I’ve been reading Fred Wilson’s blog AVC most days for 4 or 5 years now. I admire the way he writes: simple sentences that have a clear point of view. He doesn’t hide behind complexity or jargon, and he doesn’t hedge every opinion for fear of being wrong. I’ve tried with mixed success to incorporate […]
Analysis with R
- Analysis with R
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What People Talk About When They Talk About Sally Rooney Books
I recently finished Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. One of the characters in the book is a novelist who is adjusting to life in the public eye and can’t understand why strangers on the internet feel the need to analyze and comment on her life. It’s easy to imagine that Rooney herself shares […]
Quantifying what Republicans and Democrats talked about at the DNC and the RNC
We took the toughest, boldest, strongest, and hardest hitting action against China in American history by far. President Trump, RNC Night 4 Donald Trump has had a love fest with dictators, including China and Russia. He hasn’t been standing up to them at all. Rose G, DNC Night 3 I didn’t watch much of either […]
Quantifying the Poker Boom
Since reading Maria Konnikova’s terrific new book The Biggest Bluff, I have been on a poker kick. She describes her journey to the World Series of Poker Main Event, poker’s biggest stage, and what it is like to be there. This got me interested in the tournament and its history. I knew poker got incredibly […]
Drinking, Cursing, and Cardigans: Taylor Swift Lyrics Over Time
Edit 12/12/2020: Ms. Swift has been much more productive than I have this year and released another album, so this is updated with Evermore lyrics Several years ago, I listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation album and noticed lots of references to alcohol. I was in my early 20s and it reminded me of the self-conscious […]
The New York Times’ coverage of the Coronavirus
I used the New York Times API to see how it has covered the Coronavirus since the crisis began. My feeling was that for about a month, from mid-March to mid-April, it was all anyone could talk or think about. And since then, it still dominates the public consciousness but people are, understandably, tired of […]
Which companies have the most likable CEOs?
Glassdoor asks employees whether they’d recommend a company to a friend and whether they approve of the CEO. For the most part, you would expect those two numbers to match closely. And for the most part they do, but there are some interesting ways in which they don’t. I looked at data from Glassdoor for […]
Exploring Trends in the Coffee Industry through Text Analysis
I spend a lot of time in coffee shops and this has led me to want to know more about coffee and the industry around it. To this end, I analyzed text from posts to reddit’s coffee forum and looked for trends, following the same process I outlined in this post on nutrition trends. I […]
Buy the (avocado) dip: Analyzing nutritional buzzwords on Reddit
Big CPG companies are struggling to move quickly enough to meet changing tastes. Kraft Heinz’s recent write-downs are a particularly salient example of this. One way incumbents have sought to keep up is by acquiring small brands that have a more direct connection with consumers and are perceived as healthier, fresher, or more authentic. Prominent […]
Game Theory, Blockchain Tech and Predictive Modeling at Numerai
Numerai is a hedge fund that crowdsources its model-building through data science competitions. It does this by publishing a dataset with blinded and encrypted variables so that data scientists can build predictive models without having full access to Numerai’s proprietary data. Competitors can stake Numeraire, a token built on Ethereum, to signal confidence in their […]