Evan A. Warfel
data scientist & writer
Current(ish) Personal Projects
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Computationally Scoring Loevinger Ego Development Sentence Completions
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Principals of American Psychology (Choral Composition)
Recent Investigations
I've some time digging into how people grow and develop, and I've compiled the books I've found to be the most helpful into a curriculum. Here it is, if you are curious.
Does Delaware law allow for shareholders to file derivative lawsuits when a company breaches its long term fiduciary duty by essentially being too greedy in the short term?
Traffic, crowds and the price of electricity are all related to "peak demand" in social systems. Shuffled weekends and Micro-timezones could alleviate these pressures. I analyzed a few different data sources in the process - traffic data, parking lot demand, and electricity usage profiles.
Written Things (Mostly)
Quasi Academic
I don't have a graduate degree, but I'm at risk for one, if you know what I mean.
Copenhagen: A tool for tailoring fiction
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A whitepaper that a) reviews the literature on machine customized fiction, and b) introduces Copenhagen, a programming language for generating custom text.
Directly Measuring the General Factor of Personality:
Initial Evidence for a Personal Growth Quotient
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An unpublished scientific paper (w/ IRB clearance, data from ~1600 people, and a few rounds of peer review.)
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Two sentence summary:
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How people perceive and grow from feedback can explain somewhere between 32-54% of the variation in the mean of their Big Five Traits
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I created a measure of people's Openness to Personal Growth, and the resulting evidence suggests that the GFP is not a psychometric / statistical aberration.
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Towards Mechanisms and Amelioration of Motivated Reasoning
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Poster Presented at the 2017 California Cognitive Science Conference
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Basic Ideas: Bayes rule is incomplete as a model for describing certain aspects of thought.
Essays
Don't tell the columns to the left and the right, but this middle one is my favorite.
41 Jews on a Bus in the Desert Singing
My foray into simultaneously being David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship and Bruce Chatwin, but in Israel. What we talk about when we talk about "Birthright." Unpublished.r
Proposals for rethinking a few social systems to promote greener living, including alternate work schedules and mico time-zone divisions. The results of some initial research. Published in Towards Data Science.
The Butterfly Effect: Five Stages of Anthropocenic Grief
On part II of the Anthropocene. Published in The Earth Island Journal.
Do Universities Believe in Climate Change?
If university endowment boards of directors can predict that they will do something about climate change in the future, they have enough information to do so now. (Academic / Polemical).
The Complete Hipster's Guide to Taylor Swift
On the rise of pop-music about self-doubt and alienation. (Musical and Social Criticism). Unpublished.
Lessons From The Expanse: In Space, No One Complains About the Documentation.
An early essay in which I utilized SyFy's "The Expanse" as a lens to explore future trends in technology. (Futurism)
Screen Addiction
What's the best way to change one's relationship to social media and screen-mediated information? What specific policies might be effective in combatting screen addiction? A longer piece is forthcoming.
Fiction, Poems, Misc.translations, etc.
Breaking The News
A letter to the editor, published in Harper's.
A Letter to the Editor, published in the NY Times.
A short story told from the POV of one of our Pachydermatic brethren.
The Travels of Ribbits Al-Ruddin (Story and Variation on Basho)
A deadly serious short story about reincarnation from the point of view of one plucky frog named Ribbits. It originated as a theme-and-variation exercise regarding Basho's famous Haiku.
Misc.translations of Poems and Songs
Click on the link above for a translation of Anima (by Milton Nascimento), the first verse of Mack The Knife, as well as "culturally equivalent" songs.
Where is Jan Karski?
Jan Karski was an officer in the Polish resistance army in WWII. He smuggled himself into the Warsaw Ghetto, twice, so he could be an eye-witness. He tried to tell the world what he saw; he never had the effect he was hoping for. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter told Karski that he (Frankfurter) was incapable of believing Karski's report. Poem.
Who is on Second
A baseball story. Submitted to Cobalt Review.
Ancient Stuff
Digging back into Ancient Material, I am generously listed as a co-author in the following paper:
Buck, R., Wise, J., Gibson, N., Buck, M., Gekelman, W., Wetzel, E., ... & Moynihan, C. (2001, October). Ion acoustic waves, A high school plasma experiment. In APS Meeting Abstracts.