Our obsession with small probabilities and rare events — I started considering this article last month around the anniversary of the death of my father. Even with Christmas, the weeks leading up to and after the holiday are always a little somber. Thoughts of death and mortality intermingle with my children’s innocent excitement for Santa’s arrival and the welcoming…

How can two data experts disagree so much? — An obscure controversy has reared its ugly head again this past month. Two icons of the quantitative analysis community have locked horns on the greatest of public stages, Twitter. You may be forgiven for not following the controversy: I’ll do a quick review for the uninitiated. All code and data…

A Review and Tutorial of Animation Libraries in R — When telling a data-driven story, few things grab attention more than motion. Our eyes are naturally drawn to bright colors and movement. A good visualization captures the interest of the audience and makes an impression. Fortunately, making such displays has become quite simple with a few easy to use R…

I wrote my first line of R code in 2010 for a class at the University of Washington (UW). I was hooked once I realized how much more powerful coding is than spreadsheets. Over the past decade, I witnessed the term ‘data science’ come into widespread use and saw the…