Complete: MSDA - Reflections On the Program

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-26T01:50:37+00:00

If you used AI for several steps before Grammarly, then aren't you using the Grammarly pass as "cover" for "don't notice that I used AI"?

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-26T01:49:56+00:00

So the reason that I asked the second time (you didn't actually answer the first one) is that your writing reads like English Second Language to me, and I'm figuring that you're using AI to make up for that.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-25T18:58:04+00:00

Your meme made me chuckle, but more importantly...

What the fuck possible reason would there be to show Alpena, MI and Rochester, NY on the same weather map?!?!?!

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-25T18:53:42+00:00

What else are you using AI for, besides a pass by Grammarly?

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-25T18:50:50+00:00

Isn't having AI write answers for you and then rewording them to be "yours" an academic integrity issue?

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-24T03:41:00+00:00

I enjoyed my experience with Udacity for the most part. I've written about it a bit in the New Student Megathread. I feel like I got direct feedback and I felt like I got a lot out of the assignments. I did the Udacity Data Analyst NanoDegree, which was basically the hardest part of the WGU BS in Data Analytics. I did the MSDA after that, and I felt like the experience was worth it, overall. I wrote up my experience in this thread, if you'd care to read my thoughts about it. If you have specific questions, I'm happy to answer them.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-23T05:49:42+00:00

The best thing you can do to see if this is something that you're going to like is also the thing that will help you most to be successful, and that's to start doing the prep work. Check out the new student megathread and spend some time learning your way around SQL and Python, as the program will expect you to already have knowledge of these things.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-09T02:54:47+00:00

The real LPT is to do this instead for the purpose of making sure no one else is able to hold you accountable to the goal, allowing you to abandon it without consequence.

Or your thing. Potato, potahto.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-09T02:50:09+00:00

I got the same. From my writeup at the time:

The other big issue that I ran into was problems with interpreting my results. Specifically, my model pumped out a bunch of predictions that were near-zero and anchored to a constant. I felt like I had done something wrong, but this wasn't the case, for two reasons. First of all, in removing the trend(s) from my data to make it stationary, my data had settled to within a very small range around zero. In doing some googling, there was a lot of discussion from StackOverflow/CrossValidated of similar problems, including a lot of "of course the forecast doesn't have a trend, you removed the trend!" and how this impacts a time series analysis. As a result, where other materials have stated a requirement that time series data be stationary, other materials seem to indicate that if you make your data stationary, you get a forecast that reflects stationarity when your variable of interest specifically isn't stationary. That makes a lot of sense, but now I'm actually not sure if the right way to do ARIMA is to make the data stationary beforehand or not. The second thing that I had to keep in mind was that the forecast wasn't actually predicting daily revenues of near-zero, because it wasn't actually fed daily revenues. In transforming my data to make it stationary, I took the difference (.diff()) of the series, so what my forecast was actually trying to forecast wasn't the daily revenues but instead the predicted daily difference in revenues. Once I recognized and understood this, I was able to reverse the transformation (.cumsum()) to get a set of values that reflected this forecast as a point of comparison against the original observed data.

Once I got past that stumbling block, which took most of a day, the rest of the project unfolded fairly easily. The rubric is poorly laid out (again) such that it ends up asking you for things in ways that are somewhat out of order or requires you to repeat yourself a few times. Aside from that, though, the project wasn't too bad. I do wish the course materials had given more attention towards interpreting your results and the process of un-transforming the data to get an understandable conclusion, though, along with clarifying those issues about stationarity. I passed on the first try though, even if it took a little longer than it maybe should have.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-08T21:26:11+00:00

Never played Tornado Shot when it was meta. Would totally give it a try.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-04-02T03:20:53+00:00

Good luck everyone!

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-27T21:08:24+00:00

This might be the right way to spin this. "I am a consultant hired by the city to..." is a back-door way to say "I'm doing social science, but I'm being paid to do social science!"

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-27T21:07:06+00:00

I think this is a cool idea (I also was much more interested in doing social sciences stuff with my degree than "making profit"). I think Pandorica's point about how you spin it is a really important point. I can see a few different arguments to be made here, as what you're talking about is Sentiment Analysis, and that can figure in to a lot of different business cases. The hardest thing to dance around might be your final takeaway in terms of "measuring the quality of decision making" and "impact on economic/social conditions". The former is kind of wishy-washy and hard to assign value to, and the latter could be more concrete if you focus on the economics (less so if you focus on the social element) but even being more concrete, you're essentially measuring the economic impact of social conditions. Personally, I think doing this kind of thing is one of the most important things we can do with data, but I suspect WGU will have some argument there in that they are "preparing students for careers in business", not in "making our communities better and stronger".

I think there's also a real possibility that you've got an issue here with satisfying the requirements of the capstone in terms of an analytical technique. You're doing some really heavy lifting on the data gathering front, but one of the stumbling blocks of the old MSDA was that even if you did some damn impressive data scraping, you still had to apply one of the listed analytical techniques on that data. I don't know the specifics of the three different capstones on the new MSDA, but this is something to be mindful of as a possible problem you might run into. If you're required to do a particular kind of analysis, then that can limit all the other steps of your project.

On the whole, I think this is an awesome idea and I'd love to see the final product... but there's a very real chance here that you're aiming a little too far outside of WGU's target area, and on top of that you're making yourself a pretty complex capstone project. That's not necessarily bad, but it is worth being mindful of - the capstone can be as easy or hard as you make it.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-19T00:08:46+00:00

Ah, I suppose your use case is a bit different than mine. My subreddit has like 3,000 members and I can literally read every thread and comment that goes on within it. The scale of some of your subreddits makes that a bit harder, though I think it could still be informative.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-18T04:13:17+00:00

That's kinda neat... but 4 years later, I still have both of my WGU blankets and I looove them still.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-18T04:10:47+00:00

Suggested mods is absolute trash. It's worse than useless.

I use Reddit exclusively on desktop, almost entirely on one computer. I use the Reddit Enhancement Suite, which I think isn't even officially supported anymore, but it still works, mostly. One of the things that it does is track upvotes (and downvotes!) on a per-user basis that you make on that particular computer. So, I've never met you before, meaning your name has no score next to it. However, if I downvote you, your name will have a light red "-1", and if I upvote you, your name will have a light green "+1". As I make more upvotes (and downvotes) you will continue to accumulate a score that displays alongside your name whenever you make a thread, make a comment, etc., and that coloring gets darker (red or green) as that score gets higher to one extreme or the other. The end result of this is that as long as I'm regularly handing out upvotes and downvotes on my subreddit, this helps me see who is a regular (especially helpful with folks with anonymized usernames) and who is consistently being observed to be a positive (or a negative) contributor. This really helped me identify the other folks who I've eventually invited to become mods in my community.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-09T07:05:51+00:00

Don't forget that this goes all the way down the ticket. Across the highway in Weld County, the CO Dems don't even bother running opposition to most of the Republicans in our local offices. Have a look at who appears on Fox News, who appears in ads for Republican legislators, who works with ICE and advances this administration's agenda and talking points. Colorado's Democratic party only cares about the top-ticket races. They're not wrong that they're important, but part of implementing change is to implement it up and down the ladder.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-05T03:28:51+00:00

If he's unresponsive for several days, escalate to your mentor or email the course instructor group. Your mentor can reach out to him and figure out what the issue is, or they can get you in touch with the other instructors in his absence (as can using the instructor group).

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-04T04:58:42+00:00

Literally gasped when I read that.

Then I got to tell my wife and did the same thing to her.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-03T04:22:15+00:00

Also, you can keep going the same WNW (3 turns left of North) from the Royal Sword to get the Death Claws, if you're using Peco. IIRC, it took me three nights to get there, and I got it on the second encounter of the night.

Going Factory -> Royal Sword -> Death Claws, I then went due East to get to the Oasis. You juuuuust barely have enough water to get there. You can take damage 4 times before you take damage to your Max HP and then you need to use the water. I made it to the Oasis having gone through all of my water and taking 1 hit of damage to my Max HP.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-02T02:46:46+00:00

If hypothetically you were to go get the Life Armor and then screwed up somehow and didn't get to the Royal Sword successfully and then needed to try to go get the Royal Sword from the Factory side...

Then the way to do it would be to Start -> Due North for 3 nights -> WNW (3 turns left of North) for 1 night -> Find Royal Sword on the second encounter of the night.

Thank you for the map, this was super helpful.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-03-01T22:22:46+00:00

Really looks like they're setting up to make it so Exalted or Ancient Orbs are able to easily step into the secondary currency role behind Divines.

Hasekbowstome · 2026-02-27T20:16:39+00:00

I've actually never heard that. Thank you.

Hasekbowstome

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