Tag Archives: Ice Cream

The 2018 R Conference Was the Biggest Yet

Posted on by | Leave a reply

2018 New York R Conference

The 2018 New York R Conference was the biggest and best yet. This is both in terms of the crowd size and content.  The speakers included some of the R community’s best such as Hadley Wickham, David Robinson, Jennifer Hill, Max Kuhn, Andreas Mueller (ok, a little Python), Evelina Gabasova, Sean Taylor and Jeff Ryan. I am proud to say we were almost at gender parity for both attendees and speakers which is amazing for a tech conference. Brooke Watson even excitedly noted that we had a line for the women’s room.

Particularly gratifying for me was seeing so many of my students speak. Eurry Kim, Dan Chen and Alex Boghosian all gave excellent talks.

Some highlights that stuck out to me are:

Emily Robinson Shows There is More to the Tidyverse than Hadley

The Expanded Tidyverse

Emily Robinson, otherwise known as ERob, gave an excellent talk showing how the Tidyverse is so much more than just Hadley and that there are many people inspired by him to contribute in the Tidy way.

Sean Taylor Forecasted the Future with Prophet

Sean Taylor

Sean Taylor, former New Yorker and unrepentant Eagles fan, demonstrate his powerful R and Python, package Prophet, for forecasting time series data. Facebook open sourced his work so we could all benefit.

OG Data Mafia Founder Drew Conway Popped In

Giving away a data mafia shirt

A lucky fan got an autographed NYC Data Mafia t-shirt from Drew Conway.

David Smith Playing Minecraft Through R

Minecraft in R

David Smith played Minecraft through R, including building objects and moving through the world.

Evelina Gabasova Used Social Network Analysis to Break Down Star Wars

It's a Trap

Evelina Gabasova wowed the audience with her fun talk and detailed analysis of character interaction in Star Wars.

Dusty Turner Represented West Point

Dusty Talking Army Sports

Dusty Turner taught us how the United States Military Academy uses R for both student instruction and evaluation.

Hadley Wickham Delved into the Nitty Gritty of R

Hadley shows off objects are stored in memory

Hadley Wickham showed us how to get into the internals of R and figure out how to examine objects from a memory perspective.

Jennifer Hill Demonstrated Awesome Machine Learning Techniques for Causal Inference

Jennifer Hill Explaining Causal Inference

Following her sold-out meetup appearance in March, Jennifer continued to push the boundaries of causal inference.

I Made the Authors of Caret and scitkit-learn Show That R and Python Can Get Along

Caret and Scikit-learn in one place

While both Andreas and Max gave great individual talks, I made them pose for this peace-making photo.

David Robinson Got the Upper Hand in a Sibling Twitter Duel

DRob Teaching

Given only about 30 minutes notice, David put together an entire slideshow on how to livetweet and how to compete with your sibling.

In the End Emily Robinson Beat Her Brother For Best Tweeting

Emily won the prize for best tweeting

Despite David’s headstart Emily was the best tweeter (as calculated by Max Kuhn and Mara Averick) so she won the WASD Code mechanical keyboard with MX Cherry Clear switches.

Silent Auction of Data Paintings

The Robinson Family bought the Pizza Data painting for me

Thomas Levine made paintings of famous datasets that we auctioned off with the proceeds supporting the R Foundation and the Free Software Foundation. The Robinson family very graciously chipped in and bought the painting of the Pizza Poll data for me! I’m still floored by this and in love with the painting.

Ice Cream Sandwiches

Ice Cream Sandwiches

In addition to bagels and eggs sandwiches from Murray’s Bagels, Israeli food from Hummus and Pita Company, avocado toast and coffee from Bluestone Lane Coffee and pizza from Fiore’s, we also had ice creams sandwiches from World’s Best Cookie Dough.

All the Material

To catch up on all the presentations check out Mara Averick’s excellent notes:

Or check out all of Brooke’s drawings, collated by Dan Chen.

Videos and Upcoming Events

The videos will be posted at rstats.nyc in a few weeks for all to enjoy.

There are a number of other events coming up including:

We are already beginning plans for next year’s conference and are working on bringing it to DC as well! Stay tuned for all that and more.

Dan loves his mug

Related Posts



Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

The Times on Ice Cream

Posted on by | Leave a reply

The New York Times has a couple pieces today about ice cream.  The one that really caught my attention (thanks to Pat Kiernan) is on the skyrocketing cost for a scoop of ice cream.  I had somehow gotten used to paying three, four or more dollars at places like Cones, L’Arte del Gelato or the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory (I still need to get a t-shirt from there).  Even trucks, which you think would be bargain prices, are charging north of $4 for a scoop.

The article points out Grom, in particular.  I recently visited the location on Bleecker and Carmine and paid $5.25 for a small.  While the gelato was good, I’d rather walk down the street to Cones or L’Arte del Gelato where the prices are (slightly) lower and the gelato tastes better, at least to me.

What really gets me going is that on my trip to Italy last year I paid much lower prices.  Gelato in Venice only cost one Euro.  Even with the conversion rate at the time it was less than $1.50.  Florence was a little more at two Euros and Rome hit the top costing between three and four Euros.  You would think those tourist heavy cities in one of the more expensive countries to visit would have more expensive gelato, but I guess not.

The other article is about egg free ice cream and how it helps pull out the flavor.  I love ice cream of all kinds so I can go either way, but the article should be an interesting read.

Related Posts



Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.

Last Night’s Ice Cream Crawl Was a Big Success

Posted on by | Leave a reply

Last night I attended Amanda the Foodie’s ice cream crawl which is part of a series of food crawls she organizes.  I’m not good at estimating crowd size by sight (give me a few equations then sure) but I’d say 60 to 80 people showed up.  She had a break up into groups of 5 or 6 and go on different routes so the shops wouldn’t be overwhelmed with customers.  She also went so far as to negotiate discounts for us ahead of time.

I was there alone so I made new friends on the spot.  Our list of ice cream stations included Blackwell’s Oragnic Ice Cream Truck (the driver was very rude and did not honor the discount), Three Tarts (we had Rosemary and lavendar ice cream sandwiches), Miss Softee (we skipped because we all had her before), Roneybrook Farm (Cinnamon, Pumpkin) and L’Arte del Gelato (also skipped because a few of us were there yesterday).

My group decided to add The Big Gay Ice Cream Truck (Doug is awesome and has GREAT toppings) to the list so we hustled over to Union Square just in time to sample his wares.  We had the Salty Pimp, Monday Sundae and Vanilla with Sea Salt and Olive Oil.  I also gave the location to Amanda so she could tweet it to everyone sending a rush to Doug as he was trying to close.

Metromix covered the event and which is where I found that picture of me with the spoon.

Related Posts



Jared Lander is the Chief Data Scientist of Lander Analytics a New York data science firm, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Organizer of the New York Open Statistical Programming meetup and the New York and Washington DC R Conferences and author of R for Everyone.