For those that don't work in education or aren't aware, there is a measurement for a child's reading level called a Lexile ® Level.  There are ways in which this level can be retrieved using different reading assessments.  The measurement can be used to match a child's reading level to books ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

I've done a couple posts on the SOTU speeches.  In the past these dealt with word count, approval, and the vague notion that the applause the president receives has a relationship with his approval rating at that time (which had a lower correlation this year in fact). Wired had a ... [Read more...]

I've done a couple posts on the SOTU speeches.  In the past these dealt with word count, approval, and the vague notion that the applause the president receives has a relationship with his approval rating at that time (which had a lower correlatio... [Read more...]

This post will highlight a couple of my favorite things.  R programming and composer Philip Glass.  For those of you not familiar with his works, he basically pioneered the "minimalist" style of piano playing.  He has been writing and performing music since the 60s, and his pieces are still heard ... [Read more...]

This post will highlight a couple of my favorite things.  R programming and composer Philip Glass.  For those of you not familiar with his works, he basically pioneered the "minimalist" style of piano playing.  He has been writing and pe... [Read more...]

About a year ago I posted about men's and women's marathon (and longer) distance races from the Arrs.net dataset.  In the meantime, Shiny development and the open source announcement of plot.ly have brought data visualization to the next level.&nb... [Read more...]

About a year ago I posted about men's and women's marathon (and longer) distance races from the Arrs.net dataset.  In the meantime, Shiny development and the open source announcement of plot.ly have brought data visualization to the next level.  As an avid (at least former) runner, exploring marathon ... [Read more...]

Since language data provides for the demonstration of many visualization techniques, I thought of using another set showing official languages spoken across continents using a new visualization in the "UpSetR" package.  The graph can be used for c... [Read more...]

Since language data provides for the demonstration of many visualization techniques, I thought of using another set showing official languages spoken across continents using a new visualization in the "UpSetR" package.  The graph can be used for comparing sets of data numerically.  It provides an easier way to understand data ... [Read more...]

*For R users not interested in the post but the code, a markdown file is available on github.  Thanks to Zuguang Gu and Bob Rudis for the 'circlize' and 'waffle' packages respectively.I've been studying Arabic for about 10 months no... [Read more...]

Last year I posted about how chances of a non-African country winning the Boston Marathon seemed to be good because of the widening interval of winning times (more recently there had been some historically "slower" races and some historically "faster" ... [Read more...]

Some may have seen a twitter post about spurious correlations that myself and others mentioned on twitter.  Basically this was a joke about how correlation can be found in many things that certainly have no influence over each other.  I ... [Read more...]

This post isn't anything new in terms of analysis, but just a cooler look at a previous post.  I looked at board members of large companies in a previous blog post and showed via a simple network how they share board members and provided some... [Read more...]

In a previous post I looked at a data set published by the AARRS that provides a lot of data on marathons around the world and specifically the winning times of every* race.  After spending a bit more time with the data there are a few more things... [Read more...]

The proliferation and participation in the marathon has increased substantially in recent years.  No longer is the distance an event reserved for the super-athletic, but at least in the US one can from many vantage points on highways or streets se... [Read more...]

This is an animation of the growth in Syrian refugee informal camp settlements in Lebanon over the past several years.  You can see from the .gif that the growth was most dramatic in terms of the number of settlements in the Summer of 2013.  ... [Read more...]

Previously I posted about the location of refugee settlements and how that had grown in density over time as well as in numbers.  As many NGOs and non-profits work in the area, they are providing much needed assistance to the people living around ... [Read more...]

I've done a few posts on Syria and have used data provided by the UNHCR for different analysis or visualization.  There are several links on their Syrian refugee data portal that communicate the breadth of this crisis numerically and vis... [Read more...]