I just read an article in Vox about the United States’ (lack of) investment in transit. This is a conversation I’ve had with many so I had a quick response. I’m a transit user and a transit lover. Really. I’m also a realist. The author tried to debunk the argument that the United States is too spread out for effective transit by looking to Canadian metro areas for comparison. It’s not the cleanest defense; Canada’s major metro areas are a must bigger portion of that nation’s population than the United States’ are, which leaves many, many US residents owning cars and driving to and between cities for regular or semi-frequent commutes and trips.

There’s a lot of data out there on business generation.

There’s an old analysis rolling around of 311 data and its use across groups in New York City.

I’m going to look at inequality across the urban-rural divide.

I’m going to learn GitHub, and to do it I’ll spend 100 days doing projects in R. Before starting I’m going to make sure:

Once upon a time I figured out how to generate a random variable. (OK, it was mid-2016.) This is the two line story of that discovery.

Alright, I went to the Administration’s open data portal and secured FARS data for 2016: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/fatality-analysis-reporting-system-fars-ftp-raw-data

A look at the Brooklyn Public Library’s open data catalog would give you … well, roughly zero idea of what’s on the shelf.

I was asked a couple of weeks to do a little multivariate causal inference using time series. And I had a few days to do it. Woof. So I gave it a crack. Here’s an extremely simplified toy version of what I did, just to illustrate the process.

Alaska and Green Jobs (Establishments)

I was talking to someone last week about the green economy. Or whatever the actual term is for the economic activity — the investments, the companies doing the work, et cetera — that protect the environment or conserve resources, at least compared to their traditional counterpart activities. I remembered seeing a flood of work there 10 years ago in things like home weatherization and alternative energy, such as geothermal. I hypothesized the slice of the state economy, however slim, representing green investment may have grown enough recently to partly or fully offset any concomitant loss in traditional investment (setting oil and gas aside), such as in mining.

Yes, it looks like metal production in the US took a hit last year.

I don’t see clear, strong indicators from Ohio and Pennsylvania data that metal reprocessing took a huge dive there over the past four years.

I’m backing up and trying a new project.

Taking advantage of New York City’s commitment to public accessibility re: data

I’ll be using this site to hold my feet to the fire re: various data projects.