Free food is most likely to be distributed on Friday at either Frist Campus Center or at former Murray-Dodge Café, according to an analysis of free food listserv emails conducted by Felix Xiao ’16.
Xiao published a blog post on the Data Science Club website on Sept. 30 predicting where free food is most likely to appear on campus. The article says he analyzed over 900 emails during the 2014-15 academic year using the programming language R.
“The chief idea is that there are certain times and locations where the probability of free food is higher, and you can take the past history of emails and analyze them to come up with which target days are good for finding free food,” Xiao explained.
Findings indicate that Frist and Murray-Dodge have been some of the most popular locations for free food. The results also showed that the listserv experiences more traffic on Fridays than on any other day.
“I didn’t expect that there’d be many more emails sent on a Friday than Monday," Xiao said. "Why would the weekend mean there’d be more emails sent out? There was nothing that would have led me to expect that.”
Another question that the analysis might answer is whether it was feasible to live off the free food listserv, Xiao added. He said that on average, the listserv sent out two emails per day. However, further analysis revealed that a third of the days of the school year did not see emails for free food.
Xiao said that the idea for analyzing the free food listserv came from Data Science Club officer Evan Chow ’16.
“We were looking for a fun application of data science to something Princeton-related, and free food is of interest to everyone, I think,” Xiao added.
Xiao’s analysis may see the nature of free food start changing throughout the University, Chow said.
“If people start using Felix’s research a lot, the way free food is distributed around campus and the way it is publicized will change,” Chow said.
He explained that possible outcomes might be that less food left over for the public since people might be more attuned to the food alerts, and that by the time people send out emails, others might be expecting food already.
“The thing about data science is that once you start implementing the findings, the process generating the data itself might change,” Chow explained.
The free food listserv was founded in 2011 by former Undergraduate Student Government president Michael Yaroshefsky ’12 and created by former USG IT committee chair Rodrigo Menezes ’13.
Yaroshefsky did not respond to a request for comment.
“Yaro[shefsky] was really into IT projects. One thing that he realized was that a bunch of tech projects had the potential to affect the campus,” Menezes said. “It was really funny, because I didn’t really take it that seriously, because I knew [making the listserv] was going to take me five minutes; it was a listserv, sign me up!”
Menezes said that from that moment, the campus was extremely receptive to the new listserv. He noted that there were at least a dozen posts within the first week the listserv was active.
“It’s so funny, because everyone still loves it!” he added.
As a former member of the IT committee, Menezes added that the listserv could be quite difficult to manage at times, and a surprising amount of effort was needed to manage the emails, especially when people were sending out a lot of emails unrelated to the purpose of the listserv.
USG IT Committee Chair Zachary Liu ’18, who is currently in charge of the listserv, did not respond to a request for comment.
USG president Ella Cheng ’16 said that the listserv itself has not experienced much of any change over the last four years of its existence.
“It’s a very autonomous listserv now, and it’s been running very well,” she said. “I imagine there’s a lot of food waste on campus and the best way to distribute it around campus is to have people use this listserv.”
Cheng is a former staff writer for The Daily Princetonian.
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