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 …

Read More

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 …

Read More

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 …

Read More

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 …

Read More

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, …

Read More

I’m fond of navel gazing, meta discussions, and so forth. I’ve recently written about inferring navel gazing from link data, and about the meaning of the “Analytics” buzzword. This post will be my second on that other infectious buzzword, “Data Science”. When I moved to Washington DC in July, I was struck by the fact …

Read More

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 …

Read More

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 …

Read More

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 …

Read More

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 …

Read More