This is an updated version of an article first published on Medium on Oct. 24, 2015. I love my smartwatch, way more than I thought I would when I bought it, over a year ago. It’s a Moto 360, which is still better looking than the Apple watch, I think. Why do I love it? It’s not the health monitoring. I turned that junk …

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This post was originally published on Medium View this post on X (josh_wills) There are different types of data scientists, with different backgrounds and career paths. With Sean Murphy and Marck Vaisman, I wrote an article about this for O’Reilly a few years back, based on survey research we’d done. Download a copy, …

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This post was originally published on Medium I’m the Director of Data Science at EAB, a firm that provides best-practices research and enterprise software for colleges and universities. My team is responsible for the predictive models and other advanced analytics that are part of the Student Success Collaborative …

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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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{{% x user="HarlanH" id="508680143867768832" %}}

Let me unpack that a bit…

Hugh and Crye t-shirt

Recently, Hugh & Crye, a DC-based clothing firm for men, with a novel take on sizing, recently did a Kickstarter campaign for their new line of fitted t-shirts. What the hell? H&C has been around for about 5 …

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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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