Just like in 2021, I’ve sent over 30 newsletters in 2022, which together include hundreds of links to things that interested me at different points of the year. This is a quick summary of the things that stand out in my mind as favorites, now that the year is almost over.
I’ve sent nearly 40 newsletters in 2021, which together include hundreds of links to things that interested me at different points of the year. This is a quick summary of the things that stand out in my mind as favorites, now that the year is almost over.
While any organization would benefit from shared rules about transfers, data teams are uncommonly likely to need them
There is a concept in economics called Gresham’s Law, which is usually summarized as ‘Bad Money Drives out Good’.
A bit over 3 years ago, I left a job in digital media for one at a tech company. A friend recently asked a bunch of us who made similar changes what we thought about leaving media. Since this seems to be something that people are doing with some frequency, I wrote down my thoughts in the hopes that they might help people who are evaluating a similar move.
A few weeks ago, a colleague took time away from work for a personal issue. This person (let’s call them Sam) told their manager, who mentioned it to me (the manager’s manager). This was (and is) all fine, and happens all the time. The next week, I had my regular meeting with Sam, who asked me whether I wanted to know what was going on that caused them to miss work. I gave Sam a quick answer…
January 19th, 2021, will make 5 years of sending my NYC Data Jobs Newsletter. Sending out a newsletter has been one of the most rewarding things I’ve done over the last few years. In the hopes that talking about my experience would be helpful to people who are either just starting out, or are thinking about it (and, selfishly, encourage people to write more good newsletters that I can read), I’ve…
This week I started a new role as the Director of Analytics at Squarespace. I'm really excited about the role and the team that I'm going to be working with! Not only have I moved, but this blog has moved too: you might notice the 'powered by Squarespace' box at the bottom! I'm happy to say that the migration was relatively smooth. This is now the 3rd CMS that this blog has been hosted on. A few…
My name is Josh Laurito, and I'm here to talk to you about the intersection of three of my favorite things: python, New York City, and trains.
I'm super, super excited to post that I just completed my first full week at Gawker Media . I'll be acting as Head of Data & Analytics for the company, primarily helping to improve their kinja platform but also supporting the editorial team at their media properties. Any work-related findings or posts will be at the (brand new) Gawker Data Team blog: gawkerdata.kinja.com .
Late last year, I agreed to teach a master's course in data visualization at the City University of New York. In a closely related story, my blogging dropped to zero over the last few months. Anyways, the class was a great experience, and I think the students did an awesome job on their visualizations. You can see the full list of projects here .
I snuck in one last data project for 2013: a d3 interactive map of the US banking system. You can play with it here . Please do and let me know what you think! I was really happy with how the project came out. I also was really happy with Github Pages , which I tried out for the first time with this project. If you ever work with git, I can't recommend it enough. I'm hoping to move more of my…
In a couple of weeks I am going to be teaching a class on Data Visualization for Businesses (you should come!) and as part of the class prep I started thinking about key metrics that my students may want to visualize. After weighing some of the options, I settled on Revenue Per Employee, which has been on my mind recently. I want to understand what is the minimum revenue per employee that quickly…
I wrote a guest post on Chicago's finances for Lumesis (which I have worked with and am an investor in). You can find the whole post here . A couple of additional thoughts on Chicago: - Chicago's pension deficit grew by almost $3 billion last year . The whole city budget was under $6 billion! - I have a hard time imagining the city ever declaring bankruptcy, but it is being run by a famously…
(disclosure- I am involved with and invested in Lumesis , which sells Muni credit & compliance software) So Detroit filed for bankruptcy last week. If you live in the US and don’t work in municipal finance, you probably barely registered this news. And you probably think that it’s not that surprising that something bad happened in Detroit. I mean, during the recession a house there cost less than…
Analyzing the Analyzers is a recently published report by Harlan Harris, Sean Patrick Murphy and Marck Vaisman, documenting the results of a 2012 survey of ‘several hundred’ data scientists. The report is free and just 25 pages of text, plus an appendix- you should read it. The authors’ central contention is that there is not one set of skills that organizations should look for in a data…
Just a note to the readers of this blog: you may have noticed that something is different. Like, everything is different... This past weekend I migrated this blog from tumblr to wordpress. I did this because tumblr asked everyone with their own url to change their 'A record' or CNAME. This was fine, so i did as instructed. Unfortunately, the change broke the display of everything else on my…
I once asked my brother, who studied large organizations, what was more effective- the hierarchical, top-down organization of, say, Apple , or the distributed decision-making of, say, Urban Outfitters . My brother said “both”. Apparently, the best way to capture the benefits of hierarchies (order, coordination) and delegated authority (reaction speed, creativity) was to cycle between the two.…
It has been over a week since we discovered that Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff made some unusual modeling choices and an error in key calculations in their seminal paper Growth in a Time of Debt . So far, Microsoft Excel has taken a lot of the criticism, with the damning image above used to prove the point. The press has had no problem coming up with other examples of Excel errors resulting…
Today I learned that student loans recently surpassed credit-cards to become the largest non-mortgage source of debt for US consumers. Not only that, in the next quarter or two, total outstanding debt will ominously hit 1 Trillion Dollars . ( wikipedia ) The remarkable thing about this is not just how big student loan debt is, but how much it has grown in the last few years. (chart shamelessly…