If you’ve ever watched Major League Baseball, one of the feature points of the sport is the batting line-up that each team decides upon before each game. Traditional baseball logic tells us that speedy, reliable hitters like Trea Turner should…
Category: analysis
How Americans make a living based on their age
As I discussed in my last post, certain industries in the U.S. draw a younger (or older) demographic than others. There are a variety of reasons that younger people are more likely to work in a shoe store than a…
Top 10 oldest and youngest industries in the U.S.
Ever wondered what industries employ the youngest and oldest people? Wonder no more. To create the visualization below, I pulled the employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics web site to rank all of the industries by the…
Machine Learning Madden NFL: The best player position switches for Madden 17
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my initial efforts toward using machine learning to model the “master equations” that govern the Madden NFL player ratings system. This week, I’d like to put those models to use to compute the…
Spurious Extrapolations: Novel and unique research abstracts
Last Christmas, BMJ published a funny article exploring the mentions of positive and negative words in research abstracts over the past 40 years. I’ve recreated their research for two of the phrases below — “novel” and “unique.” Your eyes aren’t…
Spurious Extrapolations: What if U.S. college tuition costs keep rising?
For this post, I’m going to test run a new post series called Spurious Extrapolations, where I extrapolate time series far beyond reason and envision what would happen if the trend continued. Let me know what you think of the…
U.S. college majors: Median yearly earnings vs. gender ratio
Last year, I looked at the gender ratios across college majors and discovered an interesting-yet-spurious correlation: College majors with higher male:female ratios (i.e., with more men than women) tend to have students with higher estimated IQs. After much debate, the…
Analyzing the health of Philadelphia’s bike share system
Last month, I wrote about my initial attempts to model and predict the usage patterns of Indego, Philadelphia’s new bike share system. To recap: If you’ve ever used a bike share before, you know that one of the biggest fears…
Can the Name Age Calculator guess how old you are?
Can you guess someone’s age when all you know is their first name? That was the crazy idea behind one of FiveThirtyEight’s articles last year, and their surprising answer is, “Yes.” The idea behind guessing someone’s age based on their…
Visualizing Indego bike share usage patterns in Philadelphia
One of the many things that I love about my new home town of Philadelphia is that the government openly shares curated data sets covering most of the governmental functions. Since I recently joined Philadelphia’s Indego bike share program, I…
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