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 …

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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, …

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This post was originally published on Medium You’re a data scientist, and you’ve got a predictive model — great work! Now what? In many cases, you need to hook it up to some sort of large, complex software product so that users can get access to the predictions. Think of LinkedIn’s People You May Know, which mines your …

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This post was originally published on Medium Yesterday was the 2016 National Day of Civic Hacking, a Code for America event that encourages people with technology and related skills to explore projects related to civil society and government. My friend Josh Tauberer wrote a thoughtful post earlier about the event …

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This post was originally published on Medium Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician. — @spite.vc on bluesky (@josh_wills) May 3, 2012 There are different types of data scientists, with different backgrounds and …

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The below is a public version of a post originally posted on an internal blog at the Education Advisory Board (EAB), my current employer. We don’t yet have a public tech blog, but I got permission to edit and post it here, along with the referenced code. 

Data Science teams get asked to do a lot of different sorts …
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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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This past Friday, the web portal to the US Federal government, USA.gov, organized hackathons across the US for programmers and data scientists to work with and analyze the data from their link-shortening service. It turns out that if you shorten a web link with bit.ly, the shortened link looks like 1.usa.gov/V6NpL …

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In my previous post, I motivated a web application that would allow small-scale sustainable meat producers to sell directly to consumers using a meat share approach, using constrained optimization techniques to maximize utility for everyone involved. In this post, I’ll walk through some R code that I wrote to …

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