Another cool visualization - Neal Agarwal has created a site, Printing Money, that visualizes earnings at various hourly rates, revenue of major companies, and spending by organizations like NASA and the US Military.
If you scroll partway down, you can enter your own hourly rate and watch the money scroll by. Fair warning, watching the growth of the National Deficit race by at $125m per hour is dizzying.
You can check out Neal's other coding projects here. I particularly enjoyed his Life Stats project, where I learned that the moon has orbited 509 times in my lifetime, I've blinked about 300,607,247 times, and there are 3,120,013,847 more people on Earth than when I was born. And I'm currently playing with Where does the day go?, which asks you a series of questions to let you visualize how you spend your time each day.
This data visualization, put together by takeasecond on Reddit, shows the tallest building in all 50 states in 2020. As the graph demonstrates, the current tallest building in America is New York's One World Trade Center at 1,776 feet tall. In contrast, the shortest building on the list is the Decker Towers in Vermont at just 124 feet tall.
New research from Gallup suggests that job approval of Trump is strongly correlated with opinions on whether he should be convicted in his impeachment proceedings, a relationship also observed during Clinton's impeachment proceedings:
Americans' support for the Senate convicting Clinton in 1999 was much lower than current support for convicting Donald Trump. Gallup's Jan. 22-24, 1999, survey (one of a number we conducted while Clinton was on trial) found 33% of Americans in favor of Clinton being found guilty and removed from office, while 64% were against. Our latest survey on Trump shows 46% in favor of his conviction.
In the 1999 survey, Clinton's job approval rating was 69%, much higher than Trump's current 44% approval. So, the lower support for Clinton's conviction went hand in glove with his approval rating: 64% were against conviction compared with his 69% approval rating, and 33% were in favor of conviction juxtaposed against a 29% disapproval rating.
One interesting observation from the survey is that people place a higher bar on conviction than they do disapproval of Trump's job performance:
As noted, Americans' views on the impeachment of President Trump largely correlate with their overall views of the job he is doing as president. There is, however, a slight but evident deviation from a 100% relationship between Trump approval and views on the desired impeachment verdict.
Just 4% of Americans who approve of the job Trump is doing as president say he should be convicted, while a modestly higher 15% of those who disapprove of Trump say he should be acquitted. Apparently, there is a slightly higher bar for conviction among those who don't like Trump than there is for acquittal among those who do like him (although both of these positions are very much in the minority).
Research also suggests that Trump's current approval rating is almost the highest it's been in his presidency, but is still a lackluster performance when compared to post-World War II presidents in general (who historically average 53 percent):
Enough about politics. Here's a cute puppy (mine)!
New year, new job, new blog post describing it all. On January 6, I started working as a Data Analyst at the American Board of Medical Specialties, which oversees certification and maintenance of certification activities for 24 Member Boards (such as the American Board of Dermatology, American Board of Nuclear Medicine, and so on).
The main part of my job will be doing analysis, research, and program evaluation of the CertLink program, which is a really cool online system that tests physician knowledge in their certification area, provides feedback and introduces new information to improve over time, and measures the relevance of items to their practice, so that their maintenance of certification assessments can become more targeted to the population and types of cases they encounter in their practice. We're hoping that this kind of system will become the future of medical specialty certification, so rather than taking a high stakes exam every 10 years, medical specialists can maintain their certifications through targeted, longitudinal assessment and continuing education. And we're hoping to show this approach works by tying it to long-term, quality of care outcomes, like prescribing patterns. I'll share more as I learn more about the company and my role, to the degree that I can based on data privacy. But I'm so excited to be involved with this, using my psychometrics and statistics skills for the data I'm working with, and my research/program evaluation skills to show (how) the system works. I also finally get to use my SQL knowledge as part of my job, and will be using my R and Python programming skills pretty regularly as well.
Zeppelin is adjusting well to me working again. He adores his dog walker, who he sees three times a week, and has made many new friends in the doggy daycare he attends twice a week. He also has a huge crush on Mona, who can be found at Uncharted Books, stopping to stare longingly at her every time we walk by the shop. As is the case with so many crushes, this love seems to be unrequited; Mona tolerates Zeppelin but doesn't like the way he drinks out of her water bowl when we stop in.
On the blogging front, I'm working on an analysis of the 88 books I read last year, and might even do some long-term analysis of my last few years of reading data. Stay tuned for that.
I recently spent a couple weeks visiting my family. While there, my mom found a lost dog with no tags or collar. She brought him home and we set out to find his owners. The vet found no microchip and didn't recognize him. Walking the neighborhood, I found no one who knew him and he didn't act like he recognized anything. And I had no bites on posts in lost dog Facebook groups. The vet suspected (as do I) that he was dumped. So that's how I got a dog. Meet Zeppelin!
He's a terrier mix between 1 and 2 years old and a total sweetheart. He's my little shadow, following me around since I first met him. His name is thanks to a comment from my mom. She was describing the dog to someone, in an effort to find his owner, and mentioned he was a black dog. I remembered the Led Zeppelin song, Black Dog, and thought Zeppelin was a cute name. It was also one of the few names I tried out that he responded to in some way. He's also sometimes known as "Zep," "Zeppie," and "Z-Man," as well as "little shadow."
He likes anything that squeaks, especially soft toys. His favorite is his monkey that I've started calling Van Gogh, because Zep chewed its left ear off.
He also likes anything ball-shaped and his rope for tug-of-war. Food likes include chicken, cheese, cucumbers, and blueberries. He adores people and other dogs; the only dog he isn't sure about yet is the one he sees in mirrors and other reflective surfaces (though I think he's learning that dog is him). He prefers to sleep on a blanket on the floor but every night and morning, he hops up on my bed with me for belly rubs, and only jumps down when he feels sufficiently petted. He knows "sit," "drop," and "leave it," and we're working on more. I can't take credit for all that, because he already knew "sit" when we found him.
We also play a game where I put his toys away in his box while he's sleeping, and he immediately wakes up and drags all of them out onto the floor in a span of about 30 seconds.
He loves to be sung to, and while he likes his namesake song, he also really likes music by female artists. He seems to especially like Taylor Swift.
Speaking of Stephen King, I recently went to see It Chapter 2 with a friend. Here's what I thought (while I try to keep spoilers to a minimum).
The story starts off in Derry, Maine, present day, when Pennywise the Clown is seen again. Mike Hanlon finds a message at the site of a murder that says, "Come home." He proceeds to call his fellow members of the Losers' Club, telling them it's time to keep the promise they made 27 years before: to come back and kill Pennywise if he ever returns. Unfortunately, the remaining "losers" don't remember their time in Derry, and have to be reminded of many of the events from the first movie in order to effectively fight Pennywise.
First, what I liked about the movie. While most of the movie takes place in the present day, there are a few scenes that go back to the losers as they were 27 years before. The clubhouse they built, which was very important in the book, finally makes an appearance. We also get to meet Bill's bike, Silver, at last. The movie, while scary, is also incredibly funny. The characters impart their dark, dry humor with each other often, even during tense scenes, which feels completely real and believable. And my favorite part was a great reference to this scene in my all-time favorite horror movie, John Carpenter's The Thing:
Oh yeah, and in addition to The Thing reference, the movie features some fun fan service for people who love horror movies, and great Easter eggs for anyone who loves horror movie trivia.
I also liked seeing Mike get a much more important role in this movie, since he was relegated to the sidelines in the first one and much of his contribution to that story was given instead to Ben. And some of the subplots from the book, while interesting, were cut from the movie, making it a much more straightforward story.
At the same time, the things I didn't like as much about the movie were also related to departures from the book. The clubhouse, while finally appearing, was given little to no importance in terms of the ritual to fight Pennywise. I also didn't like some of the changes they made to Mike. In the book, Mike often didn't tell the others things he remembered but they didn't because they needed to find them out in their own time. But movie Mike also lied to his friends and purposefully put them in danger, not something book Mike would have done. In the book, the danger was always Pennywise. Really, my biggest complaint about both movies has to do with their changes to Mike's character.
The Ritual to kill Pennywise was also much more interesting in the book, though I suppose it would have been difficult to film coherently, because the book version was much more about emotions and thoughts, as opposed to clear actions. Honestly, I didn't really like the way they defeated Pennywise in the movie, but I still enjoyed the rest of the movie, so I'll let it go.
Overall, It Chapter 2 was a fun, entertaining movie that neatly wrapped up the Pennywise and Losers' Club storylines. While I'm a little sad about some of the elements from the book that were cut or changed, I'm glad that they did this as a single film instead of a two-parter, as they would have had to in order to include some of the scenes Stephen King requested they keep in the movie. The tone of this movie is certainly different than the first, but it works. As I said, you could see these characters growing up into the sarcastic, wry, somewhat dark humor they impart throughout their scenes, based on what they went through in the first movie. Despite fighting a shape-shifting, pan-dimensional fear and flesh devourer, the characters felt real.
