With Tax Day fast approaching here in the US, there's been a lot of discussion about tax policy and in particular the tax rates paid by the highest income earners. Like in many countries, here the income tax system is bracketed: Tax Bracket Single Married Filing Jointly 10% Bracket $0 – $8,375 $0 – $16,750 15% Bracket $8,375 –...
Posts Tagged ‘ current events ’
The Egyptian Revolution, in tweets
Twitter played a significant role in the recent uprising in Egypt, with protesters communicating via tweets marked with the #25bahman hastag (February 14 in the arabic calendar) to plan and rally for the demonstration. Michael Bommarito downloaded all such tweets and plotted their frequency over time using R's ggplot2 library: Not surprisingly, the activity peaked on February 14. The...
Airport security: science vs backlash
The United States has recently introduced millimeter wave and backscatter x-ray scanners to the security screening process in many airports, prompting a backlash in some quarters. Much of the opposition is centered around the invasion of privacy: the scanners generate an image of the traveller's naked body. There are also health concerns, at least for the backscatter x-ray variants...
The stimulus, mapped
Edward Tufte created this "Lights-On Map", animating the grants under the American Recovery and Investment Act (more commonly known as the Stimulus): Click the image to see the lights come on over time. It's a nice visualization of the distribution of the stimulus projects over the country and time, but I'm actually surprised that it doesn't do a great...
How extreme is the Russian heatwave?
The devastating heatwave in Russia now seems to be over, but not before killing thousands, causing extensive wildfires, and destroying crops. But how severe was this heatwave, compared to past summers? Physicist and climate scientist Joe Wheatley looks at the record of temperature and rainfall in Russia over the last 60 years and places the last 3 months in...
R’s role in the national response to the BP Oil Spill
In the early days of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the rate of flow of oil from the spill was of great concern: estimating it accurately was key to coordinating the scale and scope of the response to the emergency. Unfortunately, estimates from independent sources varied widely, and BP's own estimates varied widely over...
R unfolds the history of the Afghanistan war
Drew Conway continues his analysis of the Wikileaks data. Having concluded that the data appear legitimate (except perhaps in one region, based on a Benford's Law analysis of the numbers in the documents), Drew follows up with a spatio-temporal analysis of activity within Afghanistan, based on the datelines of the documents themselves (click to enlarge): Each panel represents a...
On the Palin effect
Do Vice-Presidential candidates have any effect on the outcome of Presidential elections in the US? Some past research suggested their impact was negligible, but the 2008 election seems to have changed all that, at least in the case Sarah Palin. As reported on the Everyday Politics blog, a new paper (co-authored by Revolution Analytics' CEO Norman Nie) looks at...
An analysis of the Wikileaks data with R
At his Zero Intelligence Agents blog, Drew Conway has taken on the task of performing a quantitative analysis (using R, of course) of the controversial Afghanistan document dump from Wikileaks. He's started with an analysis of the overall flow of information in the five Afghanistan regions, categorized by type of activity (enemy, neutral, etc.). (Click to enlarge.) It's a...
The case of the missing zeroes
Political polling is a big industry these days, especially here in the US, and both mainstream news outlets and many of the bigger political blogs commission their own polls to measure (for example) the popularity of a sitting or candidate politician or policy. In the last week though, a very public spat has erupted between the left-leaning political blog...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
