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Fun in the Sun: A Look at Summer QAC Projects

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It’s bizarre to go to a university where it’s practically a given that your classmates will your mind when they tell you about their summer. This could be daunting, as not all of us have the resources for a big internship or trip around the world. However, you don’t need to travel to have a story worth sharing, a fact that seventeen Wesleyan students took advantage of this summer. The QAC’s Summer Apprenticeship is a program in which students partner with a faculty mentor to work on a data-based research project. I spoke to a couple of participants and asked them to tell me about their work.

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Detecting Trends in Community Engagement: At Wesleyan and Beyond

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When it comes to activism and community service, Wesleyan has always tried to stay ahead of the curve. But this can be difficult, as the concerns and trends of community engagement are constantly shifting. Often, new topics will seemingly erupt out of nowhere, and it will take a while for word to spread. There are so many existing concerns that it can be difficult for new voices to be heard and for old voices to catch on to the changes. It might seem as though the trends in community engagement are shifting constantly, without any pattern. But can technology detect one?

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Crowdsourcing Data Analysis: The complexities of free data labor in a data hungry market

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Companies don’t know where to look to find the data analysts they need. A February 2017 article reported that 40% of major companies are struggling to find reliable data analysts to hire. According to TechTarget, “a lack of skills remains one of the biggest data science challenges,” and many tech magazines have reported something similar. This has led to companies sponsoring campaigns encouraging people to learn coding and universities to create comprehensive data analysis training programs. But it has also led to the widespread use of crowdsourcing data analysis. Crowdsourcing, while not a new tool in data science, has recently become extremely popular as a way for companies to fulfill their data analysis needs, from gritty data cleaning to full blown model creation. Last month DataCrunch reported on Kaggle, a website that allows companies to host competitions with a dataset they need to be analyzed in some way. Another example is DrivenData, who do activism work themselves but have a similar competition layout that runs their projects. The way the competition model works is that the participant or group whose model is chosen as the best by the company receives a cash prize. However, these competitions get a large enough number of submissions that the chance of winning the prize is rather low.

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Welcome back to campus!

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We hope you’ve all had an okay time settling in for the 2016-2017 year. We’re excited you’re here, and for all the great things you can expect on DataCrunch this year. Stay tuned!