Ryan Plant

The William Bar congressional hearing on July 28 was a lengthy grilling of the attorney general on a wide variety of subjects, from the protests and riots to the legality of the presidents orders as these events swept across the country. After watching some of the hearing, and reading a few articles, some of them seemed to conclude that the event was less an opportunity for the attorney general to communicate the rationale for his recent decisions, or even to communicate anything, than an opportunity for political grandstanding by congressional representatives. [Read More]

Calendar heatmaps are a neglected, but valuable, way of representing time series data. Their chief advantage is in allowing the viewer to visually process trends in categorical or continuous data over a period of time, while relating these values to their month, week, and weekday context - something that simple line plots do not efficiently allow for. If you are displaying data on staffing levels, stock returns (as we will do here), on-time performance for transit systems, or any other one dimensional data, a calendar heatmap can do wonders for helping your stakeholders note patterns in the interaction between those variables and their calendar context. [Read More]

When you’ve been writing R code for long enough, you’ll invariably encounter a challenge you’ve faced before. It may be remembering whether to use the color or fill parameter for a line geom in ggplot, what to put in an R notebook chunk header to prevent the code from displaying, or how to convert a character string to a datetime value - or any of a million other things. You sit there, fingers over the keys, knowing full well you’ve done this before, but not remembering how you solved the problem. [Read More]