NYC Data #374: OpenAI's Analytics Agent, OLS and Orbits, Pet Insurance Analytics, NYC's Department for the Aging, Query Plan Visualizations, Is Moravec’s Paradox Real?
Plus, statistically evaluating hockey goaltending
Hi friends, it’s Super Bowl weekend! Squarespace has an ad in the big game but honestly I’ve been spending more time thinking about Anthropic’s- the second one here is just diabolical, pure and simple.
It’s also the opening ceremonies for the Winter Olympics! I had friends in college who worked on NYC’s bid for 2012 (summer games): that bid had terrific ads to get the public excited, but sadly was not successful.
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: Brooklyn Curling Center]
Good Local Posts
Sticking with the winter sports theme, Chris Fonnesbeck of PyMC Labs wrote 5,000+ words (with code) on Bayesian Spatial Modeling for Evaluating Hockey Goaltending Performance with beautiful visualizations and a thoughtful breakdown of the problem. I’m regularly blown away by the level of sophistication in Sports Analytics and I’m always thinking about how we can apply some of these techniques are rigor in other areas!
Jason Petersen of Datadog wrote about automatically creating interactive query plan visualizations to support tuning slow SQL queries. If you’ve ever been responsible for DB performance, you’ll recognize how nifty this is. I was not familiar with Postgres’s
auto_explainextension before today!Arvind Narayanan wrote about trying to fact-check Moravec’s paradox (and created a video on it). I appreciate his point that there isn’t much evidence that there’s a true ‘negative correlation’ between AI and human skills.
Upcoming In-Person Events (new listings in bold)
2/6: Machine Learning and AI Seminar Series: Lerrel Pinto
2/17: NYC Lakehouse Meetup
2/25 - 2/26: Data Intelligence Summit
3/22 - 3/29: Open Data Week
3/28: MeasureCamp
Open Roles
Friends at GreenLite (working on construction permitting) are hiring their founding Staff Data Engineer.
Squarespace is still looking for ML Engineers.
NYC’s Department for the Aging is seeking a Director, Data Analytics.
NYU Langone is hiring a Data Analyst to complete ‘event simulation analyses’.
MetLife is looking for a Data Scientist for their Pet Insurance Data & Analytics Team!
Miscellany
OpenAI shared a terrific, extensive look at how they built their in-house data agent. I love how they articulate the layers of context and the lessons they learned.
Great trivia that I learned this week: Ordinary Least Squares was developed by Gauss to figure out the orbit of Ceres (the largest asteroid), which was detected by an Italian astronomer but then lost in the glare of the sun. It took Gauss over 100 hours to calculate the best fit!
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