Publications by Jared Knowles
On School Boards and Policy Shocks
The dissertation process has many steps. The prospectus or proposal is one of the last. Awhile ago I was lucky enough to have my dissertation proposal defense and pass! My project is seeking to understand the linkage between political activity at the state level and voter and candidate participation at the local level. To evaluate this, I take ...
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Converting a Markdown File to PDF Using Pandoc
Working with knitr and markdown is a great way to share quick reports with colleagues, but in cases where IE8 is still the dominant browser, shipping an HTML file with embedded graphics is a non-starter. IE8 does not support the Data URI format used to embed images directly in the HTML file if those files are greater than 32kb (http://en.wikipedi...
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eeptools 0.1 Available on CRAN Now!
eeptools 0.1 is available now on CRAN! You can install it by simply typing:install.packages('eeptools')in your R console now. The package allows users to play with a number of built in datasets for folks in education beginning to learn R, custom themes for the popular ggplot2 plotting package, and convenience functions for calculating modes and m...
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Picking Lotto Numbers
There’s not a lot you can do to increase your odds of winning the lottery tonight. With the PowerBall at $500 million though, a lot of otherwise rational folks might be tempted into playing. For those of you newly tempted, it is important to remember an interesting fact about the lottery–if two players hit the jackpot simultaneously, they spl...
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Shiny Apps
I have been working on developing some interactive tools for demonstrating statistical principles. The advent of the shiny framework for R from the RStudio team has made this very easy to do. These demos are still in the development stage, but they are designed to help refresh statistical knowledge for applied folks now working more and more ...
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Data Visualization for Education
Recently I was invited to give a talk to two cohorts of Strategic Data Project fellows. I was asked to speak about using data visualization to help inform decision-making of policy makers. At the same time, the group had a lot of variation in their interest and prior experience with data visualization. For my talk I decided to try to fit a little...
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R Bootcamp @ Sector67 in Madison
I am pleased to announce that together with Justin Meyer (also from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction) I will be presenting a two hour version of the R Bootcamp. Sector67 is a collaborative maker/hacker space in Madison, and is a great venue for sharing knowledge with others. We’re trying out a 2 hour overview session to see what ...
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R Bootcamp Materials!
Learn about ColoRs in R!Analyze model results with custom functions.Good and Bad GraphicsTo train new employees at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, I have developed a 2-3 day series of training modules on how to get work done in R. These modules cover everything from setting up and installing R and RStudio to creating reproducible ...
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Tips and Tricks for HTML and R
Over the past two months I have tried to convert completely to HTML5 slides, HTML reports and R + knitr. The switch from Sweave came with a few frustrations but I think overall it is way better – it is incredibly efficient and while some flexibility on report style is given up, a lot of speed is gained. To help make the change smoother, I have ...
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Announcing eeptools 0.2
My R package eeptools has reached version 0.2. As with the last release, this is still a preliminary release which means that functionality is not full, function names and code behavior may still change from version to version, and I am still looking for suggestions and ideas to improve the package — check it out on GitHub. Below, here are the ...
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