I was at the vet yesterday, and just like with any doctor’s visit experience, there was a bit of waiting around – time for re-reading all the posters in the room.
And this is what caught my eye on the information sheet about feline heartworm (I’ll spare you the images):
The question asks: _“My cat is indoor only. Is it still at risk?” _
The way I read it, this question is asking about the risk of an indoor only cat being heartworm positive.
I have gotten several requests for the R syntax I used to analyze the ranked-choice voting data and create the animated GIF. Rather than just posting the syntax, I thought I might write a detailed post describing the process.
Reading in the Data The data is available on the Twin Cities R User Group’s GitHub page. The file we are interested in is 2013-mayor-cvr.csv. Clicking this link gets you the “Display” version of the data.
The city of Minneapolis recently elected a new mayor. This is not newsworthy in and of itself, however the method they used was—ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is a method of voting allowing voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference. In the Minneapolis mayoral election, voters ranked up to three candidates.
The interesting part of this whole thing was that it took over two days for the election officials to declare a winner.
Fitbit, you know I love you and you’ll always have a special place in my pocket. But now I have to make room for the Moves app to play a special role in my capture-the-moment-with-data existence.
Moves is an ios7 app that is free. It eats up some extra battery power and in exchange records your location and merges this with various databases and syncs it up to other databases and produces some very nice “story lines” that remind you about the day you had and, as a bonus, can motivate you to improved your activity levels.
We had an interesting departmental seminar last week, thanks to our post-doc Joakim Ekstrom, that I thought would be fun to share. The topic was The Future of Statistics discussed by a panel of three statisticians. From left to right in the room: Songchun Zhu (UCLA Statistics), Susan Paddock (RAND), and Jan DeLeeuw (UCLA Statistics). The panel was asked about the future of inference: waxing or waning.
The answers spanned the spectrum from “More” to “Less” and did so, interestingly enough, as one moved left to right in order of seating.
I re-hashed this blog post title from the Edutopia article, Should Coding be the “New Foreign Language” Requirement? Texas legislators just answered this question with “Yes”. I hope Minnesota doesn’t follow suit.
Now, in all fairness, I need to disclose that when I taught high school, the Math department played a practical joke on the Languages department by faking a document that claimed that mathematics would be accepted as a foreign language requirement and then conveniently dropping the document outside the classroom door of the Spanish teacher.
The L.A. Times had a nice editorial on Thursday (Oct 30) encouraging City Hall to make its data available to the public. As you know, fellow Citizens, we’re all in favor of making data public, particularly if the public has already picked up the bill and if no individual’s dignity will be compromised. For me this editorial comes at a time when I’ve been feeling particularly down about the quality of public data.
