I’m about to BARE MY SOUL to the internet. Well, the soul of my teenage self. Get ready!

I’ve been a data scientist in the non-profit sector for 5+ years. In an earlier conversation with people starting their transition into data science, we talked about how non-profit data can be an excellent place to start. There are some cons to beginning at a non-profit - but I love it.

At the 2018 December NYC R Ladies meetup (yes this post has been sitting in my drafts for over a year), a group started talking about how a few tiny functions in a lesser-known package can provide you with serious magic. The problem is finding those packages and functions! With so many amazing packages on CRAN and GitHub, how do you even begin to search? One way - ask all your twitter followers what they think, and twitter did not disappoint - so here are some examples of amazing packages and functions you might want to learn about.

Orginal Plan - Scrape from Archive

I was reminded today by Daniela that everyone should blog - and on top of that you can totally blog something small and simple just to get something out there.

I recently gave a r-ladies presentation about my work cleaning and working with really messy education data. This blog post is an attempt at summarizing the main points of the talk.

Daniela Vázquez recently published her blog post on Last Week Tonight. She used a bunch of code from my previous LBD analysis (THANKS FOR THE LOVE DANIELA! :heart:) and also created this super cool plotly widget.

Inspired by Julia’s Silge’s recent talk on Tidytext as part of NASA Datanauts, and her blog posts, I decided to try my hand at some text analysis. Julia’s examples focus on the works of Jane Austen. As Jane Austen has been adapted so many time, I decided to “adapt” Julia’s talk for the modern works of Austen’s book Pride and Prejudice - specifically the Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

Last weekend was the 2017 RStatsNYC conference. I had a great time talking to friends and meeting new friends throughout the weekend. The speakers covered a variety of topics from data ethics to cloud cloud computing. I’ve complied my notes, plus some of popular tweets from the conference below.

At the end of spring semester, I sent in my application to DoSomething.org for their Data Intern position. I found out about the position through a communication that started over Github, and thought it sounded interesting. I sent in my resume and cover letter and waited to see what would happen. I made it through to the next rounds. The last step was a phone interview where I gave a quick presentation on my analysis on some data, and talked about what the internship was about and what I was interested in. I mentioned that what brought me to Data Science was teaching, and how I hoped to be involved with research and education technology in the future. I didn’t get the job.

At some point this past week, I came to the realization that of the professors I’ve had this year, I’ve only referred to the female professor by her first name in conversation with other students. I wondered if this was indicative of some larger issue, or if it’s just because she’s also our class adviser.

Articles and Blog posts

The Epidemiology and Statistical Mechanics of Zombies by Alexander A. Alemi, Matthew Bierbaum, Christopher R. Myers, James P. Sethna Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 A research paper about zombies!

Articles:

• This article is about a year old, but I still find it fascinating. What Makes Online Instructional Video Compelling

Graphics and visualizations are used for promotion, advertisement to promote a product or idea. In science, graphics tend to fall into one of two categories: for use in education or a science journal. For information on what makes a good educational graphic, or a teaching tool, I’ve written a piece earlier on this blog here. In the academic articles, graphics hold a special role in telling a compelling story of the data and results, however, the editing emphasis is often placed much more on text than making interesting and understandable science graphics.

Educational graphics:

Starting March 13th the college groups on Tab for a Cause will be competing in a bracket style tournament for “charitable supremacy!” For more on the tournament: click here

I’m going to start a new monthly post where I link to the most interesting articles, blog posts, tutorials and youtube videos I’ve found throughout the previous month.

YouTube is well known as the website that hosts illegal music videos and cats, and while the cat videos are abundant and adorable, there’s been a new trend on YouTube toward channels and videos that offer viewers educational content as well as entertainment.