mathbabe

The past: Money in politics

First thing’s first, I went to the Bicoastal Datafest a few weekends ago and haven’t reported back. Mostly that’s because I got sick and didn’t go on the second day, but luckily other people did, like Kathy Kiely from the Sunlight Foundation, who wrote up this description of the event and the winning teams’ projects.

And hey, it turns out that my new company shares an office with Harmony Institute, whose data scientist Burton DeWilde was on the team that won “Best in Show” for their orchestral version of the federal government’s budget.

Another writeup of the event comes by way of Michael Lawson, who worked on the team that set up an accounting fraud detection system through Benford’s Law. I might be getting a guest blog post about this project through another one of its team members soon.

And we got some good progress on our DataKind/ Sunlight Foundation money-in-politics project as well, thanks to DataKind intern Pete Darche and math nerds Kevin Wilson and Johan de Jong.

The future one week from now: Occupy

Next up, on March 1st and 2nd at CUNY Graduate Center is this data hackathon called OccupyData (note this is a Friday and Saturday, which is unusual). You can register for the event here.

It’s a combination of an Occupy event and a datafest, so obviously I am going to try to go. The theme is general – data for the 99% – but there’s a discussion on this listserv as to the various topics people might want to focus on (Aaron Swartz and Occupy Sandy are coming up for example). I’m looking forward to reporting back (or reporting other people’s report-backs if my kids don’t let me go).

The future two weeks from now: Climate change

Finally, there’s this datathon, which doesn’t look open to registration, but which I’ll be participating in through my work. It’s stated goal is “to explore how social and meteorological data can be combined to enhance social science research on climate change and cities.”  The datathon will run Saturday March 9th – Sunday March 10th, 2013, starting noon Saturday, with final presentations at noon Sunday. I’ll try to report back on that as well.