I am Professor of Sociology at Duke University. (→ Read a short biosketch.)
Recent Writing
28 March 2020
This is Just to Say
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the … u…s
that —— in
e—bo, , ; ~ ~
and w—<…
you /– /– /–
saving
; : : ~ ~ ~
Forgive me
th[ — @ r—]
so … ~
… so cold
27 March 2020
John Burn-Murdoch has been doing very good work at the Financial Times producing various visualizations of the progress of COVID-19. One of his recent images is a small-multiple plot of cases by country, showing the trajectory of the outbreak for a large number of countries, with a the background of each small-multiple panel also showing (in grey) the trajectory of every other country for comparison. It’s a useful technique. In this example, I’ll draw a version of it in R and ggplot.
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21 March 2020
Get Your Epidemiology from Epidemiologists The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage. I’m strongly committed to what should be the uncontroversial view that we should listen to the recommendations of those institutions and individuals with strong expertise in the relevant fields of Public Health, Epidemiology, Disease Control, and Infection Modeling. I also think that the open availability of data, and the free availability of methods to look at data, is generally a good thing.
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15 March 2020
As promised previously, I packaged up the U.S. Census data that I pulled together to make the population density and pyramid animations. The package is called uscenpops and it’s available to install via GitHub or with install.packages() if you set up drat first. The instructions are on the package homepage.
A small multiple plot of selected population pyramids
Instead of an animation, let’s make the less-flashy but, frankly, in all likelihood more useful small multiple plot seen here.
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14 March 2020
With the 2020 U.S. Census in motion already, I’ve been looking at various pieces of data from the Census Bureau. I decided I wanted to draw some population pyramids for the U.S. over as long a time series as I could. What’s needed for that are tables for, say, as many years as possible that show the number of males and females alive at every year of age from zero to the highest age you’re willing to track.
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