One of the very exciting and promising developments from RStudio is the rmarkdown/shiny/ggvis combination of tools. We’re on the verge of static graphs and presentations being as old-fashioned as overhead transparencies. I’ve spent the last couple of days giving these tools a test spin. Lots of ... [Read more...]

I’ve updated some of the graphical displays of the ideal point estimates I serve up here. I’ve rendered some of these in d3, with some rollover lah-de-dah: (1) 113th House ideal points in a long “caterpillar” format; (2) scatterplot of ideal point against Obama 2012 vote in district. Screenshot of the ... [Read more...]

I’ll be contributing a piece about once a week for the Guardian Australia, under a part of the web site we’re calling The Swing. The set of graphs from my 1st effort were rendered in-line and rather low-res. Bigger, full res versions appear below; click on the in-line ... [Read more...]

From one of the R lists I follow: Today (2012-08-23) on CRAN [1]: “Currently, the CRAN package repository features 4001 available packages.” These packages are maintained by approximately 2350 different folks. Previous milestones: 2011-05-12: 3,000 packages [1] 2009-10-04: 2,000 packages [2] 2007-04-12: 1,000 packages [3] 2004-10-01: 500 packages [4] 2003-04-01: 250 packages [4] [1] http://cran.r-project.org/... [Read more...]

Labor won 15 of Queensland’s 29 House of Reps seats in the 2007 Federal election (AEC details here). Yet just three years later, in the 2010 Federal election, Labor won only 8 of 30 Queensland Reps seats, with 33.6% of 1st preferences (a swing of -9.3 percentage points). Labor’s best performance on 1st preferences in [...] [Read more...]

Update to my pscl package, now on CRAN. Biggest change: fixing a bug in the way MCMC draws for item parameters were being stored and summarized by ideal. [Read more...]

Impressive. You are not alone! [Read more...]

The header of my blog (above) shows the latest prices on offer in some of Australia’s election betting markets.  I convert the prices to an implied probability of ALP win (factoring out the bookie’s profit margin, the so-called “overround”). I’m using some Javascript by John Resig to ... [Read more...]

Now that classes are over, I took a little time to update my scripts that update the analysis of Congressional roll calls in close to real time.   Links appear at the top of the blog.   As of about 15 minutes ago, we’re up to 77 non-unanimous roll calls in the 112th ... [Read more...]

Sweave source for the poll report for those who expressed some interest. You’ll also need this file of R function definitions, utilities.R. I also wrote a little shell script that calls Sweave and xelatex etc, hacking the Sweave.sh script that ships with R. [Read more...]

With Lynn Vavreck at UCLA, I ran parallel public opinion surveys in Australia and the United States, measuring attitudes on security, the fight against terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan etc, some 10 years after the 9/11 attacks. Full report here (gene... [Read more...]

So the web lit up a little today with news that iPhones are collecting time-stamped location data, and in a form that isn’t particularly hard to look at (and even with some nice apps to make animated maps of your travels etc): The database is SQLite, and I used ... [Read more...]

I gave an informal talk on my Mac based “workflow” at Stanford on Friday.  I talked a lot about Aquamacs as a tool for editing LaTeX (I use MacTeX) and for working with R (thanks auctex and ess, respectively).  Skim also got a mention; I emphasized TeX-PDF synchronization. Some of ... [Read more...]

R/SQL/scripting, oodles of data, a willing outlet for write-ups. Any takers? Do some good. Intern at Barron’s, the New York financial publication with a decades-long tradition of investigative journalism and a more recent commitment to data analytic exposure of fraud in finance, business and healthcare. Bring us ... [Read more...]

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I did some poking and prodding of the polling place data, looking at the way Green support is highly concentrated in the inner-capital cities (and in Melbourne and Sydney, in particular). There are a few interesting exceptions that will make sense to... [Read more...]

The AEC makes this reasonably easy, as do the authors of some very helpful R packages, the good people at Google Maps etc. Full description here (PDF); entire collection here; a sample here, showing Green 1st preferences, by polling places across metro... [Read more...]

We’re starting to get more divisions reporting two-candidate preferred numbers by vote type. The emerging picture (literally) is one in which Labor’s performance on the pre-polls and postals is lagging its performance in ordinary votes. On the other hand, Labor seems to be doing well among absentee voters (... [Read more...]

For the last two cycles I’ve done some simple regression analysis of the informal vote.  I saw Possum have his go at it, using a specification that is virtually the same as what I’ve run in the past (2007, 2004). The 2010 edition follows.  As usual, electorate-level informality in House of ... [Read more...]

I’m updating a swing dotplot PDF every 10 minutes as the count progresses (and the cool part is that the updates continue even as I’m flying Heathrow to SFO). [Read more...]