Started 2015-11 and ended 2018
This was a big, sprawling, academic research project which ate a good chunk of my life. I worked on it the first two years of my PhD, and probably gave too much time and energy to it having as I did at the time too little else going on. Work–life balance is hard to achieve after leaving most of your life behind in another country.
It was a pretty simple idea really that got too complicated when a lust for big data combined with basic combinatorics. The idea: most metrics of spatial segregation are static and don’t account for the possibility of movement. But cities and the people in them are dynamic. Can census transportation data be used to make a better metric?
The paper itself, after several rounds of review at multiple journals, never ended up getting published. Sometimes the peer review process works I guess. Publish or perish and this one perished.
I did however learn about cloud computing, how to write efficient code, how to schedule jobs on the local super computer, and do some wild and unnecessary statistical tests. Fun stuff.