Hi all! You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything about fencing in almost a year. Last year, I graduated from high school, and since going to college, I haven’t had much time to fence. This makes me sad, but at the same time, college has been great, and… Read More »The Touche Stats Data is Now Public
Should voters need to bring identification (ID) to vote? On the one hand, one could argue that verifying the identity of every voter prevents election fraud. It ensures that noncitizens don’t vote and that each citizen can’t cast their vote more than once. On the other hand, one could argue… Read More »When Voter ID Laws Decrease Turnout—and When They Don’t
Last summer, I found out that MIT offers advanced standing exams (ASEs), which are a way to test out of introductory STEM classes. Since MIT has a pretty large set of STEM graduation requirements (two semesters each of physics and calculus, one semester each of chemistry and biology), it can… Read More »Why I Love Anki: 10K+ Reviews and 100 Days Later
Unfortunately, many archaeologists discover ancient Latin texts in damaged condition, with words missing throughout. To solve this problem, Latin experts usually emend the texts and try to fill in these missing words. However, this process is often difficult and time-consuming. In 2020, researchers at UC Berkeley and UT Austin developed… Read More »Edging Out Latin BERT at Text Infilling With Fine-Tuned GPT-4o
Most of the analyses on this blog have been based on data from the USA Fencing tournament results website. However, there are many questions that cannot be answered from this type of data, especially those trying to gauge the opinions of the fencing community. In March, I partnered with the… Read More »90% of Youth Fencers Want to Practice More Footwork
A similar version of this was presented at the UConn Sports Analytics Symposium and is published in the Wharton Sports Analytics Journal. I wrote this article in June for a more general audience than my usual readership, so it has a slightly different tone. “The ref is biased!” hollers an… Read More »A Statistical Stab at Referee Bias
Fencers frequently switch clubs, either because their current club isn’t meeting their needs, or to train with certain fencers or coaches at another club. But does switching clubs actually lead to better competitive outcomes? To answer this, I analyzed data from over 600 fencers who switched clubs, using matrix completion—a… Read More »Joining a Top Club Won’t Necessarily Make You Better