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On Institutional Research (IR)
In post I will seek to acquaint the reader with the IPEDS database. The field of IR research has been a growing one in recent years. It’s kind of like the internal operations research counterpart of measuring our public-school performance here in America. In some senses, it is very much about education, extending value, and […]
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The Role of Art in Our Society: A Story Using Data
Introduction – Questions Raised In this essay we begin by asking the question what are our musical preferences? What shapes our taste in art? What shapes the way we consume culture? And how does it in turn influence our view of the world around us? When a data person raises a question, they want to […]
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Accessibility to Medical Care during the Obama Administration
“Writing is an act of ego” – William Zinsser As we near the 2020 elections, and people gear up to let fly their opinions and discuss the aftermath, nervous about the possible outcomes, there are many questions left unaddressed that settle into the background. Just as sports have become a ritual for bonding and hooliganism […]
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Healthcare Reform: Asymmetric Information and Medial Insurance
For the past several decades, our healthcare system in the United States has steadily complexified. The common refrain, as with many other institutions, is that the ‘healthcare system is broken’. This cry comes from several corners of the country, both upper and middle class, as well as the lower classes. The common complaint of course […]
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Criminal Justice and Prison Reform: The Story So Far
Introduction: I was listening to a lecture series on Coursera called ‘Hot Topics in Criminal Justice’ by a Professor at Vanderbilt in preparation for this post. It also, just so happened that Radiolab, a well-known podcast, did a piece on the police this last week. Lastly, I watched one of the epic American documentarian Frederick […]
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Car Ownership Trends and Motor Vehicle Safety
Introduction: A recent documentary called ‘Autonomous’, directed by popular intellectual Malcolm Gladwell, details our future with self driving cars. Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author, is largely responsible for popularizing the case-based approach to non-fiction, in the form of a compendium of quirky essays. Though not a statistician or a scientist by training, he is summarily […]
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Does Marriage Affect Lifetime Earnings?
Introduction Key question: how does marriage affect lifetime earnings? Spurred by the question of how marriage decisions affect income and household earnings, I set out to examine a range of variables, such as age, race, work status, and restricted my analysis based on variables I could find in my dataset. The Data: The data comes […]
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Washington and Wall Street: SEC Reports of Public Companies
Today’s post centers around the SEC’s EDGAR database, useful for compiling metrics and statistics of publicly traded companies that are required by law to file financial statements with the SEC quarterly. The EDGAR database is an extremely useful one that anyone can access. The most user-friendly data are in the form of .txt files, aggregating […]
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Financial Data Analysis With Python
SECTIONS: 1. Introduction 2. Returns 3. Risk 4. Portfolio Allocation, and Optimization 5. Capital Asset Pricing Model 6. Simulations 7. Conclusion Section 1: Introduction: I have borrowed generously for this discussion from Finance365’s training on the same topic, hosted on O’ Reilly Media’s website. The training, while addressing many preliminary issues pertaining to a balanced […]
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Big Data vs. Little Data: Using the world of of personal iPhone data to speculate about social data collection
Introduction: A passive versus an active future A lot of us have heard about third party companies keeping a watch on our user data. A lot of data changes hands without our knowing. And yet, we steer clear, and evade the issue at hand. I say that as best we can, we embrace the data […]