Michael Emmett Fitzpatrick

The most important takeaway from this course, in my perspective, is simply the fact that data can be applicable to almost any situation. This is true in two ways: 1) almost everything done or doable can have data to be extracted from it, and 2) when data is extracted, its applicability and usage is essentially infinite. Data can be found…[Read more]

Our group will be analyzing who has healthcare in the US. We will examine the data and make a heatmap of the country to show where the highest concentration of insured/uninsured Americans live.

A data-driven service I use daily is Snapchat. If I wanted to store my usage data on a spreadsheet, the columns would could be name of the person who I sent a snap to, whether it was a picture or video, time, date, and whether or not there was a geotag added on the picture. The rows would then be the detailed information for each category. The…[Read more]

Our group is myself, Patrick Granquist, George Raymond and Jillian Foster. We do not have a idea yet but we will after this class period.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/one-slow-month-doesnt-change-the-strong-trend-on-jobs/
This article is about jobs in the US. The US added 98,000 jobs in March, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is a sharp decline from February, and the figure falls far below most economists’ expectations. This article, however, reassures us that one…[Read more]

MyFitnessPal is an app I use to count daily calories.
Specific purpose – to ensure I meet standard calorie goals for the day
Measurable – uses exact calories for counting
Achievable – I have a specific caloric intake goal for the day
Relevant – it keeps my focused/on track with greater health goals
Time Phased – it’s a daily process.

I’ve never made any of the mentioned mistakes, but I think the most important to avoid is #6, missing the data type. This one seems to be the trickiest. You could make an entire spreadsheet, thousand of rows and columns deep, and everything seems fine, but using the wrong data type for just one cell could ruin the whole sheet. For example, using…[Read more]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-feds-favorite-inflation-predictors-arent-very-predictive/
This article is essentially an argument that the Federal Reserve’s approach to inflation is too narrow. To predict inflation, the Fed uses a model that looks at labor market slack and inflation expectations. The authors argue that the Fed should use…[Read more]

Simplify is the most important principle. The whole purpose of data visualization is to compress/compact huge amounts of data into something that anyone can understand. Thus, simplification is vital for effective data visualization. What purpose is a data visual if it is confusing or not simplified? We might as well just keep the raw data and not…[Read more]

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/02/daily-chart-0

This article, “What defines a nation’s identity,” used survey data from Pew Research Center to try to define what it means to have a national identity. The survey asked respondents from 15 countries a variety of categories about the makeup of a national identity, such as “being…[Read more]