My First Shiny App: Analyzing PSSA Test Results Introduction Being a father of two elementary school students in Philadelphia – and just returning from India last year – I knew I had to learn about the PSSA’s. I knew that a lot of importance is placed on these standardized exams, but I had no idea what they tested and how they were used. While spending some time on the Pennsylvania Department of Education web site, I discovered test result data in Excel spreadsheets available for the last 5 years.

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Merging Git Repositories with Bash I’ve been participating in TidyTuesday since 2018. TidyTuesday is a weekly data project in R from the R4DS community. A dataset is provided and allows you to practice data manipulation, visualization, and story telling. It’s traditional to share code so that others may learn from your contribution and it’s also traditional to share that code via Git. Since the beginning, I’ve been creating a new repository for each week that I participated.

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Introduction I love watches! For many, it is a dying (or dead) art. We can tell time using phones, computers, and smart watches, and they each perform many more functions making the traditional watch all but obsolete. But, to me, mechanical watches are the perfect example of form and function. I find it amazing how a selection of tiny gears and a long spring can measure something like time with very reasonable accuracy.

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Introduction I found this dataset by chance on data.world and it immediately sparked in interest as I have two small children and recently moved to India in 2017. The data is organized by state and specific crime from 2001 to 2012. It is a bit dated and not as granular as I would like (by city would have been nice), but the dataset is still worth exploring and practicing some basic skills.

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Introduction If you can see this, then my first post on my own blog was successful! If I put the picture in the right folder and named everything correctly, you should see it above; that’s me, on the left, with my two zany kids. Another success! I’ve built a few dynamic web sites before, but this is my first experience working with markdown and Hugo to build a static web site.

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