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Showing posts from September, 2020

Time and lineage in text analysis

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I've been working on a few parallel projects that involve topic modeling abstracts of managment research publications (See Topics in Management Research , for example). My method of choice at the moment is Latent Dirichlet Allocation .  I'm finding that this class of methods is useful in ways I hadn't quite expected when I started this exercise about a year ago in order to be able to test some hypotheses about management research in a causal inference/regression context. Since then I have been exploring the use of topic modeling for qualitative analysis. This sort of use of topic modeling is well represented in modern management research (See Hannigan et al., 2019 , a tremendous, encyclopedic review of the subject).  Sidebar: I'm still grappling with the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research. The terminology is deployed, at least in the circles I'm in, in a way that implies an eqivalence between qualitative and inductive research, and quantitativ

My love-hate relationship with monsoon malabar

I purchased a batch of unroasted from greenbeanery.ca  a couple weeks ago. This is the second time I'm buying this variety of bean from the greenbeanery. They've done an OK job keeping the bean out of the elements, but I'm seeing a somewhat uneven roast, likely because of moisture from the moonsooning process. This is my big problem with monsoon malabar- they're almost as hard as robusta to roast evenly.  If only they weren't delicious. This batch was roasted until a tiny bit of surface oil shows up at the beginning of second crack.  Monsoon malabar can be a good espresso bean as well, producing loads of crema. However,  my brew method of late is pourover with a stainless steel micromesh, which makes for a lightly oily, fully bodied cup.  Stepping away from an espresso-heavy COVID summer to the more mellow flavors of pourover is a good fall move. I may pair a more aromatic Brazilian beans with the full body of an Asian bean for next week's roast.

Tandoori Butter Chicken Wing Poutine

Hear me out, please.  Chicken wings, marinated overnight in garam masala and sour cream, baked in an oven until falling off the bone. Oven-baked brined potato wedges. Fresh cheese curd. Jar o Butter chicken masala gravy from Costco. All in a big cast iron skillet. The Tandoori Butter Chicken Wing Poutine (Pizza) (If you line the cast iron skillet with pizza dough)

COVID has lead to new forms of organizing...

One of which is co-writing. And by that I mean these long sessions where I get on skype with my co-authors for 5-6 hours at a stretch and work on a google doc together. It's pretty exhausting, and I dont think this way of writing (simultaneously, line by line, by consensus) would have been possible if I hadn't been locked in, without an office to go to during the day. And thus begins year 2 of graduate school. I think its a bit trite to be yet another one of those grad students who waxes on about how their mind was blown by reading an impressive and challenging paper. I do think something like this is a useful exercise in writing, however.  During my previous life as a data science consultant, I didn't have much occasion for long form writing, nor did I need to engage in much rhetorical gymnastics to convince people of the value of what I was doing. I was there, therefore they needed my help. So that's a muscle I need to exercise. And I am now in the social sciences, wh