Recent posts

First dance song discovery

misc

One year ago today, my husband and I got married! I figured our first anniversary was as good a time as any to share this silly project I used data and R for in the lead-up to our wedding.

Amelia McNamara

Guidelines I follow when giving talks

misc

As with everything in life, there are no hard-and-fast rules for giving talks. But, I have a number of conventions I have developed over the years that I think make for clear(er) presentations. If you look at talks I have given you will see many of these things in practice. I started writing up…

Amelia McNamara

Deleting Facebook

misc

I recently took the plunge and deleted my Facebook account. This was a big decision for me, and I know other people are thinking about doing the same. So, I want to detail why I decided to delete my account, how I prepared to do it while also saving my data, and the way I’ve felt since I took the…

Amelia McNamara

Key Attributes of a Modern Statistical Computing Tool

papers

A few weeks ago, I tweeted that the first paper to come out of my dissertation was published. I got my PhD in 2015, and it’s now 2019. That means I’ve been thinking about this work for more than four years (in fact, it’s probably closer to seven!).

Amelia McNamara

A tidy dress

misc

That’s right ya’ll, I made myself a R hex logo dress!

Amelia McNamara

Wikipedia in the classroom: Gender, argh

teaching

The data journalism course I’m teaching this semester is a new offering for me. I may write up more of my reflections later, but for now I wanted to get some thoughts down about the experience of using Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool. At this point, I feel like it was too real-world of an…

Amelia McNamara

Dagstuhl reflections

conferences

Over the last 10 days, I had the pleasure of attending rstudio::conf and the Dagstuhl seminar on Evidence about Programmers for Programming Language Design. At rstudio::conf, I taught a two-day workshop on Intro to R & RStudio, and at the Dagstuhl I mostly thought about exposing novices to…

Amelia McNamara

More guys

conferences

One incidental piece of the Dagstuhl is I thought more about the use of the term “guys.” While we were going around and doing our initial 3-minute introductions, I heard a lot of uses of “guys” that rubbed me the wrong way, so when I introduced myself I asked people to think about their gendered…

Amelia McNamara

Scientists Programming

conferences

At the Dagstuhl seminar, Andreas Stefik asked me to speak about “Scientists Programming.” I’m not sure whether he did this on purpose, but by assigning people their talk titles, he drew us a little outside our comfort zone and got us to think more deeply. “Scientists Programming” wasn’t a talk…

Amelia McNamara

R syntax comparison

teaching

For my rstudio::conf working, Intro to R & RStudio, I finally finished my cheatsheet on R syntaxes. I’ve been working on this for at least a year (😱 ), so I’m glad to see it out in the wild.

Amelia McNamara

On microaggressions

conferences

I was glad to see Karl Broman’s blog post on a troubling conference talk. In the post, Karl describes how the speaker repeatedly used the word “guys” to describe people involved in statistics, and how he and Hadley Wickham reached out to him in an effort to get him to change his ways.

Amelia McNamara

What are the chances my name is Amanda?

misc

I get called Amanda a lot. This tends to drive me crazy, because I think my real name is much more interesting. But, I realized recently that given the prior probabilities, it’s actually a very reasonable thing to call me.

Amelia McNamara

Census data: A rant

teaching

As usual toward the end of the semester, my students begin working in earnest on their final projects. And as usual, this results in my selective amnesia about census.gov being ruptured yet again. Looking for a way out, I turned to twitter and got some good recommendations. In case it’s useful to…

Amelia McNamara

Statistics graduate school advice

teaching

It’s that time of year again, the time where I find myself meeting with students thinking about graduate school in statistics. Since I often end up sending people the same things, I figured I’d pull them together into a blog post. You probably already know about the grad cafe, the professor is in…

Amelia McNamara

Worth adding to your inbox

misc

For the most part, I get my data news from the web (blogs like flowingdata, simply statistics, stats chat) and twitter (check out the people I follow). However, there are a few email mailing lists I’ve joined that are worth the addional lines in my inbox. Here they are:

Amelia McNamara

OpenVisConf talk transcript

conferences

During OpenVisConf, I hurriedly posted some links from my talk so people could follow up with resources I had mentioned. I kept meaning to write up a fuller blog post, but of course life comes along (in the interim, Smith has finished finals, I’ve graded a ton of projects, gone out of the state…

Amelia McNamara

Do you know Nothing when you see it?

conferences

I’m currently at OpenVisConf and in awe of my fellow presenters. I did my presentation, “Do you know Nothing when you see it?” before lunch and have been slowly unwinding since then. A couple people asked for links to my slides and resources, so here they are!

Amelia McNamara

What’s wrong with being data-collecting pigeons?

data

As you might know from my blog or twitter, I’ve been a Fitbit person since December 2013. I’m also very interested in participatory sensing and citizen science, and I’ve been thinking about the ways that data can be used for good, both on the personal and societal level.

Amelia McNamara

Contextual notes

misc

Because I tend to select books by how thick they are (super-fast-reader problems) and I am a glutton for punishment, I have been slowly working my way through two of David Foster Wallace’s books concurrently. I am reading a paper copy of Infinite Jest, but the Kindle edition of The Pale King.…

Amelia McNamara

20th New England Isolated Statisticians Meeting (NEISM)

conferences

Now that I am at Smith, I am technically an “isolated” statistician. It’s a funny term, because I don’t feel isolated. I have great colleagues in the Statistical and Data Sciences program (Ben Baumer, Jordan Crouser and Katherine Halverson), although I am the only person with a PhD in statistics.…

Amelia McNamara

Fitbit colors

visualization

I have been a devoted Fitbit user for over a year now, and I think that as a device it is the sort of thing that a statistician would natually enjoy. It produces rich data about my day-to-day life, can be used to identify notable dates in my year, and does a great job of making me more physically…

Amelia McNamara

Fabric posters

conferences

Don’t you hate having to take a poster to conferences? The tube is bulky, it’s easy to forget in the airport (or on the plane!), sometimes you get charged extra for your “additional carry-on” and often the poster doesn’t look great once it arrives. Plus, it’s expensive to print a poster, and you…

Amelia McNamara

New tools for data analysis and journalism

conferences

While the Computation + Journalism Symposium continues to be filled with fascinating inlets to journalistic projects and innovative computational approaches (like using drones to map garbage dumps) the component that always catches my attention is the demoing of new tools for data analysis.

Amelia McNamara

Kid Pix

tools

The talk was a great mix of nostalgia and inspiration for me. I loved hearing about the principles that guided Hickman as he worked, like the idea of contextual menus, so kids never had to look in the menu bar. I was also brought back to my childhood, creating artwork, menus for pretend…

Amelia McNamara

Data Science LA

teaching

I’m now involved in the recently-launched datascience.la blog. While you’ll probably be drawn to the site for the useR! conference session videos, interviews with data scientists, and meetup announcements, there’s going to be much more!

Amelia McNamara

ICOTS discussion on technology in statistics education

teaching

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at ICOTS was the panel session, Future trends for technology in statistics education. The panel was chaired by Chris Wild of Auckland, and featured

Amelia McNamara

Yes, and…

teaching

One of my primary teaching techniques is the improv-inspired “yes and…” move. People who have been trained in improvisational comedy know that the first rule is always to build on what your fellow performers say. If someone says, “now we’re sitting in a cafe, having coffee” you should never…

Amelia McNamara

Code + Ed

conferences

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the eyeo festival as a student volunteer. For me, one of the most useful parts of the festival was the Code+ed Summit, which took place on the day before the official conference opening.

Amelia McNamara

Sweater variation; or grey != black and white

misc

I have a sweater that I’ve loved to death (if you’ve encountered me anytime in the last 5 years, you’ve probably seen it) and after many frustrating attempts to replace it with something similar, I took to eBay to try to find an exact replacement. This is something I’ve had success with in the…

Amelia McNamara

That paper I was telling you to read

papers

I was joking at lunch with some colleagues that I should have a few of my favorite papers linked on the main page of my website, so when I reference them for the n^th time, I can just say “look at my website” instead of promising to email them. While I don’t think it’s reasonable to put this on my…

Amelia McNamara

Repping Hadley at DataFest

misc

This weekend, we had our fourth annual DataFest event at UCLA. DataFest is a weekend-long data hackathon, where we give students an interesting dataset, plenty of snacks, and a space to work, and they try to come up with insights. This was the third year I attended, and it seems to just get bigger…

Amelia McNamara

Thoughts from NICAR 2014: process and content

conferences

One of the things I was most interested in learning about at NICAR was the processes and tools that journalists use when they’re doing data analysis. And the conference did not disappoint. I feel like I came away with a bunch of insight about how things are typically done, and a couple great…

Amelia McNamara

Thoughts from NICAR 2014: data, where does it come from?

conferences

One of the strands I followed most closely at NICAR was the way people get and use data. Here are some of the things that surprised me or intersect with the stuff I’m thinking about for my dissertation.

Amelia McNamara

Migrated posts

misc

I decided to hand-migrate the posts from my now-depreciated blogger blog, so while this blog is new, some of the posts are old. Hopefully that makes sense!

Amelia McNamara

Thoughts from NICAR 2014: taking action

conferences

This past weekend, I attended the IRE NICAR conference in Baltimore, MD.

Amelia McNamara

Productivity

tools

Like most people, I don’t feel like there are enough hours in a day to do everything I want to. And, I’ve been getting caught up in the small stuff because it’s so much easier to renew that library book than start writing my dissertation. Here are a few things that have been helping me become more…

Amelia McNamara

What’s the shashtistic on me?

misc

One of the major perks of becoming a statistician is hearing people (mainly drunk) who mispronounce the name of my field, earnestly repeating it over and over again in the hopes that I will tell them about “shashtistics,” or recite “the shashtistic” on them (generally, probability 1 that they are…

Amelia McNamara

The Postal Service is into data visualization

misc

I was just listening to “Nothing Better” by The Postal Service on Pandora and was amused to hear for the first time the lyric,

Amelia McNamara

Bad words

misc

As a budding statistician, I struggle with the issue of terminology. Since I’m no longer just a member of the public, I’m expected to have a clearer understanding and use of technically specific words, but I’m just as biased by the popular uses of them! A few words/phrases I’m working on:

Amelia McNamara

Stochastic as shit

misc

I’m really into this comic, and am going to try to use the phrase “stochastic as shit” in a serious academic context at some point in my graduate school career. It’s good to have goals, right?

Amelia McNamara

A counting problem

misc

I was going to title this post something like “day 3” or “day 23” but it’s hard to say where I should start counting. Whatever the number, it’s clear that I’m a fresh graduate student, and barely know what I’m in for.

Amelia McNamara