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Meet
Daniel Meiners
Hello there!
nice to make your acquaintance
As I continue my professional journey, I like to think of my career as one big learning experience that continuously grows with each project and collaboration. With a dedication to functionality and a curiosity for what’s ahead of the curve, I keep my work practical, relevant and creative. Have a look at my past projects, and feel free to reach out with any questions.
Work samples
Every year, whenever March Madness rolls around I never know which teams to pick. So I decided to write a function in R that could automatically pick teams for me! Although I don’t follow basketball teams closely each year, I’m familiar with the “seed” rankings that each team has. So using that metric, I created a weighted sample with the probability of each team winning proportional to the seed they were given, which also considers the opponent’s seed as well. This has been a great start for me in learning to create automated functions in R, especially with something that interests many people. I can always build a more complex model in the future to include many more variables, but what I have right now is much more simple.
March Madness Bracket Model using r
Mattress inventory link using looker
My previous side hustle was quite a unique one: reselling warranty return bed-in-a-box mattresses through a third-party company called Sharetown. They would send me a list of people that wanted to return their mattress during their warranty and then I would pick it up, store it, and resell it on the secondhand market. I needed a way to let my customers know exactly which mattresses I had available for sale that was intuitive and easy to use. Leveraging my expertise in Looker at the time, I developed a semi-automated inventory list that was very easy for customers to view and make purchasing decisions.
Which External Factors Influence Home Field Advantage?
In baseball, the “home field advantage” is described usually as the bottom of the ninth inning where the home team gets to bat last with one more chance to score (if they’re losing). So what kind of strategy can the home team do when they’re losing and need to score? For this project, I wanted to see how the "home field advantage" influenced different variables in helping the home team win a game and find out which variables they could focus on. This project also involved the use of LaTeX and Beamer presentations.
The Psychology of Wallet Evasion
An episode of Brain Games claimed that when a wallet dropped on the ground, subjects were quick to pick it up. But when a red circle was drawn around it they were slow to pick it up because the color red would send “warning” signals to the brain. We wanted to challenge that claim by experimenting with different colors, and also adding a new factor: cash visibly sticking out or not. This project highlights the use of multiple factors in data analysis and writing academic documents with graphs and visuals using LaTeX.
"There are three kinds of lies:
lies, damned lies, and statistics."