The word meritocracy was first coined in 1958 by sociologist Michael Young who wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy — a satire about the Tripartite System of education that was being practiced in England and Wales at that time. He writes about, and ridicules a dystopian future in the United Kingdom where intelligence and merit has become the primary principle of society resulting in a stratified society of the merited and power-holding on one end and the less merited underclass on the other.

Not long after, meritocracy was recognised in the English language(without its negative connotations) when more people supported…

Whenever my sisters and I recount the challenges in life and how we overcame them, we always end the story with the same line “ We are lucky when it counts.”

I always thought that was a rather specific understanding of luck — which is that we only recognise ourselves as being lucky when it comes to very significant events in our lives. I don’t usually think about luck with regards to the smaller things in life or the day to day activities that I go through.

In trying to understand luck better, my partner and I conducted a survey…

A little about myself: I am a big meat eater. I absolutely must have meat for lunch and dinner or else my inner demon would unleash and bring upon wrath on this world.

The Discovery

A few months back I was having a conversation on food with my friends and they mentioned that meat production is more environmentally damaging than the production of plant based food items. And of course, I had to object in disbelief. It just doesn’t make sense, food is food how is the production of one more environmentally damaging than the other?

Confident that the difference in carbon…

The Youth Climate Strike was inspired by activist Greta Thunberg(who was then 14/15 years old) when she first staged a protest in August 2018 outside the Swedish parliament demanding for the government to reduce carbon emissions in accordance to the Paris Agreement.

Since then, there were strikes organised around the world where youths would not attend classes and participate in demonstrations to campaign for environmentally friendlier policies and practices.

Wanting to have their voices heard, the youths of Singapore also joined the movement on 15 March 2019, the very first Climate Strike in Singapore. …

The latest dataset given to us was on happiness from World Happiness Report 2018. For a start, I did a simple descriptive analysis on the happiest 20% and unhappiest 20% of countries who participated in the report. My goal in this entry is to try a different visualization from the commonly used ones. In this entry, I compared the GDP and healthy life expectancy between the happiest and unhappiest countries.

Data Overview

Each row details information on one of the 156 countries that participated in the World Happiness Report Survey.

Features used from original dataset

• Rank: number indicating the order of countries from the happiest to the…

I am on Medium as part of my university module ‘Developing Meaningful Indicators’ to share my analysis on some pretty cool datasets. Beyond the academic curriculum I hope to use this space as a creative outlet for data exploration and visualizations.

For a start, I played around with a dataset on the all time top 1000 posts of subreddit ‘data is beautiful’(https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/) using R. Data is from https://github.com/umbrae/reddit-top-2.5-million.

My post will contain details of the dataset and tools used to provide a more comprehensive outlook but feel free to skip ahead to the analysis.

Data Overview

Dataset Features

Each row represents one post in…