What is the Most Harmful Storm in the US?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) regularly publishes data on storm occurrences in the US. They make available annual data dating back to 1950 and it includes time-series, geographic proximity, and financial destruction information as well as storm characteristics (event type, width of tornado, wind gust estimates, etc.). While you could do thousands of … [Read more…]

Fixing Excel’s Sci Not Faux Pas with R

Encountered what I think is a pretty common excel problem at work today. A colleague showed me an excel spreadsheet that was reading warehouse locations as scientific notation. For example, location 05E03 was being read into excel as 5.00E+03 and if you tried to edit the cell or convert it to text, you’d be given … [Read more…]

Micro Time Study

Of late, I’ve been feeling accomplishment-less. So I decided to conduct a micro time study to figure how exactly how I’m utilizing all of my minutes and see if that allocation was efficiently contributing to what I was trying to achieve. The first step was in identifying exactly what I was trying to achieve so … [Read more…]

30 Miles on Foot

Last week, with a trusty Sachmel by my side, I ventured to run 30 miles on the day I turned 30 years old. In return for the effort, I gained an immense sense of satisfaction along with 25.5 miles of data collected by my Garmin Forerunner. Unfortunately, the battery only lasted 85% of the run. … [Read more…]

Predicting Fuel Economy for 1974 Automobiles

Based on the infamous mtcars dataset, I used a stepwise selection process to generate a predictive model of fuel economy for 1974 automobiles*. My entire process was done primarily in R and can be found here on rPubs. In short, the model uses a car’s weight and 1/4-mile time to predict mpg’s. At the same … [Read more…]

Vendor Deconsolidation Opportunity Leads to a D3 Map

When I first started working in logistics I heard the phrase ‘vendor deconsolidation’ frequently. I ignored the ‘de’ and automatically thought this was simply the process of a retailer getting rid of some of its vendors (it’s not). When I was asked to quote a price for a ‘deconsol’ opportunity (it’s my job to price … [Read more…]