Publications by Ari Lamstein
Notes from the 2018 APDU Conference
I recently attended the 2018 Association of Public Data Users (APDU) conference. This was my second time attending the conference, and I enjoyed learning more about how other people use federal statistics. Some of my favorite presentations were: Julia Lane on her experience teaching Big Data to social scientists and government workers. The Burea...
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Update on R Consortium Census Guide
As I mentioned in July, my proposal to the R Consortium to create a Guide to Working with Census Data in R was accepted. Today I’d like to share an update on the project. The proposal breaks the creation of the guide into four milestones. So far Logan Powell and I have completed two of those milestones: Milestone 1: Select publication techno...
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Update on the R Consortium Census Working Group
It’s been a while since I shared any information about the R Consortium’s Census Working Group. Today I’d like to share an update on three projects which the group is involved in. The project which you might already be familiar with is the “Guide to Working with Census Data in R”. This is my survey paper that will include popular datase...
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“A Guide to Working With Census Data in R” is now Complete!
Two weeks ago I mentioned that I was clearing my calendar until I finished writing A Guide to Working with Census Data in R. Today I’m happy to announce that the Guide is complete! I even took out a special domain for the project: RCensusGuide.info. The Guide is designed to address two problems that people who work with R and US Census Data fa...
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Free Course: Help Your Team Learn R!
Today I am happy to announce a new free course: Help Your Team Learn R! Over the last few years I’ve helped a number of data teams train their analysts to use R. At each company there was a skilled R user who was leading the team’s effort to adopt R. Each of these internal R advocates, however, had a similar problem: they did not have a backg...
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New Free R Course on Census.gov!
Today I am happy to announce that a new free course on Choroplethr – Mapping Census Bureau Data in R with Choroplethr – is available on Census Academy, the US Census Bureau’s new training platform! (Choroplethr is a suite of R packages I created for mapping demographic statistics).This course is a more in-depth version of Learn to Map Cens...
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Bug when Creating Reference Maps with Choroplethr
Last week the Census Bureau published a free course I created on using Choroplethr to map US Census Data. Unfortunately, a few people have reported problems when following one of the examples in the course. This post describes that issues and provides instructions for working around it. Where does the bug occur? The bug occurs in Module 2 Lesson ...
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New Resource for Learning Choroplethr
Last week I had the honor of giving a 1 hour talk about Choroplethr at a private company. When this company reached out to me about speaking there, I originally planned to give the same talk I gave at CDC two years ago. But as I reviewed the CDC talk, I realized two things: My ability to teach and explain Choroplethr has improved a lot since the...
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Notes on Becoming an RStudio Certified Trainer
I recently became an RStudio Certified Trainer, and thought that it might interest the broader R Community to learn about this new program. For those who don’t know, RStudio has recently put together a process to independently verify that R trainers (a) are proficient with the Tidyverse and (b) know modern teaching pedagogy. Certified trainers ...
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Behind the Scenes of an R Consortium Project
Next Tuesday (September 3) I will be giving a talk at the Bay Area R User Group titled Behind the Scenes of an R Consortium Project. This will be my first time speaking about my work with the R Consortium, and I encourage you to attend! Over the last few years the R Consortium has emerged as a major source of funding for R projects. However, man...
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