Democracy for Realists
Rethinking how democracy actually works
Policy, Politics, and Data
A personal blog about policy, politics, and data
Latest posts
Is Online Persuasion Possible?
Three suggestions for being persuasive online
The Perpetual Myth of Eliminating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse
Waste, Fraud, and Abuse is a slogan used to hide the basic tradeoff that cutting spending requires cutting services.
End Exclusionary Zoning
Over half of Louisville’s land is reserved for large single family dwellings. Only 6 percent is zoned for multi-family use.
Simpson’s Paradox
Simpson’s Paradox illustrated with Penguins
Mapping Census Data with Python
A tutorial on how to make maps by pulling Census data into Python
Partitioned Regression with Palmer Penguins and Scikit-Learn
Using partitioned regression to gain a better understanding of how linear regression works.
Think before adding more variables to that analysis
An introduction to thinking about causal models for data analysis. The purpose is to demonstrate that the popular approach of simply gathering as much data as you can and controlling for it via regression or other methods is not a good one, and is actively misleading in many cases. We should instead carefully think about plausible causal models using tools like diagrams (directed acyclic graphs,…
Racing Louisville in their first NWSL season
A quick look back at how Racing Louisville played in their first season in the NWSL
How to Use Census Microdata to Analyze High Speed Internet in Kentucky
This post is a start to finish descriptive analysis of high speed internet access in Kentucky, including tables, graphs, and maps. All of the detail of cleaning the data and iterating while exploring the data is included. This makes for a rather lengthy post, but it also makes it relatively unique in including all of those steps. We go through five attempts at making a table of high speed internet…