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 …

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 …

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 …

This post was originally published on Medium

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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 …

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 …

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. 

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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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …