David Ranzolin

Canvas is, in my humble opinion, the best LMS around, and my second package rcanvas is for all the students, TAs, instructors, and analysts lucky enough to reside there. A growing number of contributors has made it easier than ever to automate various workflows, and I’m excited to show off... [Read More]

In 2017 the University of California launched Career Tracks, a job classification system for staff not represented by a union. The goal was threefold: (1) to give employees better-defined career paths; (2) to better-align university compensation with the market; and (3) to better-reflect primary job responsibilities for each employee. Additionally,... [Read More]

Sophie Alpert makes several good points in a recent post on ‘Observable programming’: [Read More]

This post is about pre-exploratory data analysis. Namely, answering questions about the data at two junctures: before you know anything about the data and when you know only very little about the data. There are roughly three overlapping questions to ask: What is this? What’s in this? What can I... [Read More]

This may surprise you, but there isn’t an easy, “canonical” method to construct simple probability trees in R. Google uncovers some hacky attempts from years past, but it obviously hasn’t been a pressing issue or priority in the community. The reason for this, I think, is threefold: (1) probability trees... [Read More]

Earlier today I completed my first (sprint) triathlon. For me, it was 2 hours and 12 minutes of barbarism–a 1/2 mile swim, a 15 mile bike ride, and a three mile run to boot. I knew my time was poor; I struggled to wiggle out of my wet suit, was... [Read More]