This site is an avenue for me to share either data analysis techniques I find novel or interesting and/or ideas or thoughts from my undergrad background in continental philosophy and French / German literature. Sometimes I find these two areas of interest to overlap and other times I elect to dedicate a post to just one of my pursuits.
ABOUT ME
THE BRIEF BIO
I am a father and husband who is passionate about code, complexity, design, dichotomy busting, cuisine, travel, and striving for balance across the board in my life. I love conceptual thinking and am always working to expand my worldview through the acquisition of knowledge. With this site, I hope to document what I learn and share what I know.
STILL CURIOUS? READ ON:
My Master’s degree is in Information Science (MSIS). Furthermore, I also completed both the Information Systems program of study; a narrower focus within the MSIS degree as well as a Graduate Academic Certificate (GAC) in Digital Content Management. The MSIS is designed for information work in many different fields from information brokerage, database analytics, chief information officer, user experience designer, information architect, knowledge manager, system librarian, and many more. The information systems track taught me how to support my organization to gain strategic and tactical competitive advantages, which we can call knowledge management or business intelligence. It supports more technical knowledge and builds more technical skills than the other tracks within the MSIS. Last, the GAC in Digital Content Management provided me with a theoretical foundation and conceptual toolkit to help me manage digital content, build applications, and develop services that respond to institutional and individual user needs.
I hope to contribute posts on my site that interact with my interdisciplinary interests with special focus on the semantic relationships between objects and concepts. I’m not always as interested in the epistemological aspect of things as I might appear–really I think I enjoy metaphysical speculation (otherwise, why would I have become interested in philosophy at all?). I believe that everything is connected, and the 21st century will be about discovering these connections—hopefully I can be a part of this.
I can’t believe it’s been more than a week since I returned from my trip to Chicago. This was an incredible opportunity and before I start this post a few thank yous are in order: I really can’t thank Uptake enough for being the kind of company that does more than just ‘have an mission statement’–having the motivation to start a philanthropic arm…
Over on the rOpenSci Slack, Sam asked if anyone was doing the (Advent of Code)[http://adventofcode.com/] challenges in R. A few others said they were interested and I decided to go for it as well! My solutions…
This took me a while to figure out how to implement. Since plotly 4.0+ is so different and the documentation is still rolling out I wanted to challenge myself to make something complicated to better understand how things have changed…
There may be a special place in hell for blog posts like this that document how someone put together their static site website and hosted it on GitHub. Especially when there is really great documentation availible that has been put together by really smart people. You can even look at Rmarkdown’s website source code on GitHub to see…
University of North Texas | Master of Science in Information Science (2013)
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) | Bachelor of Arts in French and comparative literature (2008 / double major)
Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III) | Student exchange (2006—2007)
Work Experience
County of Los Angeles, Department of Public Health_Los Angeles, CA
Data Scientist (Accute Communicable Disease Control) / July 2020–Present
conducts COVID-19 specific epidemiologic analyses that involve large datasets, or linkage of multiple datasets, building and automating ETL pipelines, and programming and comparing complex matching algorithms
working with IT to implement the automation of epidemiologic code into Airflow; refactoring to Python
helping to drive the push for more hegemony over department data–helping to shape the direction of a robust analytic stack
working to modernize the analytic toolset with enterprise R and Python dev environments, version control, and continuous integration for publishing and sharing analytic products
collaborates with division and department stakeholders to define and manage data science projects from conception through implementation, including identifying and developing statements of business problems; conducting exploratory data analysis and data mining; developing model specification requirements; and conducting advanced statistical analyses