I just happened upon Analytics Made Skeezy, a blog written by John Foreman, Chief Scientist at MailChimp. He posts every so often detailing various techniques used in analytics, ranging from revenue management using price elasticity estimation to clustering and community detection.

Well this is a few weeks late! My father and I went to Chile for my spring break for about a week - between March 22nd and March 29th - to go hiking in Torres del Paine National Park.

It’s been a long time since I talked about this, but I’ve been re-writing Animurecs in PHP, having gotten fed up with feeling like I was working around Rails to get things done.

So I’m taking classes this winter and spring; finally on track to finish my BA in math. One of the classes I’m taking is an intro sociology class - one of the overarching goals of the course is to understand the interplay between parenting and education, and how these two factors help children become successful later in life.

I’ve been an active member of an online social forum called End of the Internet for a few years now. The site is particularly interesting because it’s both closed off to the public and has been relatively long-lived despite the lack of new users; the active posters on the site have been around since the site’s founding in early 2004, and watching the topics of discussion shift as the userbase grows and ages has been really interesting.

Representative Jeff Flake (R-Ariz) led a House vote on Thursday to pass an amendment prohibiting the NSF from funding political science research.

Suzy Khimm ran an article today about an interesting study done by the Center for Public Integrity showing that, contrary to commonly-held beliefs about party values and lines, Democrat and Republican citizens alike would choose to cut huge swaths of the defense budget:

I’m currently with my parents for the weekend, and things have been really busy. As a result I haven’t had the time to write this post I’ve been turning over in my head; trust me, though, if we’re at all acquainted it’s worth the wait.

I recently came across Science-Based Medicine, which is an absolute treasure trove of articles about a plethora of topics in medicine written by an all-star lineup of physicians in a variety of fields.