Plots

We recently wanted to brand several of our plots for publication in the local press. I looked around and found a couple suggestions on how to add images to plots, but nothing that seemed modular or customizable. My colleague reccomended the relatively new Magick package, which provided all of the functionality I needed (plus a lot more). Here is a simple example along with the code to replicate it: library(ggplot2) library(magick) library(here) # For making the script run without a wd library(magrittr) # For piping the logo # Make a simple plot and save it ggplot(mpg, aes(displ, hwy, colour = class)) + geom_point() + ggtitle("Cars") + ggsave(filename = paste0(here("/"), last_plot()$labels$title, ".

Recidivism, the rate at which those released from incarceration return or commit new crimes, is one of society’s most difficult social problems. The official estimate is that 55% of former prisoners will return within 60 months. Recidivism is also, I discovered, one of the most challenging things to model and understand statistically. In this blog post, I describe our efforts to build this simulation, including how we settled on some fairly basic control structures (for loops) without giving up too much in terms of efficiency and readability.

A friend recently emailed a group of us to say that his opinion is indeed backed up by data: Star Wars Episode 3, “Revenge of the Sith”, is better than Episode 6, “Return of the Jedi.” Like most right-headed people, I disagree. While I am cautiously optimistic about Episode 7, I have not truly loved a Star Wars movie since the originals. And as it turns out, many of the millions of people on Rotten Tomatoes agree:

Last year, my friend pulled 34 all-nighters, surfed 37 days, swam 62, helped to raise two kids, did 12,920 push ups, worked a total of 3,008 hours as a new poli-sci professor, and tracked all of it in a spreadsheet. He averaged 8.2 hours of work per day, including weekends and holidays. As this heatmap shows, though, his hours varied a lot compared to us regular nine-to-fivers: It’s interesting to read this chart both left to right, as an indicator of what weekdays he works hardest, and top to bottom, to see the days when he would push hard against a deadline and then give himself some time off to surf.

Time is a weekly news magazine that was first published in New York City in 1923. After my last post, a generous redditor offered to share with me a dataset of every person who has appeared on the cover since its first issue. It turns out he had painstakingly collected this data for a very cool website he created called hugequiz.com, where there are multiple quizzes on this subject. Fortunately, I don’t think it will spoil any of the quizzes to see this chart of the most frequently featured people:

The 57th annual Grammy nominations were recently announced, cementing Beyonce as the most nominated female artist in history. She is now tied with Kanye for a career total of 53 nominations. This news made me curious enough to plot the top award winners of all time. I did not recognize the knight at the top of the list (turns out he is an amazing conductor with a storied history as director of the CSO); but I sort of expected that.