Writings

Originally posted on the Simple engineering blog; also presented at PyOhio 2016 and CloudDevelop 2016

Early in 2014, Simple was a mid-stage startup with only a single analytics-focused employee. When we wanted to answer a question about customer behavior or business performance, we would have to query production databases. Everybody in the company wanted to make informed decisions, from engineering to product strategy to business development to customer relations, so it was clear that we needed to build a data warehouse and a team to support it.

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Originally posted on the Simple engineering blog

Simple has adopted Amazon Redshift as a data warehouse. It’s used not just by our data analysts, but by teams throughout the company to answer questions about fraud, customer behavior, and more.

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My Ph.D. dissertation, performed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Abstract: A search for exotic particles decaying via WZ to final states with electrons and muons is performed using a data sample of pp collisions collected at 7 TeV center-of-mass energy by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.98 inverse femtobarns. A cross section measurement for the production of WZ is also performed on a subset of the collision data. No significant excess is observed over the Standard Model background, so lower bounds at the 95% confidence level are set on the production cross sections of hypothetical particles decaying to WZ in several theoretical scenarios. Assuming the Sequential Standard Model, W’ bosons with masses below 1143 GeV are excluded. New limits are also set for several configurations of Low-Scale Technicolor.

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The LHC is currently running at 7 TeV, giving a relativistic gamma factor of 3730: $$E = \gamma mc^2 \rightarrow \gamma = {E \over mc^2} \rightarrow \gamma(3.5\text{TeV}) = 3730$$ This means the protons are moving at 99.999996% the speed of light: $$\gamma = {1 \over \sqrt{1 - \beta^2}} \rightarrow \beta = \sqrt{1 - {1 \over \gamma^2}} \approx 0.99999996$$ Alright, now let’s look at the collision rate, assuming a recent luminosity of 1e33: [Read More]

This research was performed under an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Indiana University and then extended at Wittenberg University to serve as an undergraudate honors thesis. The work was overseen by John Beggs. It was later published in the 2006 issue of Wittenberg University’s non-fiction literary magazine, Spectrum.

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This research was performed as a capstone project for the Senegal: Arts & Culture academic program of the School for International Training in Spring of 2005 under the direction of Souleye Diallo. The project was advised by Mamadou Aliou Diallo, Université Cheikh Anta Diop. It was published in the 2006 issue of Wittenberg University’s non-fiction literary magazine, Spectrum.

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