A Regex History of Modern Computing — REGEX, a shortening of “regular expressions,” is a syntax for defining elaborate search terms. Rather than simply matching characters one-to-one, REGEX matches sequences of characters with patterns in strings of text. REGEX has powerful applications in text search, including find/find-and-replace operations and input validation. The history of REGEX begins in…

In 1991 the sociologist Scott L. Feld published Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do, observing a network phenomena he termed the “friendship paradox.” The paradox reads like this: the mean number of friends for any individual will (statistically) always be lower than the mean number of friends…

A brief introduction to object oriented programming in Python with a focus on the concept of abstraction — This blog is an introduction to object oriented programming and abstraction in Python. There are many programming languages in addition to Python that, to greater or lesser extents, are object oriented. While the execution here is in Python only, many of the concepts are generalizable. Object oriented programming (OOP) is…

A Deeper Introduction to Object Oriented Programming in Python with a Focus on Domain Models — In a previous post, I introduced some of the fundamental Object Oriented Programming (OOP) principals, such as classes, methods, and attributes, as well as one of the core ideas behind OOP, abstraction. Abstraction, in short, is an OOP concept for simplifying complicated or repetitious code by focusing only on the…

My Capstone Project for Flatiron School’s Data Science Bootcamp For my three-week capstone project as part of Flatiron School’s 15-week data science bootcamp, I wanted to find a real world business problem I could solve using natural language processing (NLP). NLP, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, means programming computers…

Detecting Racial Bias in Boston Police Vehicle Stops with the Stanford Open Policing Project — There is no national database for reporting all police activity data. Departments who do publish data often self report and there is no consistent format to examine data across departments nationally. The Stanford Open Policing Project (OPP) is the first attempt to engineer a comprehensive police activity database at the…