Posts

Data Science in Education Using R Launches on October 27, 2020

With the release of Data Science in Education Using R right around the corner, Emily, Isabella, Jesse, Josh and I have been sharing what readers can expect from the book.
Last updated on Oct 4, 2020

What do Animal Crossing players look for in villagers?

I spent a recent morning at a virtual island concert celebrating the arrival of a dog folk guitarist named K.K. Slider. The concert is a milestone in the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which has become odd comfort to me and others during the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.
May 24, 2020

Planet Money's Episode on the Modal American is a Great Example of Data Storytelling

Introduction In August of 2019 Planet Money posted an episode about using statistics to understand who the typical American is. The episode was called The Modal American and was a story about using the mode–a statistic that describes the most common value in a dataset–to finally describe a human being you might see on the street, not a composite of different average numbers.
Oct 20, 2019

California School Dashboards Part 3: Modeling the Data

This is part three of a three part series where I work with California School Dashboard data by cleaning, visualizaing, and exploring through modeling. You can read the first part of this series, which shows one way to clean and prepare the data, and the second part of the series, which shows a way to visualize the data .
Mar 31, 2018

California School Dashboards Part 2: Visualizing the Data

This is part two of a three part series where I’ll be working with California School Dashboard data by cleaning, visualizaing, and exploring through modeling. You can read the first part of this series, which shows one way to clean and prepare the data, at this link.
Mar 18, 2018

California School Dashboards Part 1: Cleaning the Data

This is part one of a three part series where I’ll be working with California School Dashboard data by cleaning, visualizaing, and exploring through modeling. Introduction: It’s Ok to Skip Around I’m writing this series for data scientists, public school educators, and data scientists who are also public school educators.
Feb 8, 2018

Turning Dataset Codes to Words With R

Note: I include a lot of code in this post so my fellow data scientists can either learn from it or give me feedback about how to make it better.
Jan 28, 2018

Public School Data is Great, But You Have to Clean It First

Using public school data can help school districts see the bigger picture of what is going on. So why don’t we see more districts taking advantage of this information gold mine?
Jan 8, 2018

Comparing Home and Away Wins of Kenny Dalglish’s Managerial Runs (Also, Did It Matter?)

After my first post, @HighlandDataSci on Twitter had a great question: Was Kenny Dalglish’s home and away win odds ratio different during his first run as manager than his second?
Dec 2, 2017

Liverpool FC's Managers: Home and Away Win Odds

Anfield in Liverpool is one of the legendary stadiums of English football. Fortress Anfield has been the home to many historic games, including Liverpool’s 4-3 win against Newcastle in 1996 and my personal favorite, Liverpool’s 3-1 win against Olympiacos to go through to the Champions League’s last 16.
Nov 23, 2017