Eric Ekholm

Most data science work is just asking SMEs to help me understand their data/help me make sure I’m filtering the data correctly.

I just pushed v0.1.0 of my {blueycolors} #rstats package to GitHub.

Check it out if you’re interested in using Bluey-themed colors in ggplot:

ekholme.github.io/blueycolors/

Virginia's VALLSS 2024-25 Fall-Spring Growth Report Programming note: I’m back after a long summer hiatus. I honestly just kind of lost motivation to do weekly posts. So, moving forward, I’m not going to promise weekly posts. I’ll shoot for a 1 or 2 ti...

After a few week hiatus, edudata is back with another post. This one reviews Virginia’s fall-to-spring VALLSS growth report and offers some critiques about measuring student growth using ordinal categories:

www.edudata.blog/virginias-va...

#dataBS #edusky

I just learned about “doubleML models.” Is this just data science/ML people trying to reinvent causal inference with the worst name possible?

#rstats #datascience

The narrative fallacy and education I recently read this article on the Ludicity blog about the narrative fallacy, and it got me thinking about how this applies to education. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, the narrative ...

This week’s Edudata blog post is on the narrative fallacy, school improvement, and root cause analysis

www.edudata.blog/the-narrativ...

#education

I’ve been doing stats/data stuff “seriously” for about 10 years, and I still think bootstrapping is voodoo.

It’s the “ONE WEIRD TRICK” of statistics.

Casio

Tweet: Stats twitter: “All statistical methods fail horribly without telling you and you shouldn’t trust any research ever. fml.” Data science twitter: “Here are NINE SIMPLE WAYS to convert your data into ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS using POWERFUL AI. Number 3 will astound you!! I’m on a boat”

Among my favorites, from @cameronpat.bsky.social

Stacked bar charts and data viz tradeoffs Stacked bar charts aren’t good plots, and this is a hill I will die on. Even though everyone over the age of, say, 7, has seen a stacked bar chart at some point in their lives and probably intuits wh...

New edudata blog post: alternatives to stacked bar charts, and some thoughts on tradeoffs when visualizing data

#dataBS #rstats #edusky

www.edudata.blog/stacked-bar-...

Yeah true. I put a literal bet on pope pizzaballa, so that’s just my copium

Here’s my copium: if he had been elected pope, he’d adopt a papal name that wasn’t pizzaballa. At least now, we still have cardinal pizzaballa

Some hopefully useful questions to guide data-driven decisions I’ve mentioned in multiple posts on this blog that the primary “point” of data is to help inform decisions. There are probably occasions where it’s useful to just report out on broad compliance-y thin...

New edudata blog post: In which I self-consciously offer a framework for data-driven decision making

#datascience #edusky

www.edudata.blog/some-hopeful...

Maybe plotnine is more suspect. As a primarily #rstats user, seaborn feels better than matplotlib but still mainstream enough in the Python community. But I also only use it for eda stuff, and when I need to make something polished, I use ggplot

I don’t think so. Polars seems to be gaining “share” in code, and sklearn supports polars df’s for all (most?) operations. And if the concern is learning from others’ code, LLMs give an alternative - my experience is they’re great at producing polars code.

a man and a woman are dancing in front of a sign that says fast lake spartans chess team ALT: a man and a woman are dancing in front of a sign that says fast lake spartans chess team

TFW the Google Gemini VSCode extension just writes your #rstats
function documentation for you

Luxury goods and non-negotiable values I’ve been very much into the Acquired podcast lately. The premise of the podcast is that each episode describes a single company, usually beginning at some pivotal pre-company occurrence (the birth of...

New edudata blog post: what can educators learn from luxury brands like Hermes?

#edusky #dataBS

www.edudata.blog/luxury-goods...

I keep coming across new lists of education research (and adjacent) job opportunities so if you are looking for work, check out these links. 👇

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

www.purposephilcareer.com

Most importantly, you’re using the correct (ISO 8601) date format 🙃

I Feel Like I'm Taking Crazy Pills I recently stumbled onto a preprint research article examining the writing quality of college students before and after the introduction of ChatGPT, as well as some reporting on the same article publi...

New edudata post: do we really need “big data” to tell us obvious things?

www.edudata.blog/i-feel-like-...

Yeah, good point. Having to dig in a level to pull out the dataframe could be tedious for end users

Thanks!

So I can ensure that the objects passed to my functions are appropriate. But it also feels like I’m adding an extra layer that’s maybe not necessary? Thoughts on this vs just passing in a dataframe and checking against, say, column names?

I’m writing an #rstats package to work with data extracts (csvs) from a specific source. I mostly want a set of functions that will do data-frame-like operations on these extracts. My inclination is to create a new class that’s a thin wrapper around the data (formatted as a dataframe)…

For my educator friends in the RVA area, VCU is hosting (and I’m helping run) a free event on AI in education on 4/16.

“I’ll be 10 min late sorry!!!”

-ashamed
-fragile
-unreliable

“A thousand apologies. The relentless slog of time has overtaken my faculties.”

-powerful
-commanding
-honest

Reaction to Emily Oster's "why we need test scores" Programming Note: I’m doing an intensive AI training next week, so there will be no post on 4/4. I’ll be back again the following week. Emily Oster recently published an article (post? blog?) on her ...

This week’s Edudata newsletter is a reaction to Emily Oster’s recent article on why we still need test scores:

www.edudata.blog/reaction-to-...

#dataBS #edusky

Thanks!

Writing for busy readers, and why not to use AI I recently read The Productivity Shift (TPS) – a report from Grammarly with the basic premise that businesses should use AI to help employees communicate better, which will increase productivity. You ...

This week’s Edudata newsletter is about writing, AI, and owning your thinking:

www.edudata.blog/writing-for-...

#dataBS #edusky

When do predictions about students' future performance help? One common use of statistical models is to make predictions about the future. These predictions are ubiquitous in our tech-infused lives today. Meteorologists deliver predictions about the weather to ...

New edudata post: when do predictions about students’ future performance help?

www.edudata.blog/when-do-pred...

#edusky #databs