Publications by Francis Smart
Overwhelming Growth In National Support for Bernie Sanders Mapped
The FEC just released the most recent campaign contributor data and the results show a strong continued widespread growth in support for Bernie Sanders across the country.Figure 1: A map of what counties and states support Bernie Sanders relative to that of Hillary Clinton in January 2016.As of the end of January 2016, 88% of states have more rep...
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FALSE: Clinton Funded by "Grassroots"
The blatant distortions of reality put forth by the Clinton campaign are so offensive as to be laughable at times. In the victory speech of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina she spent a significant portion of it talking about how her campaign is financed by “grassroots”.Well, looking at the breakdown of funding for her campaign, only about 12...
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Calculating Average Consumption From One Week of Purchases
A number of large surveys have attempted to quantify consumer consumption from a limited period of time observed. This task can be fairly complex as it is fraught with potentially large difficulties directly observing who is consuming what. Rather than this expensive method some researchers have attempted to substitute more easily observed purcha...
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Calculating Average Consumption From One Week of Purchases
A number of large surveys have attempted to quantify consumer consumption from a limited period of time observed. This task can be fairly complex as it is fraught with potentially large difficulties directly observing who is consuming what. Rather than this expensive method some researchers have attempted to substitute more easily observed purcha...
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Efficiently Saving and Sharing Data in R
After spending a day the other week struggling to make sense of a federal data set shared in an archaic format (ASCII fixed format dat file). It is essential for the effective distribution and sharing of data that it use the minimum amount of disk space and be rapidly accessible for use by potential users. In this post I test four different file ...
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Plotting the Impact of Atlantic Hurricanes on the US
With hurricane Florence bearing down with expected to be devastating force, it might be a good time to reflect on the history of Atlantic Hurricanes on the United States. As an easy if not full proof source for hurricane data I drew on public data collated through Wikipedia’s list of costliest Atlantic hurricanes as well as linked articles. On ...
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Strategizing Retirement Investments (In the US)
Major caveat! I have no investment training or finance training and all of my calculations are back of the envelope calculations put together from what information I can gather online. In addition, given that investment planning usually spans decades, massive uncertainties exist in tax schemes and expected rate of returns. Please consult a profes...
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Sexual Assault in the 80s and Christine Blasey Ford’s Testimony
Dr. Ford’s testimony alleging that Judge Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when she was 15 was extremely difficult to watch as she was and still is deeply traumatized by the event. Kavanaugh’s abrasive and highly rehearsed obstructionist response was even more difficult to watch. In response I decided to look at public data to see if the type ...
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The importance of Graphing Your Data – Anscombe’s Clever Quartet!
Francis Anscombe’s seminal paper on “Graphs in Statistical” analysis (American Statistician, 1973) effectively makes the case that looking at summary statistics of data is insufficient to identify the relationship between variables. He demonstrates this by generating four different data sets (Anscombe’s quartet) which have nearly identic...
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Data Fun – Inspired by Darasaurus
After my recent post on Anscombe’s Quartet in which I demonstrated how to efficiently adjust any data set to match mean, variance, correlation (x,y), as well as regression coefficients. Philip Waggoner tuned me onto Justin Matejka and George Fitzmaurice’s Datasaurus R package/paper in which the authors demonstrate an alternative method of mod...
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