Latest Posts

• Visualizing and comparing setlist variance

  Link to Dashboard

• Visualizing Supreme Court

  The last few days of having politicians on both sides making claims of things being unprecedented or having clearly consistent precedent got me curious enough to make a few graphs about the Supreme Court. I needed to look into the history of nominations, timelines, and tenures.

• Phish 4 Night Run Song Placement

  I made some graphs that show when songs show up during four night Phish runs. Check out the links below:

• Tidy Tuesday Submissions

  About a month ago, in the process of trying to facilitate some conversation about machine learning in education, I was directed towards a great resource: [https://datascienceineducation.com/}(https://datascienceineducation.com/). I was excited to find a resource focused dirctly on using data science in the education field. The first thing I noticed, though, was that this entire book was focused on using R, after I had just spent the last six month teaching myself Python. Fortunately, the book was set up clearly enough that I could follow along, and even just dump code in when I didn’t know what it meant. And, my knowledge of Python, especially Pandas, made it relatively easy to translate what the code was doing in R to what I thought it would look like in R.

• How Learning Spanish And Coding Are Similar

  For six months, I traveled throughout South America and slowly improved my Spanish from being very poor to adequately conversational. After the virus sent me home, I decided to finally get serious about teaching myself how to code. In reflecting about both experiences, I’ve found a few similarities:

• Phish Interactive Dashboards

  Overview

  In the last three months of quarantining, I have been teaching myself how to code using Python with a hope of developing skills in data analytics and machine learning/AI. I’m not really interested in a classing “Data Science” type role but I hope to be able to stay in the education field but have stronger skills with data for whatever I do next. The more I learn, the more I’m convinced that better data practices and a focused use of ML and AI can help push education policy to be more equity driven. I’ve thought a lot about that, and I hope to do some projects in the near future to help test out that theory. But, for now, the data I have and the projects I’ve been working on have been solely focused on the band Phish and their song selection patterns over their 35+ years of playing together. Here are three links that you might find interesting if you know anything about Phish. If you don’t know anything, it will likely not be interesting at all.

• Predicting Phish Set Closers

  As mentioned in a couple of my previous posts, I decided to make a simple predictor for my first machine learning project. I wanted to be able to predict if the song that Phish just started playing was going to close the set. I figured this would be simple enough to understand, practical (“Should I run to the bathroom before the lines get long during setbreak?) and could build a foundation for a few more complicated models (like how many more songs are they going to play).

• Why Teachers Don't Trust Mathematical Models

  In my education career, data was always at the forefront of my decision making. I wanted as much information as I could before making decisions and I kept myself motivated by seeing progress in students. Not everyone I worked with was driven by data, and at first, I thought that this was mainly due to a lack of confidence in their math skills and a lack of understanding in how data informed decisions can work. I came to learn that this wasn’t the reason most of the time.

• An Attempt To Explain Antiracism

  To my conservative friends and family, this is an attempt to explain antiracism. I have observed enough examples of white people trying to prove they aren’t racist and getting supported by their white friends about how kind and compassionate they are and I’ve seen enough calls from folks of color asking white people to step up and try to help explain the situation to our friends and family. So here’s my attempt to translate what I’ve learned about antiracism.

• Reflections On Traveling During Protests In South America

  During my travels last fall, I was able to observe and build some understanding for mass protests in both Colombia and Chile. At the time, I felt awe in the power of citizens to demand change in their governments. And, I made an assumption that people in the states were too complacent for the same to happen here any time soon. It seems I was wrong. Now that we are in the process of a major movement, I thought it would be helpful to share some of the things I saw in South America and that I learned from talking with people who were taking part in different levels of protest:

• Mental Health Supports During Covid

  In late March, I started hearing the argument that more people may die of suicide if the economy is shut down for too long. I had an initial reaction to dismiss this argument as political maneuvering to excuse a lack of coherent response to the pandemic. However, over the next week, I had some cognitive dissonance because I do believe that this pandemic is having a big impact on mental health and I empathize with anyone who struggles with suicidal ideation regardless of the origin of those thoughts. And, while I do believe that there are some that are pushing this argument for political gain or distraction, I think it is more important to discuss the core reasons why I think this argument is dangerous instead of dismissing it as political ideology that I disagree with.

  First, treatments for mental health are well researched with multiple approaches available and decades of study on the effectiveness of these approaches. Clearly, with about 50,000 Americans per year dying by suicide, there is a long way to go in improving these techniques and in increasing access to everyone that needs it. But, the pathway to treat mental health struggles is a lot clearer than the complex response needed to manage a pandemic caused by a virus that is impacting people in so many different ways. I understand the call to return to normalcy as a way to try to minimize the mental health crisis; but, I think it would be more effective if we were working on ways to better leverage the mental health supports that we have in the toolbelt.

  There seems to be an assumption that any mental health crisis during this pandemic is caused by jobs lost to government imposed regulations or a sense of isolation due to social distancing requirements. To me, this ignores the very real and significant traumas that are being endured by healthcare workers and those that are being put at risk to keep our grocery stores and food processing systems running. There are numerous examples of these frontline workers suiciding during the crisis. However, I will not try to make an argument with anecdotes. Ignoring the science and history of pandemics to the point that we overwhelm this critical sector of our community with a new wave of hospital visits and panic buying is not the way we should be thanking these heroes for their service.

  A lack of resilience in the face of adversity is a large contributing factor to the current mental health crisis. And sending everyone back to work would be a quick way to heal the symptom to a deeper problem. Keeping people busy at work is an easy way to push the issue down the line but not affect the cause. The loss of agency for someone who is worried about how they will feed their family is real; but, the anger at government officials who are trying to limit the spread of disease is a distraction from solutions that will be needed to get through this crisis. I think that building the needed resilience comes from creating hope in the power of working together to find new ways to make sure everyone is fed and people don’t lose their homes. Pushing everyone back to work is only one of many ways to increase access to and limit loss of food and shelter.

  I hope that we can all agree that people returning to their jobs is just one of many ways we could be working on a solution to this problem. I hope that everyone can contribute by staying connected with their friends and family they are most worried about, by doing what they can to ensure that those around them are aware of the professional support available to them, and by limiting access to any means for someone to hurt themselves. For anyone who is making the argument to return to the status quo as a way to limit suidice, if you aren’t also doing the things I listed above, then I will believe that you are making a political argument that isn’t rooted in the ultimate goal of saving the lives of as many people as possible. And, I’m not trying to tell you that you are wrong for advocating for a solution you believe in. I’m hoping to provide a different perspective that can hopefully nudge us all in the direction of working together to limit the impacts of this pandemic and away from the direction of giving up too quickly.

• Dinner And A Movie 12 29 18

  Even though I had hopes that the delay in announcing this week’s stream meant that we might get a special treat, I was still happy to have this show come up. I wore a sloth onesie to this show and walked around the concourse pre-show extremely slowly, especially in bottlenecks, just to mess with people. It was really fun to see annoyed people get past me then look back and chuckle once they realized the bit. It was also funny to hear people yell “Wombat!” and have the lady in the spicy chicken sandwich line say: “How many sandwiches does the bear want?”

• Data Science Podcast Reviews

  When I decided to teach myself data science about six weeks ago, I thought that listening to podcasts would be a helpful way to learn more about what I needed to learn. I didn’t think that I would learn the techniques I needed through listening to a podcast while on a walk; but, I thought that it would help me build up a set of concepts and approaches that I would need to learn. That turned out to be the case. But what helped most was that I gained a lot of confidence along the way. Here are my thoughts on the three main podcasts that I listened to.

• Why Data Science In Education Interests Me

  Data Science became interesting to me because I found myself spending a lot of my free time looking for patterns in data and trying to find insights that would help me make decisions for my classroom and my school. As I’ve gone through about six weeks of teaching myself how to use the tools of data science and the processes that are used in machine learning, I have had mixed feelings about how well I think they can be applied to the education space. This is my attempt to process those thoughts productively.

• Dinner And A Movie 7 21 97

  After posting a few of my Phish data visualizations, I got a request to make something focused on the shows being played for the DInner and a Movie streams. When they finally announced a 1.0 show, I decided it would be fun to learn a bit more about the era of the show while putting together a few visualizations.

• Travel Photos

  About 3000 Travel Pictures from June 2019 - March 2020

• My Learning Process So Far

  In June 2019 I quit my job as a high school principal to take time off and travel. I had hit a point in my career where any forward momentum to continue on that career path or to any natural next step felt more like letting my circumstances decide what I do next and not what would ultimately make me happy. I set off on a long term international trip that was meant to last about a year before the virus sent me back to the states to quarantine.

• Song Placement Analysis

  In my ultimate goal to create a model that can predict if a song is the last song in a set or not, I’m looking at the number of songs played so far, the song being played, and the amount of time passed in the set so far. I already did some work on number of songs played in a set over Phish’s career and today I looked into the way that songs are placed within sets and complete shows.

• Visualizing Number Of Tracks Per Show

  I’ve decided to do my first real Machine Learning project on predicting how many songs are left in a set at any point. My first reason is that I think it is a question all fans have had at one point or another. Do I have time to run to the bathroom before the set closer? Should we leave now to get in line for the Camden ferry? I also want to keep the model simple and use some of the more basic ML processes instead of jumping right to a neural network or some other deep learning approach.

• Sussex County Love

  

• Podcast Notes

  I’ve now listened to about forty episodes of various data science podcasts, including all episodes of Towards Data Science. I kept a running list of ideas, concepts, and people that I thought I would need to learn about while listening. I also had a bunch of blog ideas in this file but I have already shared them in the landing pages for each section of the blog. Here are the notes lists.

• Anatomy Of A Phish Stats Post

  I’m planning to use a consistent structure for Phish Stat posts. The main reason is to find the right balance between being comprehensive with shoaring my thought process and making posts predictable so people can read just the parts they are interested in. I’m stealing the name for this post from these awesome videos done by Amar. I’m only mentioning him here because he’s awesome and give him credit for what he posts. I expect that if you have gotten this deep into internet Phish land, you’ve already stumbled onto his posts.

• Data Science in Secondary Education

  As I’m teaching myself data science, I am thinking a lot about how I may have used data differently if I had known some of the things then that I’m learning now. Here are some of the things I would do if I was helping to support a data science initiative at a school district or CMO.

• Disclaimer

  I think it’s important to include two disclaimers here. The first is that I know that I currently know very little about the current status of data science and it’s history. I’m not sharing any of this because I believe I have something special to tell you. I’m writing to share my thought process and help myself monitor my learning. I hope to periodically go back to the things I post and find the naive things I wrote and fix them. I also hope to learn faster by having people point out where I have huge gaps in my understanding or where I could have used different tools.

• Song Frequency Over Phish Career

  Everyone knows which songs Phish has played most often, and many of us can remember different periods where some songs used to be played a lot more than they are now. While it’s easy to go take a quick look at how many times Roggae was played in 2011 or which year had the most Twists, I thought there was probably a way to visualize this to see more of the data all at once.

• Quarantine Walk Mapping

  One of my daily routines during quarantine has been a long walk. Most days it is around 3 hours long and about 10 miles. It has been a great way to get some much needed exercise, alone time, time to think, and time for podcasts. After over thirty days of walking, I’m about to run out of places to walk to. That has gotten me thinking about if I could have been more efficient or comprehensive with my daily walks to be able to see more of the area and repeat roads less often. I don’t really need to be efficient at the moment,and I’m sure I’m not the first person to think about how I could see something new everyday when I go on a walk.

• What Do I Need To Know About This Data?

  When I first decided to teach myself some data science concepts by analyzing Phish data and making some predictive models, I had seen enough data online to know that there was a version of a database somewhere that listed all setlists. I looked into and saw that the main two being used were phish.net and phish.in. phish.net seems more comprehensive and standardized, but it seems like it isn’t open source due to their relationship with the Mockingbird Foundation. Phish.in has some missing shows and quirks in the data but includes track lengths which will be important to some of the project ideas I have. I didn’t want to spend my first few hours with the dataset looking for of its flaws so I jumped into my first two projects, weekday bias and showing song frequency over time. But, before I published anything, I thought it best to look into how messy the data really was.

• Day Of Week Bias In Phish Setlists

  Why isn’t it Friday today? Well it’s never Friday when that song is played, and it’s always Tuesday when Tuesday is played. But, are there other interesting patterns in Phish song selection for different days of the week? I decided to make my first mini project in the Phish Stats journey this one because I thought it would be complicated enough to test my skills and straightforward enough to build a little confidence. I don’t think it will appeal to fans as much as some other projects I’m thinking about, but I’m glad I started with it.

• Why Phish Data?

  I’m about two weeks into my big dive into teaching myself data science and everyone says the first big step is to do my own project. Create something that is interesting to me and that will be a way to push myself to figure out new things when I hit roadblocks and it can provide some insight to potential employers about how I think and solve problems. My first idea was Phish stats. I’ve spent that majority of the last two weeks trying to convince myself it was a bad idea and to think of something more practical to start with. I failed at this task and kept finding new reasons that it is the right place to start.