Markov Wanderer

10 less well-known Python packages

(Remember that to use these, you will need to run pip install packagename on the command line.)

A better narrative on narratives

Pigou, Keynes and Shiller all recognised the importance of narratives and sentiment for the economy. But we don’t know too much about how narratives spread. One of the most…

Blog: Markov Wanderer

Building an API in the cloud in fewer than 200 lines of code

Cloud tools and Python packages have become so powerful that you can build a (scalable) cloud-based API in fewer than 200 lines of code. In this blog post, you’ll see how to…

Converting handwritten, maths-heavy lecture notes to markdown using large language models

It would be nice to have digital copies of all of those old handwritten lecture notes that I so lovingly put together. Some of them might even still be useful, though I have…

Data science maturity and the cloud

Data science has enormous potential to do good in the public sector. The efficiencies that are possible from automation and reproducible analytical pipelines alone are…

Data science with impact

I was recently asked to give a talk at No. 10 Downing Street on the topic of data science with impact and, in this post, I’m going to share some of what I said in that talk.…

Econometrics in Python Part II - Fixed effects

In this second in a series on econometrics in Python, I’ll look at how to implement fixed effects.

Econometrics in Python Part IV - Running many regressions alongside pandas

The fourth in the series of posts covering econometrics in Python. This time: automating the boring business of running multiple regressions on columns in a pandas dataframe.

Econometrics in Python part I - Double machine learning

The idea is that this will be the first in a series of posts covering econometrics in Python.

Econometrics in Python part III - Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects using random forests

The third in a series of posts covering econometrics in Python. Here I look at ‘causal forests’.

Efficiency in the public sector: analysis and operations

I’ve been thinking a lot about efficiency in the public sector recently. This post looks at ideas for increasing the efficiency of analysis and operations through…

Efficiency in the public sector: communication and co-ordination

I’ve been thinking a lot about efficiency in the public sector recently, particularly how we can improve it. In this post, I’ll focus on some ideas for improving…

Get organised

This monster blog post is going to discuss how to organise your a data science project or research project: data, code and outputs. I’ll cover how to structure the project…

In praise of APIs (application programming interfaces)

In this blog, I look at some of reasons why APIs are such a great way to share data.

Making a publication quality plot with Python (and latex)

I now recommend the style file below for quick, publication quality plots in Python using Matplotlib (tested on 3.3.4 and Python 3.8). To use the style, save it in a file…

Putting women scientists onto Wikipedia

In a previous post, I shared links about the predictors for not participating in higher education, and about how it is difficult to reach audiences in “remote rural or…

Setting up R in Visual Studio Code

This post will show you how to set up Visual Studio Code as an integrated development environment for the statistical language R. This will include some useful features such…

Specification curve analysis

Since publishing this post, I have written the specification_curve package for Python. specification_curve automates some aspects of specification curve analysis, namely…

TIL: How to break RSS feeds

Note: this is the first post under a new tag called TIL or “today I learned”. These are shorter format posts that lower the barrier to blogging and capture a mini piece of…

TIL: How to resume sessions on virtual machines

Today I learned how to resume sessions on virtual machines while using Visual Studio Code remote.

TIL: Obsidian, and integrating it with Zotero

I’ve long been interested in how best to store knowledge; so much that I wrote about it in this post (in the context of the public sector). Today I learned how to combine…

TIL: how to connect Visual Studio Code to Azure Virtual Machines

In a previous blog post, I looked at how to connect desktop-based Visual Studio Code to a Google Cloud Virtual machine; today, it’s how to do the same using a virtual…

TIL: how to create a virtual desktop from a cloud virtual machine

Researchers frequently want to be able to access a second computer that works like a normal computer (think a virtual desktop rather than a virtual machine + command line)…

TIL: how to create and work with a MySQL database on Azure

In this TIL, I find out how to create a new MySQL database on Microsoft Azure. This is a place to store structured, tabular data. Note that the instructions below assume you…

TIL: how to create and work with remote blob storage on Azure

In this TIL, I find out how to create a new blob storage account on Microsoft Azure. This is a place to store unstructured data of any kind (as opposed to, say, a SQL…

The ONS API

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) produces most of the macroeconomic statistics for the UK. I was delighted to discover recently that they had been working on an API.

The data validation landscape in 2025

What’s going on in the world of data validation? For those of you who don’t know, data validation is the process of checking data quality in an automated or semi-automated…

The explosion in time series forecasting packages in data science

There have been a series of sometimes jaw-dropping developments in data science in the last few years, with large language models by far the most prominent (and with good…

The false economy of bad IT

Many of us will have experienced bad hardware or software at work. Applications that freeze when you try and do something. A lag when typing. Some programmes ceasing to work…

The mystery of stuff: why all the self-storage?

There’s a mystery at the fringes of our towns and cities: beyond the concrete circulars and just off the dual carriageways, a seemingly growing amount of our stuff is…

The public sector could be better at managing knowledge ‘data’: what can we do?

Who thinks the public sector is good enough at managing its stock of knowledge; the ideas, strategies, processes, and decisions that go into the efficient provision of…

The self-storage problem meets chatGPT

In a previous post, I looked at four ways we might be able to establish the way that the number of self-storage facilities is trending over time. You can read that post using …

Three ways to blog with code

Typically, what I want to do when I create a blog post is to combine text, code, and code output, and then push it to the github repo that hosts my website. But what are the…

Ultra-modern Python Cookiecutters

In January 2020, Claudio Jolowicz published an extremely influential post on Hypermodern Python. It was extremely influential on me, anyway, because it introduced me to a…

Untangling spaghetti code with smartrappy

If you’ve ever inherited responsibility for a messy Python codebase, or returned to your own code after a few months, and wondered “what on earth is going on here?”, you’re…

Visual Studio Code on the Cloud

Visual Studio Code is incredibly powerful, whether it’s for writing markdown, writing quarto (.qmd) files, getting syntax highlighting and peerless language support (eg…

Welcome To The New Home for My Blog

This is the first post on a brand new blog site: welcome!

Who is not participating in Higher Education?

Given my work in both economics and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), I’ve become interested in what factors determine groups’ participation in…

Why have a model registry?

Many large institutions, including in the public sector, have a set of forecasts, predictions, or estimated statistical relationships (perhaps from a linear regression)…

Why the latest, most exciting thing in machine learning is… game theory

And when I say latest, this particular method was invented in 1953.

Why you shouldn’t code on your work laptop

“Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft” goes an old saying. Actually, it was probably first said in the 1980s in reference to IBM (School Microcomputing Bulletin 1983)…

Writing a Research Blog Post

In this post, you will find hints and tips for writing impactful blog posts that summarise research or analysis. This is a cross-post with a new page on Coding for Economists…