Over the last two days the weblog picked up a lot more traffic than usual. I’m going to attribute that to posting on a more regular basis. It did not look like the posts were being read in order. That was a very curious thing that caught my attention. All the content here shared a common writer, but the topics being covered vary widely. I updated the “About Nels” page to suggest that new readers start with my 40th birthday weblog post. That was the post where I realized that my ability to carry a narrative thread along the way with me from post to post was lacking. Telling a really good sustained story day after day is a skill. Perhaps it is a skill that I need to learn to better master along the journey of daily writing. Getting back into the swing of writing has taken some time and things have been going well enough. I’m not talking about a solid 5 single spaced pages a day of productivity, but things are getting back to normal. 

Throughout this Memorial Day weekend I’m going to spend some time reflecting to commemorate and I’m going to work on understanding how to build infographics. My base election prediction model is pretty simplistic and should be really easy to turn into a series of graphics, but those graphics would not be interactive. My ability to build graphics is generally geared toward putting them in academic publications that are very static and not designed to be a living thing that people could tinker with and enjoy. Perhaps that is the beautiful and lasting contribution of Jupyter notebooks to the social sciences space. You can share the chart creation to others for the purposes of both replication and extension. Somebody could take and tinker with what was done to produce something interesting. That is where my time will be spent at the intersection of building out my base election prediction models in some Jupyter notebooks and working toward sharing those on GitHub along the way for others to be able to work with going forward. 

One of my intellectual hobbies over the years has been trying to extend sentiment analysis to electoral prediction in ways using bots. Most of that effort was not micro-targeted; it was very macro level analysis based on tracking news media down to see sentiment assuming that sentiment was passed along to readers. One of the things that this last election cycle identified in the modeling is that the transitive property of sentiment has become weaker as a factor in any model and that political sentiment has become highly sticky. The assumption of sticky political sentiment creates a much different election modeling algorithm. We will see if it is effective in November. The trajectory of my academic work will be focused in this area for the rest of the year. I feel that is a solid place to put my efforts right now. Other researchers are focusing their attention on other things in this time of quarantine. This is where my attention will be focused and hopefully it will help me both learn better interactive infographic creation skills and it will help me share a project based on election modeling. I’m going to build all my forecasting and projection models from the ground up so they are easy to review, modify, and replicate.

Interrupted. Coffee. 

Today instead of listening to my Warren Zevon station on Pandora I decided to let a few of my YouTube subscription videos play. This does pull my attention in and out of writing in a different way than what happens during the course of only listening to music. For the most part listening to music while I write helps me focus and the music is sort of in the background and the writing is in the forefront of my attention. Watching YouTube videos tends to pull my attention from one side of the screen where the video is playing and back to the other side of the screen where I am writing. This is an entirely different setup on my Google Pixelbook Go where the screen size does not really support split screen efforts. This Dell UltraSharp 38 inch curved monitor has worked really well. The specific model I received on March 11, 2019 was the U3818DW. I’m using the built in KVM and could simply plug in my Pixelbook via USB Type-C, but my Corsair Cube works well enough for writing that is not required. 

Whoa —- my thoughts just wondered way off topic. Given that this is a stream of consciousness based writing session that is particularly surprising. I really should be listening to music instead of watching videos about guitars and traveling. If you were wondering about my YouTube journey, then let me explain it for you. It pretty much falls into three categories: 1) technology related things, 2) guitar gear, and 3) travel content.