Blog

Method of moments for randomised responses, overlaid on an image of a set of scales.

Method of Moments Estimation for Randomised Response Surveys

privacy
estimation
statistics
tutorial

Method of moments estimation for common data models and randomised response designs.
Nov 9, 2023
Zak Varty

Flow chart showing the stages of preprocessing and analysis used by Potluri et al to quantify data science notebook accessibility.

Notably Inaccessible

workflows
data science
computing
accessibility
reading summary

A data driven investigation into the (in)accessibility of data science notebooks.
Oct 3, 2023
Zak Varty

BibTeX written on an green background.

Bib but Better

templates
writing

Templates for all the bib entries you never knew you needed.
Sep 13, 2023
Zak Varty

Plot from Chen, Johansson and Sontag (2018). The expected loss for each subgroup of a protected characteristic is shown as power-law function of their sample size. This can be used to inform which subgroups to collect further samples from, and how many further samples to collect.

Why is My Classifier Discrimanatory?

reading summary
fairness
data ethics
data science

A fresh view on understanding and addressing unfairness in classification (and regression) models.
Aug 17, 2023
Zak Varty

Title page of Bowers and Voors (2016).

How to Improve Your Relationship with Your Future Self

reading summary
reproducibility
workflows
data science

Reproducible workflows are not just good for science.
Aug 15, 2023
Zak Varty

Stylised combination of the CN tower and data icons in purple and orange

Overcoming Barriers to Sharing Code

reading summary
data science
reproducibility
pedagogy

Talk summary from the Toronto Workshop on Reproducibility in February 2023.
Aug 8, 2023
Zak Varty

Six swimmers in a swimming pool, competing in a race. One swimmer is leading by quite some way.

The Mundanity of Excellence

reading summary
workflows
data science

Exceptional performance is acheived by doing the small, boring stuff really well.
Jul 26, 2023
Zak Varty

Article headline from Real Life - counting the countless, why data science is a profound treat for queer people.

Counting the Countless

reading summary
data ethics
data science

Is data science compatible with queerness?
Jul 14, 2023
Zak Varty

Drawing of two people, the first proundly displays a screen full of code while saying “Behold an Amazing Function!”. The second person looks a bit scared and replies “I would rather not behold...”.

Packaging your R code

R
data science
tutorial

A tutorial to guide you as you make your first (or hundredth) minimal R package.
Jan 19, 2023
Zak Varty

Two happy looking round fuzzy monsters, each holding a similarly shaped wrench with the word “wrangle” on it. Between their tools is held up a rectangular data table labeled “TIDY.”

Data Wrangling

data science
data wrangling
tutorial

Get your data ducks in a line using base R and the tidyverse.
Jan 6, 2023
Zak Varty

The text APIs and httr, written on a black hexagon.

Aquiring Data via an API

data science
data acquisition
tutorial

Part 2 of a mini-series on aquiring data from the web, focusing on data aquisition via APIs.
Dec 14, 2022
Zak Varty

git logo. This is a red-orange square with rounded corners, it is rotated by 45 degrees so that it is standing on one corner and has a cut-out design representing a branching graph.

Git: putting your new feature out into the world.

workflows
git

A git workflow to put a local feature out in the wild, then tidy up after yourself.
Dec 13, 2022
Zak Varty

Hexagonal logo of the rvest package; a sickle cutting wheat on a red background.

Web Scraping with {rvest}

data science
data acquisition
tutorial

Part 1 of a mini-series on aquiring data from the web, focusing on scraping webpages using the {rvest} package.
Dec 1, 2022
Zak Varty

Header section of a PLOS Comptational Biology perspective paper titled 'Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing'.

Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing

reading summary
reproducibility
academic skills
computing

Reading Summary of Wilson et al. (2017).
Oct 19, 2022
Zak Varty

BBC dumbbell plot showing stations with the largest gaps between previous and new records, ordered by the highest new temperature.

Data Journalism: Recreating a Professional Plot

data visualisation

Recreating a plot of record breaking temperatures by the BBC data journalism team.
Oct 15, 2022
Zak Varty

Stacked bar chart of yarn weights on Ravelry. Bars are descending order by their fequency, with yarn-type labels written within the bars and count values to the right of the bars. Annotations indicate that the most popular yarn weights are Fingering and Double Knit, and that there were more missing yarn weights than in all remaining categories combined.

Tidy Tuesday: Ravelry Yarn

data visualisation
tidy tuesday

Tidy Tuesday 2022 || Week 41
Oct 12, 2022
Zak Varty

Photograph of the mathematics section of Blackwell's book shop in Oxford.

Recommended Statistics Books

academic skills
reading

Book recommendations for those looking to reinforce their knowledge of undergraduate and advanced statistics.
Oct 10, 2022
Zak Varty

Photograph of a filing cabinet filled with library index cards.

Writing a rhetorical précis

academic skills
writing
reading

Structured summaries to remember and retrieve what you read
Oct 7, 2022
Zak Varty

Mechanical typewriter on white background.

Setting up a quarto blog

quarto
tutorial

Adding a blog within a quarto website
Sep 26, 2022
Zak Varty

The text Hello, World` written in red monospaced font inside curly braces on a grey background.

Hello, World!

quarto
templates

A minimal first post
Sep 26, 2022
Zak Varty
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