Ask a large language model a question about your data, and you’ll probably get a confident answer.
Ask it again, and you might get a different one.
Sometimes, neither answer is correct.
That’s a problem if you’re building an AI ...
New York City month continues here at Kieran Healy Industries, an effort that will eventually produce something properly scholarly in nature. But in the meantime—and with my apologies to the many great urbanists of times past—we can enjoy o... [Read more...]
Note: This post was originally published by Emmanuel Mhango on LinkedIn on 27 October 2026 (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/operationalizing-fair-care-data-stewardship-wash-systems-mhango-go7jf/).
Moving beyond data collection toward responsible,... [Read more...]
I recently learned about an interesting way of reducing the dimension of a data set. I’d like to illustrate it with a data set of about 550 historical battles in the UK, extracted from Wikidata using a SPARQL query. No doubt some readers will have seen...
Summary
Who this is for: Data scientists and analysts who need to estimate what an intervention does (a call, a discount, a campaign) and want to know when causal ML methods are worth using over LM, GLM, and GBM. The basis is nine simulations w...
My recent Dogs of New
York, post
got circulated a little. On Friday I got a very nice note from William
Kornblum, an urban and
community studies sociologist who these days is emeritus at CUNY. In the 1980s,
Bill studied the people who use Central Park ... [Read more...]
It’s really easy to make your own agent. You should do it once, just to understand how this technology works.
LLM agents are becoming pervasive, with Meta’s Muse perhaps the first consumer grade agent. They are only going to get more common. If ...
Introduction
When learning R, we are always told to vectorise, vectorise, vectorise. This is because R is an interpreted language.
Every time R runs a line of R code, it has to look up each name, match the arguments of each function call and set up... [Read more...]
This blog post is about me trying to make a better version of an existing diagram that I think is important, but difficult to read in the version it keeps popping up on my Bluesky feed.
Robin J Brooks of the Brookings Institution has been using a usef...
What would happen if we peeled the Earth like an orange? The
interrupted Goode homolosine projection
gives us something close to that! This equal-area projection preserves relative
areas while splitting the world map into lobes. Add a few shades of orange and
our world is ready to peel.
Zhenguo Zhang's Blog https://fortune9.netlify.app/2026/10/23/python-simpsons-paradox/ -
Introduction
Simpson’s paradox occurs when the direction of an association reverses after data from several groups are combined. For example, A can have a higher success rate than B in every subgroup, yet a lower success rate overall.
In this ...
Following this previous post and this discussion on Mastodon, I wrote a function that wraps a combination of functions from the ‘terra’ package to project a SpatRaster or SpatVector layer while automatically centering the projection on that layer, to minimize … Continue reading →
Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup!
You can read this post on our blog.
Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!
rOpenSci HQ
Team update: thank you Mark Padgham!
Mark Padgham is leaving rOpenSc... [Read more...]
When forecasting high-volatility financial assets like Bitcoin (BTC-USD), standard point-prediction models—whether classical ARIMA or deep neural networks—often fall short. A point estimate tells you where the model expects the price to go, but it completely ignores market regime shifts and changing risk levels. In this article, we construct ...
Mark Padgham is leaving rOpenSci at the end of October, and we want to take this moment to recognize his impact and say thank you for helping to shape rOpenSci.
Mark joined rOpenSci as a staff member in December 2019 to help us expand software peer re... [Read more...]
1 Documentation was always the point
TKCat (Tailored Knowledge Catalog) is built on a simple idea: a knowledge resource is more than a set of tables. In TKCat, each resource is a modeled database (MDB) that contains:
a general description of t...
I often need to get mainland from country / administrative region polygons, so I finally decided to write a function to help automate it. It selects the N largest feature(s) in a polygons or lines map. Here’s the code: The … Continue reading →