Letters to a Layperson (myself)

Welcome to my personal website. I always aspire to keep pumping out content, but I don’t.

Here you will find my “recent” blog posts, possibly outdated biographical information, my socials, and links to projects I have made or worked on.

posts

Rust traits for R users
In the few months that I’ve been programming in Rust nothing has so fundamentally…
learning rust
I have been wanting to learn a low level language for quite some time. Due to the power and prominence of Rcpp I had thought I wanted to learn C++. Every fast package in R…
JHU talk (slides)
Raw strings in R
The one thing about Python I actually really…
Programatically Create Formulas in R
I’m working on a prototype of a tool using R to create some regressions. I’d like to take in independent and dependent variables as character vectors…
YouTube Videos & what not
Please vote or post a comment in this discuss on what would be helpful for you.
Fishnets and overlapping polygons
Today a question was asked in the geocompr discord. I wanted to share part of the solution as I think it covers 2 helpful things:
Complete spatial randomness
< this is a cliche about Tobler’s fist law and things being related in space>. Because of Tobler’s first law, spatial data tend to not follow any specific…
spacetime representations aren’t good—yet
My beliefs can be summarized somewhat succinctly.
Make your R scripts Databricks notebooks
I’ve never had a good reason to deviate from the canonical .R file extension until today.
Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis in R
Geospatial data is becoming increasingly common across domains and industries. Spatial data is no longer only in the hands of soil scientists, meteorologists, and…
My new IDE theme: xxEmoCandyLandxx
In general, I’m not a fan of “Dark Themes.” I find that they…
Actually identifying R package System Requirements
During my approximately three years at RStudio there were two things that stumped system…
Installing Python on my M1 in under 10 minutes
Installing python has never been an easy task for me. I remember back in 2016 I wanted to learn how to use pyspark and thus python, I couldn’t figure out how to install…
The heck is a statistical moment??
I wrote myself a short story to help me remember what the moments are.
SLICED! a brief reflection
A few weeks ago I was a contestant on the machine learning game show #SLICED! The format of the challenge is as follows:
{cpcinema} & associated journey
Yesterday I had the chance to discuss my R package, {cpcinema} with the Boston useR group. If you’re not familiar with {cpcinema}, please read my previous post. I intended for my talk to be focused on the package’s functionality, how / why I made it, and then briefly on why I didn’t share it widely, my feelings after my seeing the…
OSINT in 7 minutes
As I was perusing the bowels of YouTube, as one does, I stumbled across a video titled “Using My Python Skills To Punish Credit Card Scammers”. The video is both whimsical, informative, and…
APIs: the language agnostic love story
You may have noticed by now that we at RStudio have been emphatic about the R &…
Python & R in production — the API way
In my previous post I discussed how…
Color Palette Cinema
Note (2022-11-14): This package no longer is functional because of changes to underlying API cpcinema calls. Thus output is no longer rendered for this blog post.
Secure R Package Environments
One of the biggest challenges faced by public sector organizations and other security conscious groups is package management. These groups are typically characterized air…
What is critical race theory, anyways?
TL;DR critical race theory is a mental framework used for understanding racial inequality that focuses on power imbalances.
Demographic Change, White Fear, and Social Construction of Race
Two or three weeks ago, somewhere between Carter Dome and Mount Hight in the White Mountains of New Hampshire my friend posed a…
Medium Data and Production API Pipeline
“[P]arsing huge json strings is difficult and inefficient.”1 If you have an API that needs to receive a large amount of json, sending that over will be slow.
The Red Queen Effect
It’s Monday morning. You’re back at work after a few days off. Your inbox is a lot more full than you hoped with 70 emails. Time to get reading and sending. It’s been an…
Excel in pRod
I recently had a conversation that touched on using plumber to…
Design Paradigms in R
Lately I have been developing a deep curiosity of the origins of the R language. I have since read a more from the WayBack Machine than a Master’s student probably…
R Security Concerns and 2019 CRAN downloads
The number of downloads that a package has can tell us a number of things. For example, how much other packages rely on it. A great case of this is rlang. Not many of use …
Non-interactive user tokens with googlesheets4
This repository contains an example of an R Markdown document that uses googlesheets4 to read from a private Google Sheet and is deployed to RStudio Connect.
Finding an SPSS {haven}
Note (2022-11-14): the dataset that was used can no longer be access from the url I provided in this blog post. I have found it at a zip file in a blog post at https://blog.faradars.org/wp-content/uploads/2020…
Intro to Tidy Modeling
This is a resource intended to provide a top-level introduction into the main aspects of tidymodels.…
Water Quality Analysis
This small tutorial was developed for a talk / workshop that Phil Bowsher gave at the EPA. This…
∑ { my parts }
Web-scraping for Campaigns
Note: 2022-11-14 I’m migrating my website and this can no longer be reproduced. This blog post is based on the short guide I wrote back in 2019. P…
Google Trends for Campaigns
Over the past few years we have seen Google Trends becoming quite ubiquitous in politics. Pundits have used Google seach trends as talking points. It is not uncommon to…
Introducing trendyy
trendyy is a package for querying Google Trends. It is build around Philippe Massicotte’s package gtrendsR which accesses this data wonderfully.
genius tutorial
You want to start analysing song lyrics, where do you go? There have been music information retrieval papers written on the topic of programmatically extracting lyrics from…
genius Plumber API
get started here
The Fallacy of one person, one vote
On October 6, 2018, the US Senate voted 50–48 in favor of the appointment of Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh. This led many pundits to point out a “disconnect” between the Senate and the body politic. The 50 senators who voted “yea” represent only 44% of the nation’s population. The year prior, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch…
The Cost of Gridlock
Originally posted via Boston Area Research Initiative
xgboost feature importance
This post will go over extracting feature (variable)…
[Not so] generic functions
Lately I have been doing more of my spatial analysis work in R with the help of the sf package. One shapefile I was…
US Representation: Part I
Before the United States created the Constitution, something called the Articles of Confederation defined what the US Government would look like. It was the first attempt at creating some sort of agreement between the 13 original states to form a central government. In…
Introducing: Letters to a layperson
I have been in the world of academia for nearly five years now. During this time I’ve read countless scholarly journal articles that I’ve struggled to wrap my head around. The academic language is riddled with obfuscating words like “milieux” and “nexus” which are often used to…
Chunking your csv
Sometimes due to limitations of software, file uploads often have a row limit. I recently encountered this while creating texting campaigns using Relay. Relay is a peer-to-peer texting platform. It has a limitation of 20k contacts per texting campaign. This is a limitation when running a massive Get Out the Vote…
Reading Multiple csvs as 1 data frame
In an earlier posting I wrote about having to break a single csv into multiple csvs. In other scenarios one data set maybe provided as multiple a csvs.
Coursera R-Programming: Week 2 Problems
Over the past several weeks I have been helping students, career…
Introducing geniusR
geniusR enables quick and easy download of song lyrics. The intent behind the package is to be able to perform text based analyses on songs in a tidy[text] format.
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