Recent Writing

Flipbookr for Quarto

10 August 2023 {{flipbookr}} is an R package written by Gina Reynolds. It’s very useful for teaching. It was developed for use with .Rmd files Xaringan and presently does not work with Quarto. I hacked-up a version of Flipbookr that does work with Quarto. Using it with Xaringan should be exactly the same as before. Right now it’s incomplete. I’ve just focused on getting the main user-facing function, chunk_reveal() to work. But this is also most of what the package does.   Continue reading…

The Naming of Stats

19 June 2023 The Naming of Stats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a stat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. First of all are the names where usage is informal, Such as Median, Estimate, Average, or Range, Such as Variance, Quartile, or else Standard Normal All of them sensible everyday names. There are fancier names that may be better-tasting,   Continue reading…

Free Speech Tsar

10 May 2023 The news that Arif Ahmed is to be appointed the UK’s first ‘Free Speech Tsar’ — a position that apparently comes with “the power to investigate universities and student unions in England and Wales that wrongly restrict debate” and to “advise the sector regulator on imposing fines for free speech breaches” — is disappointing for various reasons. One of them (not the most important one) is that it suggests Britain’s capacity to name things continues to decline.   Continue reading…

Assault Deaths in the OECD 1960-2020

30 March 2023 While we’re redoing some classics, here is the time series of assault deaths in the United States and eighteen other OECD countries from 1960 to 2020. Again, this is the sort of plot that you could choose to draw in a variety of ways depending on what it was that you wanted to emphasize. Code and data for this way of doing it are available on GitHub. Assault deaths in the OECD, 1960-2020.   Continue reading…

Life Expectancy and Health Spending in the OECD

29 March 2023 The visualization exercise of the day for class is a re-creation of a figure I first saw Lane Kenworthy make. It’s a connected scatterplot of total health spending in real terms and life expectancy of the population as a whole. The fact that real spending and expectancy tend to steadily increase for most countries in most years makes the year-to-year connections work even though they’re not labeled as such. A connected scatterplot of life expectancy against total health spending in the US and eighteen other OECD countries.   Continue reading…