Occasionally, I need a map. I’m not talking about a beautiful, polished work of art. I just need something that gives me some spacial context and that will be acceptable in a customer presentation. Most frequently I need to see points on a map… sometimes lots of them.If you Google ‘plot points on a map’ … [Read more…]
Dear Tom, a few months ago we were running in Central Park discussing your impending job search when you finish your MBA this spring. I mentioned that I wrote a script that extracts key phrases from job postings to use in both your resume and cover letter that would at the very least give you ideas about what … [Read more…]
As a business development manager (BDM) it’s good to be a data science aspirant, especially when your customer relationship management (CRM) platform doesn’t have the type of out of the box analytics that you need to answer questions about your sales processes. My data science education has enabled me to write my own code and … [Read more…]
Last week, I finished the 6 course Data Analyst Nanodegree offered by Sabastian Thrun’s Udacity Inc. Even with an above average number of academic credentials behind me, I will venture to say that this was the best educational endeavor I’ve been through yet. When I worked through my undergrad and graduate degrees in economics, I … [Read more…]
The state of Florida, every four years, is a definitive swing state in the US Presidential election. Since 1996 – 5 election cycles ago – the candidate that captured Florida’s electoral votes became the next US President. Assuming a strong correlation between campaign contributions and election results and having perfect hindsight of knowing the 2012 Presidential election … [Read more…]
A few weeks back I submitted a project to Udacity’s Intro to Data Science Course that analyzed a dataset of NYC subway entries and weather. It was an attempt to explore, visualize, and build a model to predict hourly subway entries. It was almost an end to end data project… except that they supplied the … [Read more…]
Wrapped up the second project in Udacity’s Data Analyst Nanodegree last night. In a nutshell, the goal of the project was to Download a .osm file > 50 MB of any geographic boundary from around the world (I used Denver-Boulder, CO which is 616 MB) Parse the .osm file and clean the data specific to … [Read more…]
In this post I’ll pretend that I am teaching a data science course on collecting, cleaning, storing, and updating data. Rather than pretending my students are computer scientists or software developers, I’ll pretend that they are business analysts or college grads going on to become business analysts. However, I’ll assume they know some programming (python), … [Read more…]
As I ventured into Lesson 4 in Udacity’s Data Wrangling with MongoDB, I really wanted to run the first script — inserting a record into the database — locally. I feel like I really damaged the sanctity of my files by installing, uninstalling, messing with permission, etc. for hours in all different locations in my … [Read more…]
I’ve created an ‘in-progress’ google spreadsheet for a lot of the exercises and examples in Udacity’s Intro Statistics courses (Intro to Descriptive Statistics & Intro to Statistical Inference) — link is below. When I used to teach finance, I taught class with spreadsheets like this one rather than with powerpoint. Preparing this kind of document … [Read more…]