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Clinton Boys

Australian data scientist and mathematician, living in London.

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Blog

2021

The Setup

In this post I answer the interview questions from The Setup. This is an updated version of this post which I wrote in 2019.

The wonders of org-mode

I wrote last year about how I finally got around to building my own system of organising my notes, thoughts, writings and to-do lists based on emacs and org ...

2020

Deriving Kepler's laws from Newton's laws

I’ve always been interested in physics but somehow, despite my years of studying mathematics, I’d never really properly studied physics outside of a couple o...

Encrypting files in emacs org-mode

People who use org-mode in emacs for sensitive things like keeping a private journal, or recording their unprocessed thoughts on all manner of subjects, have...

Multilevel regression

This post is about what people usually mean when they use the term “heirarchical regression”, which is one of those confusing terms in statistics that can ha...

Getting started with emacs

I’ve been looking for a system of organising my notes, which represent a sort of “second brain” for my thoughts, for many years. I have thousands of text fil...

2019

The 2019 UK election under AV

On December 12 this year, there were parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom for the third time in five years. The country is in the middle of an unpre...

The Setup

In this post I answer the interview questions from The Setup. This is an updated version of this post which I wrote in 2016, which is itself an updated versi...

Regression

At work recently I gave a 90-minute colloquium talk on regression. We have a monthly series of talks where researchers and data scientists discuss fundamenta...

2018

2017

Fixing the Trendy scraper

My Google trends scraper is the most popular post on this site, and I’ve been getting questions about it for the last year or so, ever since Google changed t...

The Bias-Variance tradeoff

The Bias-Variance tradeoff is an extremely important concept in statistical modelling which is often misinterpreted or poorly understood. In this post I’ll g...

2016

The Setup

In this post I answer the interview questions from The Setup. This is an updated version of this post which I first wrote here in April 2015.

Call your mum

Since moving overseas away from my family and friends nearly two years ago, one problem I have had is keeping in touch with everyone. A combination of distan...

2015

Lifetime flight simulator

I spent a few hours today writing a basic first draft of a data-driven text-based “game” which demonstrates just how safe air travel is. The code for the gam...

The Setup

In this post I answer the interview questions from The Setup.

Pitchfork and my iTunes library

I listen to a lot of music and for more than a decade now my main source of discovering new music has been Pitchfork.com, particularly since all my friends o...

2014

Scraping Gumtree

Gumtree.com.au is a trading post website, largely used by private sellers interacting with each other off-site to sell used goods. One particularly common us...