Publications by jlebeau
OKC Thunder: Too close for comfort?
The Thunder this season have already played some pretty exciting/anxiety-causing basketball. Not just the excitement of watching new and old players return to the court, but the games seem to have been back-to-back nail-biting. Peering around on the data from the good people at basketball reference, I wanted to see if this feeling actually wa...
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What Twitter Says About A&E and Duck Dynasty
I was looking on twitter and noticed a lot of people talking about Duck Dynasty and then talking about the consequences to A&E. I was curious on what was being said. I mined Twitter for #A&E and #duckdynasty and got the following wordclouds:#A&E#duckdynasty amp is ampersandThese were for words mentioned at least 20 times over a few thousand t...
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Lyric Analytics
I was messing around with the text mining ™ package in R and was thinking of something I could comb through. I looked through some other blogs and websites to see how they were using it: mining through presidential speeches debates being one of the more notable uses. I was thinking about it in terms of where we focus mostly on how thing...
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State of the Union Speech Comparison
The State of the Union is historically a speech used to set the tone for the year…at least I think that’s what it is. The process of writing these speeches has been discussed before and first-hand detail is available in this article. I was interested in seeing the difference in language between the 2013 and 2014 State of the Union addres...
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Most Entertaining NBA Teams
In a previous post I highlighted the Thunder keeping more of their games closer (within 3 points) than anyone else in the NBA. As the season has progressed, this has changed. The Thunder are still in the top five of most close games as of 2/19/2014, but the Mavericks, Warriors, and Hawks have more. If a game is close, by itself that doesn�...
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Lebanon shouldering Syria
The crisis that is Syria has had an incredible regional affect geopolitically, economically, and has required a significant response in humanitarian aid. As the mass evacuation has occurred, surrounding countries are found hosting thousands of people, many of them children. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) has setup a...
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Syria Timeline
The UNHCR has provided a portal for tracking when refugees have left Syria and where they have gone. The display of data in the graph below is in no way endorsed by the UNHCR, but was aggregated from their portalAs seen in a previous post, neighboring countries and specifically Lebanon has played a significant role in the process of relocatin...
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Boston Marathon Winners and Challenging Africa
The marathon is dominated by African runners. David Epstein in a relatively recent interview mentions about a specific tribe in Kenya called the Kalenjin, “There are 17 American men in history who have run under 2:10 in the marathon…there were 32 Kalenjin who did it in October of 2011”. The times and number of African runners reaching tho...
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The Current Golden Era of the NBA
We are in the midst of what many are calling a “golden age” of the NBA. Being in the midst of a time where attention to the sport has seemingly increased is difficult to quantify. For most people who have had an interest in the NBA over a long period of time, the current state of the game just “feels” like a time unlike recent years. ...
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NBA Drafting
The draft for the NBA is quickly approaching. Much effort on the part of teams goes into selecting the correct assets in a player to complement what a team needs. Drafts also come in on much cheaper contracts than their more veteran counterparts and are therefore desirable from a value standpoint. It becomes increasingly important then what...
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