Looking forward. Data projects and continued learning for 2020.
Happy New Year! It’s a brand new decade and I resolve to build on my qualifications in my Data Science Career. If you follow my Github you will find NLP and vote counting projects in politics, and a physics forward explainer for sunspots over time. I have yet to dive into my career work in healthcare so that’s where I’ll kick off the New Year.
A look at healthcare data
Health insurance companies have come into their own since the advent (and continued success) of Obamacare. The initial bumpy road for startups in the space have given way to a proper marketplace where startups are thriving.
The healthcare tech space is also exploding driven by privacy innovations in blockchain and personalized health devices. The apple watch will monitor your heart-rate, keep track of your glucose, manage your exercise goals and tons more.
Election Year Analysis
The next US Presidential election is upon us. Polls of the 2020 Democratic primary candidates are still in flux and the Iowa caucuses are just a month away. There will be a lot of attention paid to this election and will certainly draw a lot of press as well. That means a lot of data will be on the table generated in real time with consequences for the future of the country.
I’ll be watching the national polls but also keeping track of local reactions with the New York City press. Brian Lehrer is a gem to NYC national and local political news coverage. I am also paying attention to what the New York City left is doing. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has become a darling of the left and a favorite target of the right, but the news media is saturated with personality stories and completely failing to cover grass roots movement from on the ground groups like the Sunrise Movement, DSA and the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York. Regardless of what your newsfeed says, ‘all politics is local’ still holds true in New York City.
Good Journalism Groups
Finally, New York has been a hub for journalists and journalism schools. The media landscape is shaped here and in Washington D.C. I’ve already met pioneering journalists in new media and politics who are also NYC locals. Going forward I will be focussing on local news journalists and focussing on tech, ai and data journalism.
Writing groups will also be on my meetup list. Being a lab analyst, prose and diction were not exactly on the top of my skills. However now as a data scientist, I will be communicating with more people and making the best case I can with the data I have. That means being a better, writer, speaker, and powerpoint communicator as well as being a prolific coder.
If I thought that 2019 was a busy tumultuous year, 2020 promises to be even wilder and crazier. Ring in the new year with ambition. It’s a great time to be a data journalist.
