Over the past two weeks, precautions associated with the spread of COVID-19 have escalated quickly. From seeming inaction from local government just weeks ago to a near full-city shutdown as of this weekend, daily life has drastically changed for every person living in the city. Walking to our favorite Indian restaurant for take-out last night, the streets were eerily quiet, almost empty even, an inconceivable sight for a Saturday night in the city that supposedly never sleeps. In a matter of days, the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple has transformed into a quarantined community, socially isolated through new work-from-home protocols and an escalating fear of viral transmission. In unprecedented times like this, the future can seem frightening and uncertain; yet, simultaneously, the situation offers the opportunity to reconceptualize how to best utilize this newfound free time. Below, I summarize some the ways technology has influenced how I have restructured my daily life to maintain some sense of normalcy, and even increase my productivity without all the distractions we typically face.
Data Science
With the excess free time that comes from quarantine procedures and remote work, I’ve been able to invest additional time in data science projects and skill challenges. Whether it’s spending an hour or two on HackerRank to practice for technical interviews or browsing the datasets on Kaggle, there are countless ways to continuing building technical skills and learning about the data science community.
Currently, I’m working on a project involving IBM employee data and company attrition rates. The primary objectives including building models to predict employee retention, as well as performance ratings, using a variety of features about each employee’s history and relationship with IBM. After producing initial models, we achieved fairly decent accuracy ratings for both training and testing sets, although, with an inbalanced target variable, these results are misleading. While the model accurately classifies the majority of employees who stay with the company (the bulk of the target variable), the models only classify a few attrited employees (a small percentage of the target dataset) accurately, allowing for a high accuracy score, but without very useful results. Hopefully, as I continue to work through this project, I’ll be able to maximize not only accuracy, but precision and recall as well.
Teaching in New York City
New York City public schools, alongside many other school districts across the country, have moved to online platforms for remote instruction. At the middle school where I teach, Google applications already provide the major foundation for our staff communication, data tracking, curriculum planning, and other essential “behind-the-scenes” teaching practices. Thus, it was natural for us to utilize Google Classroom as the primary instructional platform for our students as well.
Thus, in the week since this announcement in NYC, the ways in which students access technology have already radically transformed. As a predominantly minority and low-income school, the majority of our students lack adaquate access to computers (or comparable technology) and internet/wifi. In the past few days, our school community and company partnerships, have worked around the clock to ensure our students can borrow computers and receive free internet access from Optimum. In times such as these, when technology comes to comprise and dictate every function of our daily operations, the gaps between social classes with respect to this access starkly expose themselves.
As remote instruction does not begin until tomorrow, it will be fascinating to see how the next few months of public school unfold, both for students and for teachers. The long-term consequences of this time away from the physical classroom will surely reverberate for years to come, and will certainly affect the educational trajectory of every public school student throughout the city. For more information, check out this article from New York Magazine on the crisis associated with the school closures.
Fitness
Given the transmissabilty of the virus, all local fitness studios and gyms shut down for the foreseeable future, as per the orders of NYC Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo. However, we are extraordinarily lucky to live in an era characterized by technological innovation, and thus, our favorite workouts and fitness instructors are just a few finger taps and swipes away. In breaks from the aforementioned work for data science projects and online instruction, some of my favorite sources of fitness have been the Peloton app (for at-home yoga, meditation, and cardio/bootcamp classes), CorePower Yoga’s on demand yoga, and short outdoor walks to the park (although it seems like far too many people have this idea as well amid the social distancing guidelines). Alongside many other aspects of our day-to-day lives, it will be interesting to see how these times of quarantine reshape the ways in which we access and conceputalize group fitness.
Learn something new!
Quarantining within our apartments allows us to reclaim much of the time lost in our daily commutes to/from work, more frequent visits to the grocery store for just a few items at a time, and social gatherings at restaurants, bars, or other destinations around the city. In this salvaged time, I have enjoyed spending more time learning a variety of new things, through different apps, and even in seemingly-antiquated hard copy books. So far, in this time I have been honing my Spanish language skills (through Duolingo), studying the conceptual foundation of machine learning algorithms in “The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book”, and catching up on my ever-increasing stack of novels (right now, I’m grappling with the emotionally-taxing, 800-pages-dense novel by Hanya Yanagihara, “A Little Life”).
In the weeks to come, I’ll follow-up on this post with updates on the status of our quarantined life, addressing the ways in which technology continues to improve an otherwise difficult situation. Given the magnitude of historical pandemics such as the Spanish Influenza, we are very fortunate to live in a time when our access to technology allows us to maintain some sense of normalcy, as well as tackle this new virus with the full force of our medical and technological innovation.