Looking closely at a surprising claim Eric Kaufmann’s recent article on UnHerd –covered by the New York Post , RealClearPolitics , and elsewhere–claims that gender non-conforming identification among U.S. college students “has effectively halved” from 6.8% in 2022–2023 to 3.6% in 2025. This conclusion, based on analysis of survey data collected for FIRE ’s College Free Speech Rankings , suffers…
This post serves as documentation of my current NAS setup. As usual, it primarily serves as personal documentation. I’ll update it as my system evolves or if I encounter and resolve new issues. Why a NAS My previous solution for file storage involved external hard drives, Dropbox, and my computer’s hard drive. This setup was fragmented, making file access difficult and leaving data unversioned and…
Intro You may or may not want to set up your own server at home. I did, mostly for learning purposes and for data science projects. The following is a description of the process I followed for future reference. It’s fairly procedural as it’s only a lightly edited version of the iCloud note I kept along the way. To start with, I bought a HP ProDesk 600 G5 Mini (Intel i5-9500T, 16GB RAM, 512GB HDD)…
The following is mostly to pin this solution for my future self. I’ve set up Google Analytics on a personal site before but I’ve never bothered to do anything with the resultant data. I’m interested in knowing whether the site is receiving visitors but I’m also pretty sympathetic to high privacy standards. GoatCounter turned out to be a nice fit for this combination of preferences. I’ll let the…
I recently wrote an R wrapper for an online prediction market’s API. Why? After stumbling upon the platform, I was interested in finding an easier way to exploit potential market inefficiencies programmatically It had been a while since I’d written code for an R package and I wanted to refresh my memory Manifold Markets The prediction market is called Manifold Markets . Manifold has been described…
What Last month, I made a Twitter bot using RStudio. Every few hours, the bot posts a satellite image and a Wikipedia reference for a given pair of coordinates from my home state of Utah. The bot is inspired by @mattdray ’s @londonmapbot . How I started by forking Matt’s repository and following his instructions here . I made the following changes to his workflow: Instead of sampling from the…
Context On Monday, Jana Riess (who I’ve admired for some time since reading her fascinating book ) published a surprising finding in Religious News Service showing that 18% of Gen Z Mormons are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Jana’s findings were picked up by several local and national news sources, including the Salt Lake Tribune and the Washington Post . They also generated some lively discussion on…
When I run, I use Strava to log my activity. In honor of recently running my one-thousandth mile on Strava, I thought I’d do a write up for the steps I use to process my user data in R. The data Strava makes available is granular and can be used for all kinds of fun things after the steps detailed here. 1. Export your data Per the instructions on their website, you can export your Strava activity…