I’ve recently begun reading through the book Modern Data Science with R, by Benjamin S. Baumer, Daniel T. Kaplan, and Nicholas J. Horton. It’s quite clear and informative. One of the things I especially appreciate about it is that I’m not finding the math to be too ... [Read more...]

From the first time I listened to Radiohead’s The Bends, the band has been my favorite. I was a grad student in England at the time, and I recall listening to “Fake Plastic Trees” on repeat as I made my way to and from the library each day. By ... [Read more...]

One of my favorite places to find new datasets is Jeremy Singer-Vine’s “Data is Plural” newsletter, which comes out most Thursday’s. There is always something there to pique my interest. From a recent edition I learned about law professor Brandon L. Garrett’s death penalty dataset, which identifies ... [Read more...]

Let’s face it: When it comes to politics this country is exceedingly polarized. What I would like to do is quantify that polarization. To do this, I will use the platform documents that each of the political parties create during presidential election years. I’ll be using the tidy ... [Read more...]

I love polls. All kinds of polls, but especially political polls. I think I love them because I like politics and I also like to find out what’s going on in people’s heads, which is something that survey data allows one to do.So I was thrilled to ... [Read more...]