NYC Data #340: Subway Track ML, Columbia’s Data Science Day, Scholastic, Dropbox, GiveButter, K-means Elbows, OpenAI Fiction
Plus, when will the Cherry Trees Blossom?
Hi friends: Happy Purim and an early Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone who celebrates! I’m very excited that Spring if finally making its way to NYC!
As always, help me keep this space up-to-date: please send me posts, events, and job openings. If you know someone who might enjoy or benefit from this newsletter, please share it with them. [image credit: Scott Lynch / Gothamist]
Good Local Posts
The first daffodils are blooming in Central Park, so it’s time for my favorite local prediction contest: when will the Cherry Trees Bloom? GMU’s contest estimates and average ‘Peak’ date of April 3, with ChatGPT estimating a few days later. You can follow the Brooklyn Botanic Garden CherryWatch and the NYBG version should be up soon as well.
A neat project from the MTA & Google, where Google Pixel phones were attached to subway cars on the A line to identify track issues early. “TrackInspect collected 335 million sensor readings, one million GPS locations, and 1,200 hours of audio. The data was combined with NYCT’s database of track non-conformities and ingested into a machine learning model”.
5 years ago today, NYC stopped due to COVID: The Upshot has a piece on 30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything In March 2020 that brought back a lot of memories. I remember the unemployment spike, I had forgotten about oil prices going below $0!
Upcoming In-Person Events (new listings in bold)
3/18: 2025 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Promises and Pitfalls of Geoengineering
3/21 - 4/6: Corpus: Bodies of Data
3/22 - 3/30: NYC Open Data Week
3/24 - 3/25: DCD>Connect
3/27: MLConf NYC
4/2: Columbia’s Data Science Day 2025
5/15: AI Summit NYC: The Technology Conference For Non-Tech Professionals
5/28 - 5/30: Lifetime Data Science Conference
Open Roles
Squarespace is hiring for several data roles, including a BI Analyst and Product Insights Analysts.
Scholastic is hiring a Director of Data Science.
Dropbox is looking for a Data Engineer, Data Finance.
Dotdash Meredith is seeking a Manager, Campaign Analytics.
ZS is hiring a Supply Chain Analytics Manager.
The New York City Council is looking for a Data Scientist.
GiveButter is looking for a Senior Data Scientist.
Miscellany
Sam Altman posted some fiction written by a new model that I thought was compelling (though I agree with the author that a line or two shouldn’t get past a 2nd draft).
This paper by Erich Schubert takes on the informal ‘elbow method’ to K-means clustering to choose K and proposes a host of other ways to assess the number of populations you should identify in this unsupervised learning method. I leaned on K-means heavily in an old role so read this with a lot of interest. (h/t Data Science Weekly)
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