evo 4G (I’m gettin’ one!), fewer and fewer people are buying standalone MP3 players. Why have two gadgets when you can have just one? But I think there are good reasons to do so, but I …

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A few months back I gave a presentation to the NYC R Meetup. (R is a statistical programming language. If this means nothing to you, feel free to stop reading now.) The presentation was on ggplot2, a popular package for generating graphs of data and statistics. In the talk (which you can see here, including both my …

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Hah, it rhymes! The fall haul (hah!) from the CSA inevitably means two things, root vegetables and ungodly numbers of pears. I love root vegetables, but tend to find pears to be pale imitations of apples. But when poached in red wine, or cooked with butter and sugar, pears can have some redeeming value. Recently, for …

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The problem of how to monetize online publishing, particularly news publishing, is neither new nor all that surprising. But the ongoing lack of a solution is steadily eating into news organizations across the country. Yesterday, the Times announced it was going to buy out or lay off 8% of its newsroom staff, despite …

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