Dec 21, 2020Using Data Science to Better Understand Taylor Swift’s VoiceI made a heatmap of Taylor Swift’s most frequently sung notes, calculated across all of her nine studio albums. A self-generated time series of each track’s isolated vocal frequencies was turned into a vector and grouped together by album, resulting in a matrix in the shape of M x N…Pop2 min readPop2 min read
Jun 1, 2019How many times do you forget a stranger?Reddit user katyvs1 created an AskReddit thread with the following question: What’s a random statistic about yourself you’d love to know, but never will? I was excited to see that many of the responses were bona-fide Fermi questions, and one response in particular caught my imagination: How many times have…Questions4 min readQuestions4 min read
Dec 1, 2018Using Neural Networks to Identify Hate SpeechLast year, researchers from Cornell published a paper describing their work classifying tweets as hateful, offensive, or neither. They experimented with a handful of models and parameters before settling on logistic regression. In addition to the effort spent building and evaluating models, they also extracted a handful of features for…Machine Learning2 min readMachine Learning2 min read
Nov 8, 2018An Introduction to the Storefront IndexJoe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi introduced the ‘Storefront Index’ in a 2016 report available here. The metric is a simple one, counting the total number of businesses within a city that meet several conditions (publicly accessible, densely located, and close to the city center). Despite its simplicity, this metric identifies…Data Science4 min readData Science4 min read
Published inTowards Data Science·Aug 23, 2017The (Unchanging) Statistics of Deadly QuarrelsStatistics of Deadly Quarrels was written by Lewis Fry Richardson and published in 1960. The book is notable for both its findings and for being one of the first examples of quantitative methods being applied to the realm of international relations. Richardson, a meteorologist by trade, turned his revolutionary and…Data Science3 min readData Science3 min read
