The Comrades Marathon is an epic ultramarathon run each year between Durban and Pietermaritzburg (South Africa). A few years ago I put together a simple spreadsheet for generating a Comrades Marathon pacing strategy. But the spreadsheet was clunky to u...

The Comrades Marathon is an epic ultramarathon run each year between Durban and Pietermaritzburg (South Africa). A few years ago I put together a simple spreadsheet for generating a Comrades Marathon pacing strategy. But the spreadsheet was clunky to use and laborious to maintain. Plus I was frustrated by the ...

Lately I’ve been interested in trying to cluster documents, and to find similar documents based on their contents. In this blog post, I will use Seneca’s Moral letters to Lucilius and compute the pairwise cosine similarity of his 124 letters. Compu...

TLDR Wordclouds can be used to produce a neat summary of text and can readily be produced in R. This is a simple example based on a recent conferene paper. Summarising the content of a conference paper There is an R package dedicated to creating wordclouds, so I’ve started ...

TLDR There are many instances where it may be useful to animate graphical representations of data, perhaps to add an additional dimension to a plot. The below example builds a cumulative map of car accidents in the UK using some of the functionality of the gganimate package. Making Moving Plots ...

Graeme Blair is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCLA. Jasper Cooper is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy at Princeton University. Alexander Coppock is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Macartan Humphreys is a Professor of Political ...

Agarrada a mis costillas le cuelgan las piernas (Godzilla, Leiva) Penrose tilings are amazing. Apart of the inner beauty of tesselations, they have two interesting properties: they are non-periodic (they lack any translational symmetry) and self-similar (any finite region appears an infinite number of times in the tiling). Both characteristics ...

What is a Statistic? A statistic is a mathematical operation on a data set, performed to get information from the data. Below is the R code that generates 20 random samples. The samples are uniformly distributed between 0 and 1. Uniformly means all the data samples are equally likely, like when you flip ...

bayestestR 0.2 is here! As you might have heard from previous posts, we have recently started to collaborate around the new easystats project, a suite of packages designed to make your life easier. One of the packages, bayestestR, has just been up...

bayestestR 0.2 is here! As you might have heard from previous posts, we have recently started to collaborate around the new easystats project, a suite of packages designed to make your life easier. One of the packages, bayestestR, has just been up...

What do we mean when we see a bird and say that it’s a robin? A simple description would be a small brownish bird with a red breast. But that’s a superficial description, and when we say “robin” what we mean depends on your location; you don’t ...

New York has pressed on with environmental legislation while the nation dawdles - where and by whom will the impact be felt? Shiny app | GitHub As mentioned in my last post, effective and timely legislation will be a key weapon in the battle to keep greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable ...