About
- +About Me
+--This is where I would boast about myself no doubt.
-
Written in Go, Hugo is an open source static site generator available under the Apache Licence 2.0. Hugo supports TOML, YAML and JSON data file types, Markdown and HTML content files and uses shortcodes to add rich content. Other notable features are taxonomies, multilingual mode, image processing, custom output formats, HTML/CSS/JS minification and support for Sass SCSS workflows.
-Hugo makes use of a variety of open source projects including:
+My Professional Background
+I obtained a PhD in Statistics from the University of Warwick in 2013, my thesis title was “Uncertainty in Changepoints in Time Series” 1. I’m delighted that Dr Little Alex Horne recently became associated with my alma mater through the Taskmaster Education.
+I have 10 years of industry experience as a Research Scientist/Data Scientist at Amazon and Samsung, predominantly demand forecasting at scale for products. I can impart best practices and vision of how to run this project at scale and with rigor (automation, repeatability).
+My Personal Motivation
+There are a variety of personal reasons why I am starting “The Median Duck”.
+Perhaps optimistically, I want to (stealthy) educate others of analytics to the general public in a fun and amusing manner. Statistics is not taught particularly well in the UK, often seen as a boring number crunching and often a medium to lie. Add to this, I want to instill best practices and the graft work that I have experienced over my years, and that are often overlooked in courses and textbooks (importance of good quality data, automated workflows, etc.).
+I made the somewhat brave decision to become self employed at the start of 2024, and have various ventures in the work to provide some income and keep me entertained on a daily basis (piano teaching, piano performance, admin for my housing association). The Median Duck is one of these ventures. I don’t expect this venture to be a major money maker, but I do want to retain my engagement in the data science and statistics field. Add to this, my “imposter syndrome” often wants me to relearn the basics.
+I do have some aspirations to potentially go into data journalism through data science and analytics and this venture may provide some experience.
+Finally, I do not claim to be a full expert and entirely knowledgeable about the analysis I will be covering. However I’m always eager to learn new topics and also educate others; I believe I am an educator and teacher at my core. My passion for Taskmaster and prior experience with the analytics field thus makes “The Median Duck” this the ideal vehicle.
+My Taskmaster History
+I properly encountered Taskmaster during 2020 (and the global pandemic), when the Series 2 task “order something without using certain words” was recommended to me on YouTube. Once I watched this task, I was hooked and consequently went down the Taskmaster rabbit hole.
+However, I was initially quite dismissive of Taskmaster prior to this. I had previously associated “Taskmaster” with “Ticketmaster” and thus erroneously thought it was going to be a dull show in which extortionate ticket scalping may occur. How wrong I was…
+Since 2020, I have watched each series of Taskmaster (mainly UK) near the time of broadcast, and consumed Taskmaster adjacent material (the podcast, comedians appearances on other shows etc.). I have also unofficially (and jokingly) assigned myself the title of “Taskmaster Representative of the Pacific Northwest” as I have referred numerous friends and colleagues about Taskmaster and also informed them of when the next series is broadcasting.
+These are a few of my favourite things…
-
-
- https://github.com/yuin/goldmark -
- https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma -
- https://github.com/muesli/smartcrop -
- https://github.com/spf13/cobra -
- https://github.com/spf13/viper +
- Favourite Task: Ringtone Choreography (S4E4) +
- Favourite Series: Series 4 or 5. +
- Favourite Contestant: Victoria Coren Mitchell; I actively squealed when she was announced. +
- Favourite Quote(s): “Friendship is Truth” +
- Degrees of Separation to Alex Horne (to my knowledge): 3
Hugo is ideal for blogs, corporate websites, creative portfolios, online magazines, single page applications or even a website with thousands of pages.
-Hugo is for people who want to hand code their own website without worrying about setting up complicated runtimes, dependencies and databases.
-Websites built with Hugo are extremelly fast, secure and can be deployed anywhere including, AWS, GitHub Pages, Heroku, Netlify and any other hosting provider.
-Learn more and contribute on GitHub.
++
-
+
-
+
I’m sure you eager readers can find my thesis online and be gently amused by my chapter quotes. ↩︎
+
+
Really? Is this not the hompage editor?
+ +Resources
+ +Here are some of the resources I used as part of The Median Duck.
+(I will tabulate and automate this eventually).
+Taskmaster Related
+Website Related
+Statistics Related
+Misc Related
+ +The Vision
- ---To entertain and educate the general public of statistical and analytical concepts through data associated with the hit UK TV show “Taskmaster”.
-
The Objective
-Using data from the UK hit TV show “Taskmaster”, “The Median Duck” aims to entertain and educate the general public of statistical and analytical concepts. Articles and analysis will be written for a non-technical audience predominantly.
-Types of analysis and content fall under the following umbrellas, and example topics include.
-Exploratory Analysis
--
-
- Do older contestants fair better on the show? Is there a correlation between series ranking and age of contestant? -
- Has Greg been harsher as the show has progressed along? -
- Was Sally Phillips better at creative tasks, than objective tasks on average? -
- Existing analysis that you have performed thus far would fall into this category. -
Predictive Analysis
--
-
- Prior to a series starting, can we predict who is likely to win the series? What are the probabilities (odds) of each contestant winning? -
- As the series progresses and we start to see actual contestant performance, how do these odds change? -
Hypothetical Analysis
--
-
- What would be the outcome of a hypothetical series featuring Ed Gamble, James Acaster, Nish Kumar, Josh Widdicombe and Sally Phillips? -
Game Theory and Strategy
--
-
- What is the optimal strategy in Series 4’s “Draw the median duck” task? -
- What is the optimal strategy in Series 13’ “Give Alex a high-five. The third-fastest high-fiver wins.” task? -
The various datasets, code snippets and analysis will be open source on this git repo, such that others are able to reproduce it at their own pace, and contribute to the project.
-My Background
-I obtained a PhD in Statistics from the University of Warwick in 2013. I’m delighted that Dr Little Alex Horne recently became associated with my alma mater through the Taskmaster Education.
-I have 10 years of industry experience as a Research Scientist/Data Scientist at Amazon and Samsung. I can impart best practices and vision of how to run this project at scale and with rigor (automation, repeatability).
-I properly encountered Taskmaster during 2020 (and the global pandemic), when the Series 2 task “order something without using certain words” was recommended to me on YouTube. Once I watched this task, I was hooked and consequently went down the Taskmaster rabbit hole.
-However, I was initially quite dismissive of Taskmaster prior to this. I had previously associated “Taskmaster” with “Ticketmaster” and thus erroneously thought it was going to be a dull show in which extortionate ticket scalping may occur. How wrong I was….
-My personal motivation
-There are a variety of personal reasons why I am starting “The Median Duck”.
-Perhaps optimistically, I want to (stealthy) educate others of analytics to the general public in a fun and amusing manner. Add to this, I want to instill best practices and the graft work that I have experienced over my years, and that are often overlooked in courses and textbooks (importance of good quality data, automated workflows, etc.).
-I made the somewhat brave decision to become self employed at the start of 2024, and have various ventures in the work to provide some income and keep me entertained on a daily basis (piano teaching, piano performance, admin for my housing association). The Median Duck is one of these ventures. I don’t expect this venture to be a major money maker, but I do want to retain my engagement in the data science and statistics field. Add to this, my “imposter syndrome” often wants me to relearn the basics.
-I do have some aspirations to potentially go into data journalism through data science and analytics and this venture may provide some experience.
-Finally, I do not claim to be a full expert and entirely knowledgeable about the analysis I will be covering. However I’m always eager to learn new topics and also educate others; I believe I am an educator and teacher at my core. My passion for Taskmaster and prior experience with the analytics field thus makes “The Median Duck” this the ideal vehicle.
-Christopher F H Nam
- -