The term “mail merge” might not be familiar to those who have not worked in an office setting, but here is the Wikipedia definition:
**Mail merge** is a software operation describing the production of multiple (and potentially large numbers of) documents from a single template form and a structured data source. The letter may be sent out to many "recipients" with small changes, such as a change of address or a change in the greeting line.
Somehow almost an entire academic year went by without a blog post, I must have been busy… It’s time to get back in the saddle! (I’m using the classical definition of this idiom here, “doing something you stopped doing for a period of time”, not the urban dictionary definition, “when you are back to doing what you do best”, as I really don’t think writing blog posts are what I do best…)
Apparently our last blog post was in August. Dang. Where did five months go? Blog guilt would be killing me, but I swear it was just yesterday that Mine posted.
I will give a bit of review of some of the books that I read this semester related to statistics. Most recently, I finished Hands-On Matrix Algebra Using R: Active and Motivated Learning with Applications. This was a fairly readable book for those looking to understand a bit of matrix algebra.
Like Rob, I recently got back from ICOTS. What a great conference. Kudos to everyone who worked hard to organize and pull it off. In one of the sessions I was at, Amelia McNamara (@AmeliaMN) gave a nice presentation about how they were using data and computer science in high schools as a part of the Mobilize Project. At one point in the presentation she had a slide that showed a screenshot of the dashboard used in one of their apps.
Next week, the UseR conference comes to UCLA. And in anticipation, I thought a little foreshadowing would be nice. Amelia McNamara, UCLA Stats grad student and rising stats ed star, shared with me a new tool that has the potential to do some wonderful things.LivelyR is a work-in-progress that is, in the words of its creators, a “mashup of R with packages of Rstudio.” The result is a highly interactive. I was particularly struck by and intrigued by the ‘sweeping’ function, which visually smears graphics across several parameter values.
I have gotten several requests for the R syntax I used to analyze the ranked-choice voting data and create the animated GIF. Rather than just posting the syntax, I thought I might write a detailed post describing the process.
Reading in the Data The data is available on the Twin Cities R User Group’s GitHub page. The file we are interested in is 2013-mayor-cvr.csv. Clicking this link gets you the “Display” version of the data.
The city of Minneapolis recently elected a new mayor. This is not newsworthy in and of itself, however the method they used was—ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is a method of voting allowing voters to rank multiple candidates in order of preference. In the Minneapolis mayoral election, voters ranked up to three candidates.
The interesting part of this whole thing was that it took over two days for the election officials to declare a winner.
