Research Matters

One of my first blog posts was about the fantastic book Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. At that time, I said I was looking forward to writing about some academic research about racism and the use of force by police officers. As with many things in the blog, it took a while. In this case, it wasn't for lack of trying. Over the last six months, I found myself returning over and over again to google scholar, but was unable to find any compelling research in this area.

Then, the exact week that officer involved shootings became a major news story again, with two high-profile incidents, rallies across country, and then a shooting against police officers, a relatively high profile piece of economic research came out. A working paper, The Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in the Police Use of Force by Roland G. Fryer, Jr  was posted on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The paper examines whether African Americans, and other minority groups experience disproportionate amounts of force, after being stopped or encountered by the police.

Hadoop... There It Is (Part 2)

Well, at long last, I have completed my Hadoop Raspberry Cluster. It took a couple of months to dive back into this project. I have my own personal cloud, running similar technology that power some of the worlds most important tech companies. However, my cloud is pretty lame. It less powerful than the MacBook Air that I am currently writing this post on. But, at least it's complete and time to write about it!